Monday, January 18, 2010
Book <--> film
posted at 8:28 PM |
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Just finished reading "Up in the Air" by Walter Kirn. It's a profoundly sad story with very little moments of charm or levity to break the unremittingness of the main character's ennui. The only good news is that he is making huge changes as the book ends but, on the other hand, disaster may be about to strike; I suppose it's a little like old-fashioned romantic comedies that leave it up to viewers/readers to decide if the ALmost reunited couple will get back together or be forever separated.
What puzzled me a great deal and sent me researching on the Internet was that one of my favorite reviewers, 5 Second Reviews, had indicated the movie had an interesting and absorbing storyline but one that didn't remotely sound like what took place in all the gazillion endless musings of the characters in the novel. (Did I mention that it's not only unremittingly miserable but also very very very very very very (sorry) long? or that it's all told as an inner monologue and that it's often nearly crushingly nasty and mean, and almost always tedious with only a few few exceptions?)
So I was relieved to read an interview with Walter Kirn himself (here) in which he says that the screenwriters and producers (and Clooney, one assumes) invented some new characters as well as quite substantively different story threads for the movie. Enough so that I kept wondering if there were two books because the one I was reading had only the airplanes and million-mile goal and his job and the tedium of his job in common. In the interview, Kirn says he liked it that Ryan was saved/revived by the moview and I guess I would feel the same about my gone but not forgotten fictional offspring, although why anyone saw chose to bring this miserable guy back to life is beyond me; I have to assume the movie Ryan Bingham is not anywhere near as miserable as his book counterpart. And maybe I'll even like the Reitman character a bit (it would behard impossible to like him less).
But I'm hard pressed to figure out how it isn't copyright infringement, even with the author's agreement, to use a title and characters but utterly change activities and, in fact, the whole story line. I suppose one could argue that disenchantment and misery are the core point of both and, therefore, that nothing fundamental has really been altered; in that case, why not just recite Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" or any of Nietzsche's books over and over?
What puzzled me a great deal and sent me researching on the Internet was that one of my favorite reviewers, 5 Second Reviews, had indicated the movie had an interesting and absorbing storyline but one that didn't remotely sound like what took place in all the gazillion endless musings of the characters in the novel. (Did I mention that it's not only unremittingly miserable but also very very very very very very (sorry) long? or that it's all told as an inner monologue and that it's often nearly crushingly nasty and mean, and almost always tedious with only a few few exceptions?)
So I was relieved to read an interview with Walter Kirn himself (here) in which he says that the screenwriters and producers (and Clooney, one assumes) invented some new characters as well as quite substantively different story threads for the movie. Enough so that I kept wondering if there were two books because the one I was reading had only the airplanes and million-mile goal and his job and the tedium of his job in common. In the interview, Kirn says he liked it that Ryan was saved/revived by the moview and I guess I would feel the same about my gone but not forgotten fictional offspring, although why anyone saw chose to bring this miserable guy back to life is beyond me; I have to assume the movie Ryan Bingham is not anywhere near as miserable as his book counterpart. And maybe I'll even like the Reitman character a bit (it would be
But I'm hard pressed to figure out how it isn't copyright infringement, even with the author's agreement, to use a title and characters but utterly change activities and, in fact, the whole story line. I suppose one could argue that disenchantment and misery are the core point of both and, therefore, that nothing fundamental has really been altered; in that case, why not just recite Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" or any of Nietzsche's books over and over?
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