adaptation – Page 8 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum (1979)
Written by Volker Schlöndorff
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff, Jean-Claude Carrière, and Franz Seitz

I have not read Herman Hesse’s novel of the same name, so I won’t be able to compare this version of The Tin Drum to its source material. However, the film feels dense & literary, which leads me to believe it is likely not too far removed from the book. This decision makes the picture heavy-handed and obvious as the story progresses. Director Volker Schlöndorff’s career includes many adaptations, including the Dustin Hoffman-led Death of a Salesman and the feature film version of The Handmaid’s Tale. Schlöndorff feels very different from his peers like Herzog, Wenders, and Fassbinder; he is a little more straightforward & direct. However, there’s no mistaking what The Tin Drum is about, and that may not be a great thing as it fails to challenge the audience to think in ways that it could, given a defter touch.

Movie Review – The American Friend

The American Friend (1977)
Written & Directed by Wim Wenders

There’s a scene early on in The American Friend where Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) is asked by a hatmaker/art forger (director Nicholas Ray) if Ripley wears his Stetson hat when he’s in Germany. Ripley removes the hat, briefly examines it, and responds, “What’s wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?” Wim Wenders’ films, while German, are very much fixated on America. The director finds an incredible amount of inspiration in the mythic idea of America and the way these grand ideas crumble under just the slightest scrutiny. Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is the perfect character to explore that, and Wenders proceeds to repurpose this figure in the same way Robert Altman presented audiences with a radically different Phillip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye. This Ripley is not a cool, calm, collected man but a psychologically troubled murderer who manipulates an unsuspecting man into his web.

Movie Review – The Graduate

The Graduate (1967)
Written by Calder Willingham & Buck Henry
Directed by Mike Nichols

It’s incredible how some movies have remained as relevant as they were when they were first released. The Graduate is a movie straight out of the ennui of 1960s youth culture, but it’s far more nuanced than that. Roger Ebert’s reading of the film on its original release was to empathize with its protagonist. Thirty years later, he retracted many of his comments to say how his sympathies had shifted to the older woman he has a tryst with, how she is the character the audience is meant to feel heartbreak for. The Graduate is a movie with no heroes or villains, simply people existing, making choices, and never truly knowing if the choices they make are the right ones or not.

Movie Review – Magnificent Obsession

Magnificent Obsession (1954)
Written by Robert Blees, Wells Root, Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman, and Finley Peter Dunne
Directed by Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk discovered a love for the performing arts at a young age. While being born to Danish parents, the future director’s homeland would be Germany. In his teenage years, Sirk discovered Shakespeare and went to the cinema more often. He would speak about this period as introducing him to the intensity of emotion and the drama that comes with that. After that, Sirk studied the law and wrote for his father’s newspaper but kept wandering back to the arts. By the early 1920s, he would be directing stageplays, set on the path the rest of his professional life would follow. But, if you know anything of history, then you know Germany in the 1920s was a prelude to something terrible, and Sirk experienced it in a cruel & painful way.

Patron Pick – The Wonder

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

The Wonder (2022)
Written by Emma Donoghue, Sebastián Lelio, and Alice Birch
Directed by Sebastián Lelio

You will not be able to predict the opening shot of this movie if you haven’t heard about it already. But that first image immediately puts the viewer in a place where their expectations are gone. What you think this movie is and what it will be about are all flushed, creating an open canvas for your mind. Now you are just going with the picture, discovering it simultaneously as it happens before your eyes. We rarely get this sort of film anymore, especially from Netflix. By the end, you may not fully grasp what has happened, and that’s okay. The ideas in The Wonder are big & essential, but you need to sit with them for a while. That’s also not an experience many popular films are providing for their audiences, and we need it.

Movie Review – White Noise

White Noise (2022)
Written & Directed by Noah Baumbach

Yeah, so American cinema is a corpse. To end my year on this movie is a sign that I need to slowly withdraw my time & energy from the majority of mainstream films coming out of the United States. Noah Baumbach was never one of my favorite directors, but I have enjoyed some of his recent work, especially his films on Netflix (The Meyerowitz Stories, Marriage Story). And I didn’t balk at the idea of him writing & directing an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, a book I’ve read twice and enjoy quite a bit. Baumbach seemed an excellent fit to bring a very unfilmable novel to the big screen. Then the first trailer dropped, and I started to question the tone. And then I watched the movie.

Patron Pick – Slumberland

Slumberland (2022)
Written by David Guion and Michael Handelman
Directed by Francis Lawrence

The collective American memory is a fickle thing. There have been pieces of art that reached astronomical levels of fame within the culture a hundred years ago that have been completely lost to the masses. I tend to think this is intentional. It’s dangerous to have a society where people remember. In remembering, we will make connections, and when that happens, those in power don’t have long on their thrones. Like a dream fading in the first few minutes of waking up, we’ve forgotten about Little Nemo in Slumberland.

Movie Review – Bones and All

Bones and All (2022)
Written by David Kajganich
Directed by Luca Guadagnino

A recurring trope in American cinema is the story of a pair of lovers, lost in a world without much to offer them, traveling across desolate landscapes and having strange encounters. Most notably, Arthur Penn told us this story with Bonnie & Clyde and Terence Malick with Badlands; the list is ever-growing. More often than not, these stories serve as commentary on the plight of the current youth, a means to examine what makes it challenging to be coming into adulthood at a particular time and how young people respond to these obstacles. Luca Guadagnino’s latest, Bones and All, is one of those movies. He’s not brand new to these ideas; they were explored with a lot of depth in his HBO mini-series We Are Who We Are, albeit with a more grounded concept.

Patron Pick – One True Thing

One True Thing (1998)
Written by Karen Croner
Directed by Carl Franklin

Movies like One True Thing weren’t on my radar in the late 1990s. I was a teenager, a year away from college, sheltered & homeschooled, working at my local public library and discovering all sorts of exciting niche things I would cultivate over the decades. So something like this movie wouldn’t have even been a blip for me. Instead, I was far more interested in exploring weird movies, inching my way towards becoming the art house snob I lived as during college. Now, at age 41, I appreciate this type of movie more, particularly in the face of its near extinction, as something you can see in a theater. The cineplexes are dominated by blockbuster incoherence, and streaming seems to be a flood of mediocrity devoid of soul. So while One True Thing sounds like a Lifetime movie in its description, the performances, mainly Meryl Streep’s (coming as no surprise to anyone), elevate the picture to something of note.

Patron Pick – Sweet Smell of Success

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Written by Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman, and Alexander Mackendrick
Directed by Alexander Mackendrick

Possessing a title that drips with as much irony as grease seems to exude from its central character, Sweet Smell of Success is a bold reminder that America in the 1950s was not some picket fence, sunny side wonderland. It was the same festering sore before, and it remains a place where no one gets ahead because they have talent or have cultivated a skill. Nope, the only skill that counts is how well you can lie, cheat, and steal your way to the top. Success is defined as power, and you get that power with money. How do you get the money? Well, with power. See what a con job it is? Some gatekeepers sit on makeshift thrones, not in throne rooms but in nightclubs where they humor desperate politicians and desperate talent who want a kind word thrown their way in tomorrow’s paper. But what will they do for that bit of ego-boosting fluffery, hm? There seems to be no bottom.