As you wish . . . .

a very popular saying in my house.  If you've seen the movie The Princess Bride, then you know what I'm taking about.  If you haven't, get thee to Netflix and watch this movie!!  It has an incredible cast, very pithy dialogue, a love story, sword fighting and is celebrating it's 25th Anniversary!

A Facebook friend posted a link to this wonderful article and gave me the idea for today's post.  You see, The Princess Bride started out as a book. And I confess, I started to read that book once, long ago. I didn't like it.  So I stopped.  And this is one of the problems with watching the movie before reading the book: you expect the book to be like the movie and it is not.  This is also the case with the Jason Bourne movies and books, as well as one of my most favorite movies of all time, Gone with the Wind.

I'm going on a slight rabbit trail here.  You see, I stayed at the Tarleton Oaks Bed and Breakfast in Barnesville, Georgia once (it has been renamed Antebellum Oaks since Fred Crane died in 2008 and it was auctioned off).  It was owned by Fred Crane who played a Tarelton twin in the movie. He had quite the bounty of GWTW movie memorabilia.   On that trip, I also visited the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta and took a tour.  I also took a very similar tour in Jonesboro but it was lead by a man named Catfish who was quite a character himself (I'm guessing Catfish's tour was a lot more fun than Mr. Bonner's!).  So, you see, GWTW has a special place in my heart.  I've read the book and, not surprisingly, the book is different from the movie.  I've also read the sequels Scarlett and Rhett Butler's People (disappointing to say the least).

Now if there was a tour or a Princess Bride b&b, I'd go.

And I guess I should give the book another chance.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Movie Review

*WARNING - There are spoilers from this point on so STOP here if you don't want your viewing of the movie ruined.*













I finally watched this movie, obviously.  You can read the book review here.  I'd like to be able to say that for once I watched a movie of a book and the movie matched the book perfectly.  While this film managed to stick pretty closely to the novel, it failed on several major points.

First, I really liked the opening montage.  It was all done in a thick, black oily looking substance that could only be ink, pointing to Mikael Blomkvist's occupation as a journalist.  There were computer images intertwined throughout, linking to Lisbeth Salandar, hacker extraordinaire.  It reminded me a bit of the opening of some Bond movies.

Second, the music in this movie matched perfectly the action and the characters.  It wasn't done by Danny Elfman (The Simpsons) or Hans Zimmer (Gladiator and Pirates of the Carribean) or John Williams (Star Wars)  but by two people I'd never heard of, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.  Kudos gentlemen!

Third, and this is the spoiler part, the deviations from the book.  The movie had Harriet Vanger, the subject of the thirty-year mystery, posing as Anita Vanger but then had Anita conveniently dead in a car crash several years before.  Boo hiss.  I wanted to see the movie makers put Mikael on a sheep station in Australia.  I wanted to meet Harriet's over-protective son and to see that whole confrontation scene on the big screen.  But no, the director and screenplay writer conspired against the readers and deprived us of that by trying to substitute an unacceptable deviation from the book.

The second major deviation was in the scene concerning Martin Vanger's death.  In the book, Lisbeth finds Vanger torturing Blomkvist, whacks Martin with a golf club and then follows him as he's trying to get away by car.  Further down the road, away from Hedestad, Lisbeth watches Vanger crash his car into an on-coming truck.  In the movie, Martin drives off the road after trying to slam into Lisbeth on her motorcycle and then crashes into a petrol tank, which then conveniently explodes. I realize this was played out at the bridge, the same bridge where a car and truck crashed thirty years earlier and directed all attention away from the disappearance of Harriet Vanger.  So, I get the connection the director was trying to make with the past.  However,  All the director, David Fincher, would have had to do was add a 60-120 seconds more of chase scene and then, viola, the book is followed.  Although I will say that particular chase scene was well done - filmed from the wood looking at the unlit, deserted road and all you could see were the headlights of  Martin's car and the headlight of Lisbeth's cycle zooming through the dark.  However, that does not make up for the change.

The third deviation was that fact that when Lisbeth disguised herself and went globetrotting, bank-hopping and stealing, she used two disguises, not just the one the film showed.  Rooney Mara, as an actress, whose leather and mohawk Lisbeth disguised herself as blonde Irene Nesser the socialite, struck me by just how well Irene carried her purse which was quite different from how Lisbeth slung her backpack around.  A good actress pays attention to the little things to make the character(s) memorable.  Again, this little thing does not make up for the change.

I understand, that in the interest of time, budget, availability of shooting locales, resources, union contracts, etc., a movie script can't always follow the book exactly, however that doesn't mean I have to like it.  And I always wonder how the author feels about it. For example, I knew that Suzanne Collins helped write the script for Hunger Games, so I felt a certain safety, comfortable that she would not let the movie venture too far from the book but if it did, I was confident that her guiding hand was there.  Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (and the other two Girl books), died unexpectedly, leaving his father and brother to war over his literary estate with his "common-law" wife, so I guess we will never know what he thinks of these changes.

All The President's Men

For the past six weeks, my WEM book club has been reading All The President's Men (ATPM), Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's story of how they uncovered and exposed Watergate.  In 1972, I was 5 so this political event isn't embedded in my psyche.  However, politics hasn't changed much at all, despite the times.

I do know that reading this book was laborious - the cast of characters took up three pages.  It was hard at times to keep them all straight, including which was Bernstein (college dropout) and Woodward (Naval officer).  The unnamed sources Bernstein and Woodward used were just as hard, if not impossible, to keep straight.  However, it was quite an exciting adventure, in a cloak and dagger sort of way.

Reading about the process the two went through to keep extensive notes and record meeting dialogues, track down people who were willing to talk, getting in trouble with a judge for asking grand jurists about the grand jury testimony, traveling to Florida and California on the spur of the moment on the hope of getting information and putting the pieces together was quite enlightening.  Being allowed to be a fly on the page, so to speak, as to the editorial meetings and the writing process and the eventual fear that gripped the reporters when it all started to come out was not something most books give their readers a chance to do.

There were a lot of familiar names mentioned in this book: Helen Thomas, Bill Moyers, G. Gordon Liddy (how did he ever get a radio talk show?), Henry Kissinger, Pat Buchanan, Robert Dole, Morton Halperin (father of Game Change author Mark Halperin), and Brit Hume.

The one character I could connect with was Chuck Colson and only because Book Club had read his book, Born Again earlier.  The Colson in ATPM was not the same Colson I met in his autobiography; a religious conversion experience will completely change a man. I find that intriguing and it raises the questions of how others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves.  Colson passed away in April, 2012; ironically, the Washington Post published a four-page, fair article on Colson's life.

Bob Woodward has continued to write about politics and politicians.  He has two books out on President Obama, The Price of Politics and Obama's Wars.  These might be good to read before the election to inform your voting.  I have not read either one.

If you care to read more about it, the Washington Post has an extensive website devoted to Watergate. Once I watch the movie, I'll revisit this post to share.

Literary Cruises

This blogging gig is turning out to be a little more difficult than I thought.  You see, I may have a reading list but I'm not always good at sticking to it. There are so many books to distract me, so many books to take me places I've never been and meet people I've never met before.  And that's what happened this summer.  While I have slogged through my reading list, I've also read a couple other books which I want to tell you about.

First we are going to cruise on down to the Carribean for Michael Crichton's posthumously published Pirate Latitudes.  This hardback treasure was on the Bargain Priced table at Barnes and Noble, so I picked it up for quite less than a King's ransom.  Surprisingly, this is a work of historical fiction, based on the life of Charles Hunter, real privateer, aka pirate.  It was a very riveting tale, one I could not put down, reading it in the space of about three days.  Pirates, lately, at least with the success of the Pirates of the Carribean franchise, are a hot topic and reading about the adventures of a real life one is even better.  (Rabbit Trail: It's hard to believe a little water ride about pirates at Walt Disney World turned into such a movie series!)

Michael Crichton is one of my favorite authors and producers.  You can read more about his books, tv shows and movies here.  While researching this, I learned he was the writer for Twister, a movie my family watches frequently.  State of Fear was a thorough, thoughtful and scientific response to global warming.  Crichton's works live at the intersection of science and technology with humanity.  If you haven't read anything of his, do.  He will entertain you while making you think, not always an easy task.

Now we fly to Sweden.  The next book is another one in which I've come lately to the brouhaha: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; wow! really late! Didn't realize this book was published in 2005; better late than never.  I loved "traveling" to Sweden and trying to pronounce Swedish names in my head. I loved the snow and cold, the locations, the world traveling near the end.  I loved trying to predict whodunit but then finding the mystery solved in an unexpected way.  I do wish Mr. Larsson could have included a map or two, but then I love maps - they just help me see the action better in my head.  I was a little confused at first regarding who the story was really about but the ending cleared that up; a rather sad ending, in my opinion.

Throughout, this book has an underlying theme of violence against women.  And there is one particular brutal scene, so if you are sensitive to this, you may want to either skip the book or at least skip that part (you can message me and I'll give you page numbers in the paperback to skip if you want).  I found this book to have many, many different story lines, character relationships and themes (incest, corporate espionage, embezzlement, dysfunctional families of the highest order, Nazis to name a few) to the point where I envisioned Larsson the writer as Larsson the juggler maintaining as many balls in the air as possible.  

This book was translated from the Swedish.  It was very fascinating to read that; I found it to be noticeable, at times, especially with antecedents and pronouns, but yet it never threw me out of the story.  I admire the work of translators and ponder the difficulties inherent in their task.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is actually two movies, one that came out in 2009 and the 2011 one with Daniel Craig.  The 2009 version, according to my parents who watched it on Netflix Instant Play, is English subtitled.  My father usually doesn't like to watch subtitled movies but he said he enjoyed this one.  My mom was impacted by the aforementioned scene and the way the actress conveyed the character's pain.

So now that I've had some literary travels, it's back to the 14th century, slavery, feminism, politics and radicals.