Movies and Books

I don't watch too many movies, but the ones I enjoy the most are usually based on books. Sometimes I have read the book first, but other times the movie comes first and I find out that there is a book.

For example, this year, I went to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (basically because I adore Bill Nighy) and discovered that it was taken from a book originally titled These Foolish Things by Deborah Moggach. I enjoyed them both.

Also this year I came upon the books Millions and Framed written by Frank Cottrell Boyce. I read Millions first and then rented the movie version. On the other hand, I found Framed on Masterpiece Theatre and that led me to the book. 

I tackled The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas in July for the "Paris in July" blog challenge and managed to watch three versions of the movie all of which were very different. Each included and excluded different parts of the adventure told in the book. All of them were terrific. 

Others I have read and watched this year include All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren and Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes. In both cases the books were better although I don't really spin my wheels bothering with that argument. I try to take each book or movie on its own merits.

Two other movies I saw this year were Bell, Book, and Candle - for obvious reasons - and 84 Charing Cross Road. BB&C had many bookish aspects to it. It was originally a play and then was adapted for the big screen. Since I plan to read a play or two in 2013, perhaps it will find its way onto my TBR pile.

I own a copy of the book 84 Charing Cross Road and have slipped it into my Books to Be Re-read stack. Make that Re-Re-Re-read. I never grow tired of reading it.

Conversely, I rented The Hunger Games (star Jennifer Lawrence is from my hometown and I was curious to see her in action) but I have no desire to read the book.

What is your take on the book/movie idea? Do you enjoy seeing the characters On Screen as well as On Page? Any favorites?

The Great American Novel

Robert Penn Warren Birthplace
Guthrie, Kentucky

Today, in a seven-hour reading marathon I finished All the King's Men. I truly think this is The Great American Novel. It has it all: greed; lust; violence; adultery; war; bribery and blackmail; political shenanigans; murder; love lost and found; friendship; sports; and, history. It also has the most compelling prose and plot-line to be found anywhere.

I can't tell you how many times I said to myself, "Oooh. I didn't see that coming."

I do believe Robert Penn Warren gave this novel everything he had.

I am so glad I didn't have but the vaguest of notions of what the novel was about. Anyone I have talked to about it says: "Oh, that is the book about the politician in the South, isn't it?"

Well it is and it isn't. Warren himself said that the book was never about politics. And I believe that. Politics plays a part but it is just the background against which all the action takes place. It could just as well have been Corporate America or the Wild West.

I am going to have to take some time to digest and absorb all that the book has to offer. It is quite a read.

Loves Lost

Chapter VI of All the King's Men which begins on page 376 and ends on 434 is a doozy. Jack Burden tells the reader about his summer love affair with Anne Stanton when she was 17 and he was maybe 21 or 22. They had been childhood friends for a long time before that summer when they both realized they were in love with each other.

It ends badly. It seems that most things do for our Jack.

Also in this chapter is the tale of Jack's marriage to Lois. He writes:

As long as I regarded Lois as a beautiful juicy, soft, vibrant, sweet-smelling, sweet-breathed machine for provoking and satisfying the appetite (and that was the Lois I had married), all was well. But as soon as I began to regard her as a person, trouble began. All would have been well perhaps, had Lois been struck dumb at puberty. Then no man could have withstood her. But she could talk, and when something talks you sooner or later begin to listen to the sound it makes, and begin, even in the face of all other evidence, to regard it as a person. You begin to apply human standards to it, and the human element infects your innocent Eden pleasure in the juicy sweet-breathed machine. I had loved Lois the machine, the way you love the filet mignon or the Georgia peach, but I definitely was not in love with Lois the person.

No surprise. The marriage ended badly as well.

Poor Jack.

Range of Intellect

As I am reading All the King's Men I am so aware of its many different levels. There is the plot level; the plot within the plot; the characters and their personalities; the lush writing; the philosophy; the sense of place; and most of all the range of intellect, imagination, and endurance that it took for Robert Penn Warren to craft such a piece of work.

I know that I am missing some of the wonder of each of the above as I read and my mind wanders from level to level. And then I think, 'Oh, I will have to reread this book,' or 'I wish I could just sit and read this book in one fell swoop and not be jerked in and out of Warren's world.'

And now, back to the reading chair.

Swept Away

I can barely pull myself out of the river that is the novel All the King's Men. It flows, it swirls, there are rapids and calm waters. Huge boulders appear. The muddy banks come closer and then recede. Mysterious people appear on the shore. Some are smiling with happiness, some shoot looks of hatred.

My reading chair is my river raft and my life jacket is firmly buckled.

Wish me luck.

A Coincidence at the Coffee Shop



Movie Poster for All the King's Men
1949

How's this for a coincidence: This afternoon I had a rendezvous with a woman to discuss some business at a coffee shop. I had not met her before and when she asked me how my day had been, I told her I spent the morning reading Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.

She looked shocked, then smiled and said, "That is one of my top ten favorite books ever."

Then it was my turn to look shocked. I don't think I have ever met anyone who has read it.

She loves it for the political intrigue. I love it for the writing. And the intrigue...which we agreed was so very current even though the book was published over 60 years ago. Some things just never change. I explained to her a bit about the Grand Southern Literary Tour and how I even came to buy the book.

When we finished our business, she insisted that when I got to the end of the story to be sure and call her and we could meet again and talk about it.

Which is just what I will do.

All the King's Men

I seem to swing from one extreme to another. I left the childhood charm of the Hundred Acre Wood and am now embroiled in the political shenanigans in The South in the 1930s with Robert Penn Warren's All the Kings Men. It is a whopper of a tale coming in at 600 pages. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947.

The copy I have is the Restored Version edited by Noel Polk, which has the main character named Willie Talos as the Boss, the name Warren used in his original manuscript. The Boss is better known as Willie Stark in the first published edition and in the movies. There have been two film versions - one in 1949 starring Broderick Crawford and another in 2006 starring Sean Penn.

Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky in 1905. He received degrees from, are you ready, Vanderbilt University, University of California at Berkeley, Yale University, and Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar.  Quite an education. He was named poet laureate and won two Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry. He died in 1989.

I am surprised at how quickly I was drawn into the story which is narrated by former newspaperman and now the Boss's right-hand-man Jack Burden. The writing is superb - slow and sinuous like a Southern summer's day. It evokes perfectly the long red faces of the hard-scrabble farmers, the sweat-stained seersucker jackets of the townsmen, and the still-blazing evening sun setting over cotton fields and courthouses.

Here is a small sample:

I went on past the stables, which were build of log, but with a good tin roof, and leaned on the fence, looking off down the rise. Back of the barn the ground was washed and gullied some, with piles of brush chucked into the washes here and there to stop the process. As if it ever would. A hundred yards off, at the foot of the rise, there was a patch of woods, scrub oak and such. The ground must have been swampy down there, for the grass and weeds down there at the edge of the trees were lush and tropical green. Against the bare ground beyond it looked too green to be natural, the way the phony grass carpet the undertaker puts on the new grave to spare the feelings of the bereaved looks too green to be natural. I could see a couple of hogs lounging down there on their sides, like big gray blisters popped up out of the ground.

I think I am in for quite an experience.