Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Unfortunately, The Mosquito Coast (based on Paul Theroux's 1982 novel) is not a postcard. It is a movie, recording in painful detail the self-righteous Allie's trek toward a predictable tragedy, herding his long-suffering family before him as he goes. And though Harrison Ford offers a hypnotizing portrayal of a man covering despair with lunatic optimism, hysteria with bravado and rigid self-control, a fatal prejudice lingers in the audience: we do not want to spend a couple of hours with Allie here any more than we would if he were, heaven forfend, our next-door neighbor...
Mailer, 63, is in his element in more ways than one. Based on his best- selling 1984 novel, Tough Guys Don't Dance, the film is set in the autumnal gloom of the Cape Cod resort that he has frequented for years. In fact, aptly enough, the director's brick-faced home has been taken over to serve as the onscreen abode of his protagonist Tim Madden, a onetime boxer and womanizing writer who wakes up one morning with a case of alcoholic amnesia and the vague apprehension that he may have killed his wife. Due for release next fall...
...Tough Guys screenplay is also by Mailer, but while the novel took two months to write, the film took three times as long. "It was tougher than I thought it would be. Scenes that read well on the page wouldn't play well." The motivating greed that drives the plot wound up being shifted from real estate to cocaine, and some of the gorier scenes were muted. "A horror film has to be delicate or it becomes a butcher shop," explains the author. There was also a larger difference. "When you're a novelist, it's all yours and your...
...prose is strikingly gnomic as Langley tells of her past and future. But the consistent tone masks an impatience with novelistic invention. Much of the novel reads like a catchall of California behaviors and the confessional sociology that passed for journalism in the '70s. Sometimes See is right on the money: "I don't remember Jack very well at all. And we were married five years! He hated the way I held hamburgers." But there is not enough of this to pass for serious fiction...
...Soviet film establishment -- a cinema Yevtushenko. But soon his artistic intransigence and the supposed obscurity of his themes nettled the bureaucracy that financed his films. The epic Andrei Rublev, completed in 1966, was not released in the U.S.S.R. until 1971; Solaris (1972), based on the Stanislaw Lem novel, suffered official censure; the lusciously enigmatic Mirror (1978) and Stalker (1979) sealed Tarkovsky's fate as a picturemaker on the way out. Within a few years, he was. He went to Italy to make Nostalghia (1983), about a Russian estranged from his homeland, and to Sweden for The Sacrifice with Ingmar Bergman...