Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Legend is the third major movie adaptation of the 1954 novel by Richard Matheson; the others were the The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price in 1964 and The Omega Man with Charlton Heston seven years later. Matheson is a prolific, influential writer of horror and sci-fi novels, short stories and films, from Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe movies of the '60s to the seminal '70s TV films Duel (Steven Spielberg's first feature) and The Night Stalker and the '90s films What Dreams May Come and Stir of Echoes, based on his novels. Some of Matheson...
...story it tells is firmly set against the history of modern Afghanistan, from a point just before the Soviet invasion of that unhappy land to the moment after the Taliban imposed its hateful fundamentalism on the country. Yet the movie version of Khaled Hosseini's best selling novel doesn't feel like it has been, as people used to say, "ripped from headlines." It instead has about it something of the air of a big, rich, very old-fashioned novel, telling the far-ranging story of two boys, one of them rich and well-favored, the other a servant...
Forster is fortunate that Hosseinni has provided him with a lovely, appropriately cinematic novel and controlling metaphor, the kite flying that precedes his title's kite running. It seems that in the peaceable Kabul of yore, kids once flew kites competitively, hoping to cut their opponents' strings by deftly maneuvering their own kites as they swooped through the air. It is a pretty game, but one that also hints at the ferocities that will follow in this film. Once it is over, the kids ran madly through the streets to retrieve the beautiful object they had downed. The servant...
...been on the “New York Times” best-sellers list. Now a fixture on Starbucks bookshelves across the nation, “The Kite Runner,” when first published, was a list of unknowns: a new author’s first novel and a story about a culture unfamiliar to most mainstream readers. Subduing those question marks required captivating, original fiction. That challenge, which the novel met so spectacularly, is analogous to the one the new film of the same name faces. “The Kite Runner” is a subtitled film...
...down by the Nazis, who take a keen interest in his situation and his loneliness. Coppola starts with a number of promising elements. Stylistically, he keeps the film interesting by incorporating vivid scenery—from a gory hospital visit to a whimsical trip to India—with novel approaches to dream sequences, where the shots begin upside-down. Tim Roth offers an impressive portrayal of Dominic as he appears at 70 and at 35. Roth salvages the boring intellectual banter between Dominic’s doubles as best he can, though the scenes drag. However, Coppola?...