Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Thousand Acres" is derived from Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, itself a loose adaptation of King Lear that carries Shakespeare's plot into present-day Iowa. The film veers wildly between a pedestrian fidelity to Smiley's words and a surprising negligence of her plot sequence. The film works, but not nearly as well as it should...
...that a bolder, more harrowing film exists on someone's cutting-room floor. Touchstone Pictures-Disney's live-action film division, i.e. the home of "Pretty Woman" -was notoriously frightened by Moorhouse's first cut, which preserved the higher stakes of secrecy, manipulation, and even murder from Smiley's novel. So displeased was Moorhouse with the changes that only recently was she convinced to have her name among the credits of the film...
...Thousand Acres" -as-film eventually achieves a fascinating symmetry with the events of its own plot. Like an epic sweep of land or a childhood resentment, a Pulitzer-winning novel is a difficult inheritance, and without proper stewardship can degenerate quickly. The cornerstone virtues of the film-Shakespeare's brutal story and Smiley's ingenious new context-are enough to sustain a solid two-hour drama, but Pfeiffer excepted, the filmmakers reap little from the rich soil they have been handed...
...fine version of the somewhat beefy Ellroy crime novel, director Curtis Hanson portrays the cool, brutal world of Hollywood glam and corrupt police in 50s Los Angeles, with all its gradations of questionable ethics and morality...
...same thing happened with Literature and Arts A-46: "The City and the Novel," which was moved from the cramped Emerson 305 down two flights to the much larger Emerson...