erin!balser

Tonight, I will be pajama-clad early, snacks on hand, watching starlets sashaying up the red carpet, and wondering who will win the coveted Oscar statuette. It’s the most exciting night in the film industry and one of the most watched telecasts in the world.

I’ll be paying paticular attention to the select Canadians nominated: Jason Reitman for Best Director, Ellen Page for Best Actress and Sarah Polley for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Which brings me to the subject of note: film adaptations of books. As I was browsing the blogs of my friends, Patricia had this to say about the movie The Kite Runner:

In spite of all it’s good qualities, the book was still way better than the movie. I’m a print snob, shoot me.

Being from a pseudo-academic, pseudo-publishing background, I hear this all the time. It’s not always meant to be pretentious, but it always bothers me. A book is not a film and a film is not a book. A film is a single artist’s interpretation of a particular story through a different medium.

The screen is inherently different from the page. Literature is not bound by the visual elements of film beyond words on a page. Literature is not bound by a two-hour time frame. Literature allows you to move through the story at your own spatial and temporal pace, whereas films do not.

Yes, some films are better adapted at others. Some adaptations leave out crucial plot-points or misinterpret characters. But at the core, a film adaptation is not like a cover song. It’s a creative interpretation, the transition of a story from one medium to the other, which may or may not correspond to how you interpreted the book.

Image by melodrama.ca. Licensed through Creative Commons.

The nominees are in! And finally, this is a year where I’ve seen enough films that I don’t have to make blind guesses about most of the categories. Sadly, there might not even be a ceremony this year, leaving any hilarious live-blogging attempts futile. You can’t blog an hour-long news conference, even if Billy Bush is a moron.

The nominees are below the jump:

Read more »

I saw 27 Dresses last night. It was one of those movies I pretend to hate, but will watch over and over again while wearing pajamas, eating ice cream, crying at the most random parts and feeling sorry for myself.

The plot is simple enough. The plain-Jane perennial-bridesmaid type secretly pines away for the perfect man, gets upstaged by perky and flashy younger sister, disaster ensues, gains self assertion, realizes that that asshole who was using her for some reason is the one and it’s happily ever after for all.

James Marsden was delicious but flat. I find it hard to believe someone as attractive as him would be forever stuck in the “Commitments” section of any newspaper, but I’ll suspend such disbelief for now. In his defense, he wasn’t given much to work with.

Judy Greer overplayed her over-sexed simple-minded best-friend character. She normally gives these characters more depth.

Katherine Heigl held her own, but she lacks that spark that makes a romantic comedy starlet really work. Reese has it, Julia has it, Cameron has it. Katherine’s not quite there yet. But it’s her second major film (unless you reaaally want to count My Father, the Hero.

I need to point out a bias here: I can’t stand her. She has this aura of self-righteous self-entitlement (see: most interviews with her, her Emmy acceptance speech) that transfers over to most of the characters she plays. In 27 Dresses, she was playing the insecure wallflower and it came across as “I’m an insecure wallflower because I deserve to be.” as opposed to, say, Anne Hathaway, who plays plain jane characters whose plainness stems from naivete. In such a case, when the wallflower finally gets the guy, you get a little gooey inside as they evolve and find love. With Jane in 27 Dresses, that growth wasn’t really there.

The best element of this film were the bridesmaid dresses. The mandatory montage was well done, the closet anchored the film and I enjoyed how it call came together in the end, as cliche as it was.

So in sum, 27 Dresses accomplished exactly what it set out to do: produce a cotton-candy colored sugar-coated romance and propel James Marsden and Katherine Heigl into A-list stars. It’s a cliche bubblegum click flick. Nothing more, nothing less.