Its never easy to translate the literary word to a motion picture. Only recently the formula of turning comic books to films as been tweaked to success, with relatively good execution of one super-hero movie to another with far less failure rate than the past, namely the 80s & 90s.
When it comes to novels\short stories this is clearly not the case. Mostly because of a lack of objective and the narrative challenge. This film fully succeeds in its objective in portraying the world H.Murakami draws in his short story, but fails to provide a narrative that would otherwise exploit the various themes and meanings intermingled in the story. Its to H.Murakami's credit he's able to play these off in a short story ( which, regardless if you like the story or not, is a stroke of genius ), but the film fails miserably to imitate this achievement.
When I found out about the film I seriously wished for it to be a 100- 120-minute film. A visual translation of a written story isn't about translation but expansion, a seriously difficult affair for the writer & director to pull off well within the context of the original source material, hence why rarely such efforts really succeed. This film is a perfect example: The only part where this film really shines is the ending. Its as if H.Murakami re-visited his story, it makes for a nice add-on that explores the feelings of the main character in depth. If you read the story the only real reason to watch through the film is to witness the last 5 minutes.
Don't get me wrong, this is a good film. Many will find it boring, others will like the minimalism. It is this minimalist approach in narration that kills it. The characters are poorly fleshed out, the only reason this aspect worked out to a watchable level is because the actors simply pull off a superb job. H.M is known for his interesting characters and they're interesting for reasons. Again, to H.M's credit, he managed to pull off deep characters in a short story setting ( hence the importance of the first bits on H.M's short story, which this film simply ignores ). Reading the story you do get the feeling you know Tony even though H.M really didn't give you much to work with.
You cannot establish this equally well in film (due the nature of what a motion picture is ) without additional narrative. The director acknowledges this basic film-making fact, and instead of tackling the problem creatively he ends up putting a guy ( a great narrator, by the way ) and reads the narrative from the book!!!!!
Yeah yeah, there are some tools used to flesh out the characters like the bland looking colorless apartment of Tony's, & I really enjoyed this immensely, giving me more reason to hate the fact they depended on the guy reading the book as the primary form of narrative!
It destroys everything. Characters are far from fully fleshed out ( as I looked forward to, I guess ), pacing is too slow without really much content to justify it ( as opposed to Akira Kurosawa's work ). What I anticipated as a 100-min film turned up to be 75 minutes of over- stretched sequences made less dis-jointed by the poor solution of narrating the story by reading parts of the book.
Too bad, because this one had so much potential.
Off to watch "Norwegian Wood", hoping it'll be less disastrous.
When it comes to novels\short stories this is clearly not the case. Mostly because of a lack of objective and the narrative challenge. This film fully succeeds in its objective in portraying the world H.Murakami draws in his short story, but fails to provide a narrative that would otherwise exploit the various themes and meanings intermingled in the story. Its to H.Murakami's credit he's able to play these off in a short story ( which, regardless if you like the story or not, is a stroke of genius ), but the film fails miserably to imitate this achievement.
When I found out about the film I seriously wished for it to be a 100- 120-minute film. A visual translation of a written story isn't about translation but expansion, a seriously difficult affair for the writer & director to pull off well within the context of the original source material, hence why rarely such efforts really succeed. This film is a perfect example: The only part where this film really shines is the ending. Its as if H.Murakami re-visited his story, it makes for a nice add-on that explores the feelings of the main character in depth. If you read the story the only real reason to watch through the film is to witness the last 5 minutes.
Don't get me wrong, this is a good film. Many will find it boring, others will like the minimalism. It is this minimalist approach in narration that kills it. The characters are poorly fleshed out, the only reason this aspect worked out to a watchable level is because the actors simply pull off a superb job. H.M is known for his interesting characters and they're interesting for reasons. Again, to H.M's credit, he managed to pull off deep characters in a short story setting ( hence the importance of the first bits on H.M's short story, which this film simply ignores ). Reading the story you do get the feeling you know Tony even though H.M really didn't give you much to work with.
You cannot establish this equally well in film (due the nature of what a motion picture is ) without additional narrative. The director acknowledges this basic film-making fact, and instead of tackling the problem creatively he ends up putting a guy ( a great narrator, by the way ) and reads the narrative from the book!!!!!
Yeah yeah, there are some tools used to flesh out the characters like the bland looking colorless apartment of Tony's, & I really enjoyed this immensely, giving me more reason to hate the fact they depended on the guy reading the book as the primary form of narrative!
It destroys everything. Characters are far from fully fleshed out ( as I looked forward to, I guess ), pacing is too slow without really much content to justify it ( as opposed to Akira Kurosawa's work ). What I anticipated as a 100-min film turned up to be 75 minutes of over- stretched sequences made less dis-jointed by the poor solution of narrating the story by reading parts of the book.
Too bad, because this one had so much potential.
Off to watch "Norwegian Wood", hoping it'll be less disastrous.