Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story Movie Review (2006) | Roger Ebert Tweet I started reading Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman in 1965, and intend to finish it any day now. That is true, and also a joke (a small one) involving a novel about procrastination. Tristram Shandy begins with its hero about to be born and becomes so sidetracked by digressions that the story ends shortly after his birth. Perhaps Sterne considered writing a sequel describing the rest of Tristram's life, but never got around to it (smaller joke). Advertisement Now comes "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story," the movie, which never gets around to filming the book. Since the book is probably unfilmable, this is just as well; what we get instead is a film about the making of a film based on a novel about the writing of a novel. As an idea for comedy this is inspired, and Michael Winterbottom and his screenwriter, Frank Cottrell Boyce , show the filmmakers constantly distracted by themselves. "But enough about me," Darryl Zanuck once said.

"What did you think of my movie?" The film takes place on the set of a movie named "Tristram Shandy." It involves actors named Steve Coogan , Rob Brydon , Gillian Anderson and others, played by Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Gillian Anderson and others. The opening scene takes place in a makeup room, where Coogan and Brydon discuss their billing, and whether Brydon's teeth are too yellow. Coogan has the lead, playing both Tristram and his father, Walter. Brydon plays Tristram's uncle Toby, who devotes his life to constructing a large outdoor model of the battlefield where, as a young man, he suffered an obscure wound. The Widow Wadman (Anderson), who is considering marrying Toby, wants to know precisely how and, ahem, where he was wounded. "Just beyond the asparagus," Toby explains, pointing to his model landscape. But I digress. Back to the dressing room. Coogan mentions that he has the lead in the movie.

Yes, says Brydon, but Toby is "a featured co-lead." Coogan: "Well, we'll see after the edit." Both actors are competitive in that understated British way that involves put-downs hardly less obscure than Toby's wound. Coogan wants the wardrobe department to build up his shoes so that the "featured co-lead" will not be taller than the leading man. Brydon learns that Gillian Anderson has been hired to join the cast, and is panic-stricken: He is afraid that in a love scene he might blush, or be betrayed by stirrings beyond the asparagus. Advertisement There are elements of "This Is Spinal Tap" in the film, and also a touch of Al Pacino's " Looking For Richard ," a semi-documentary about actors preparing to play Richard III. From "Spinal Tap" come the egos of the artists and the shabbiness of their art; from Pacino the film borrows the device of explaining the material to the viewers while it is being explained to the actors (only one person in "Tristram Shandy," and possibly nobody in the audience, has read the book). The art is endearingly shabby.

There is a screening of some battle footage in which lackluster foot soldiers wander dispiritedly past the camera, looking like extras on their lunch break. And a scene in which a miniature unborn Tristram is seen inside a miniature womb; I was reminded of Stonehenge in "Spinal Tap." The explanations of the material include witty dinner-time conversation by Stephen Fry , playing himself playing an actor playing a literary theorist. Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: "This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about." Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was "No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels," which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological. Now about that interviewer. He has information about a lap dancer that the actor met one recent drunken evening. It would be embarrassing to see the lap dancer on the front page of the tabloids, but the interviewer is willing to do a deal: He'll tidy the story in return for an exclusive about Coogan's relationship with his girlfriend Jenny ( Kelly MacDonald ), who has just given birth to their baby. It would not be good for Jenny to read about the lap-dancer.

Advertisement Jenny, as it happens, has just arrived on the set, where Coogan has been having a flirtation with a production assistant named Jennie ( Naomie Harris ). Jennie is not merely sexy and efficient, but a film buff who offers analysis and theory to people who really only want a drink. She compares the ungainly battle scene to Bresson's work in "Lancelot du Lac," and has a lot to say about Fassbinder, who Coogan vaguely suspects might have been a German director. Not surprisingly, Jennie is the only person on the set who has read the novel, and tries to explain why the battle scene isn't exactly important. Because their work is so varied, the director Winterbottom and Boyce, his frequent writer, are only now coming into focus as perhaps the most creative team in British film.

Their collaborations include films as different as " Butterfly Kiss ," "Welcome To Sarajevo" ," "The Claim," "Code 46" and "24-Hour Party People." That the same director and writer could make such different films is almost inexplicable, and consider too that Winterbottom directed " Wonderland " (2000) and Boyce wrote Danny Boyle's "Millions." Boyce told me "Tristram Shandy" might sound a little like Charlie Kaufman's screenplay for " Adaptation ," but he thinks it's closer to Truffaut's " Day for Night " (am I sounding a little like Jennie here?). It wonderfully evokes the life on a movie set, which for a few weeks or months creates its own closed society. Wives and lovers visit the set but are subtly excluded from its "family," and even such a miraculous creature as a newborn baby is treated like a prop that is very nice, yes, but not needed for the scene. As the final credits roll, Coogan and Brydon are still engaged in their running duel of veiled insults. They are briefly diverted, however, by imitating Pacino as Shylock.

Every actor knows what David Merrick meant when he said, "It is not enough for me to succeed; my enemies must fail." Advertisement Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story ( 2005 ) A Cock and Bull Story (original title) R | Director Michael Winterbottom (Northam) attempts to shoot the adaptation of Laurence Sterne's essentially unfilmable novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman." Director: Laurence Sterne (novel), Frank Cottrell Boyce (screenplay) (as Martin Hardy) Stars: From $14.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC The Huntsman: Winter’s War movie review: snow what?

7 April 2016 1:46 PM, -08:00 | a list of 26 titles created 02 Dec 2010 a list of 30 titles created 19 Feb 2012 a list of 36 titles created 30 Jun 2014 a list of 29 titles created 28 Aug 2014 a list of 45 titles created 4 months ago Title: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005) 6.8/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. 2 wins & 13 nominations. See more awards » Videos The Trip (TV Series 2010) Comedy Steve is asked to review restaurants for the UK's Observer who is joined on a working road trip by his friend Rob who fills in at the last minute when Coogan's romantic relationship falls apart.

Stars: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Rebecca Johnson Steve Coogan has been asked by The Observer to tour the country's finest restaurants, but after his girlfriend backs out on him he must take his best friend and source of eternal aggravation, Rob Brydon. Director: Michael Winterbottom Two men, six meals in six different places on a road trip around Italy. Liguria, Tuscany, Rome, Amalfi and ending in Capri. Director: Michael Winterbottom In 1976, Tony Wilson sets up Factory Records and brings Manchester's music to the world. Director: Michael Winterbottom This film charts the relationship between a man imprisoned for drug smuggling and his wife and is being shot over the course of five years, a few weeks at a time. Director: Michael Winterbottom In February 2002 in the Shamshatoo Refugee Camp in the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan, there are 53,000 refugees living in sub-human conditions since 1979 with the Soviet Union ... See full summary » Director: Michael Winterbottom Eunice is walking along the highways of northern England from one filling station to another.

She is searching for Judith, the woman, she says to be in love with. It's bad luck for the ... See full summary » Director: Michael Winterbottom The life of Paul Raymond, the controversial entrepreneur who became Britain's richest man. Director: Michael Winterbottom Edit Storyline Two actors, as their make up is applied, talk about the size of their parts. Then into the film: Laurence Sterne's unfilmable novel, Tristram Shandy, a fictive autobiography wherein the narrator, interrupted constantly, takes the entire story to be born. The film tracks between "Shandy" and behind the scenes. Size matters: parts, egos, shoes, noses. The lead's girlfriend, with their infant son, is up from London for the night, wanting sex; interruptions are constant. Scenes are shot, re-shot, and discarded. The purpose of the project is elusive. Fathers and sons; men and women; cocks and bulls. Life is amorphous, too full and too rich to be captured in one narrative. Written by <jhailey@hotmail.com> He's About To Play The Role Of His Life.

See more » Genres: Rated R for language and sexual content | See all certifications » Parents Guide: 20 January 2006 (UK) See more » Also Known As: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story See more » Filming Locations: £332,582 (UK) (20 January 2006) Gross: Did You Know? Trivia Tony Wilson : The real Tony Wilson (who Steve Coogan played in 24 Hour Party People (2002), another Michael Winterbottom film) plays himself, interviewing Steve Coogan on the film set. The somewhat spiky relationship between the two (who also worked together on local TV in the early 1990s) is subtly referenced in Coogan's lukewarm "let's catch up in Manchester". See more » Quotes Steve Coogan : I know that. Rob Brydon : ...with Gillian Anderson. I have a sexual thing for Gillian Anderson. See more » Crazy Credits Throughout the closing credits, Rob and Steve talk about how they use techniques of various other actors. See more » Connections This FAQ is empty. Add the first question.

User Reviews Messy and a bit too post-modern and smart-arsed for some I'm sure but for me it was just a great deal of fun and a lot of laughs (United Kingdom) – See all my reviews Before getting on to what I thought of the film, let's just get some of the big problems out in the open. Firstly those looking for an adaptation of the book will be disappointed to find that very little of the content is on the screen because the script uses it more as a frame and a guide for essentially a behind-the-scenes mockumentary about making the film of the book. It does go someway to backing up the claim that the book is "unfilmable" because this film certainly hasn't managed it. Secondly, by being all post-modern and having actors playing a version of themselves the film will alienate viewers who don't get it and feel that it is all too clever for its own good; likewise it may have people feeling that it has all been done before  indeed by the very same people in fact. However, that said, it is hard for me to ignore the fact that it was tremendous fun.

Taking its lead from the novel's constant digressions, the film cannot stick on anything long and as we open the film jumping around the events around Tristram's birth, we soon find that we have jumped behind the scenes and into the lives of those involved. It is a brave move and one that doesn't totally work but it is surprisingly easy to go along with. In terms of the treatment of the novel I felt it did well because it made me want to read the book. We are told enough about the novel to develop an interest in it and know what it is about and it may be a very wise decision to have avoided tackling something that everyone says couldn't be done. Some parts of the book are told as they would have been in a "proper" filmed version but some are not  one scene is actually Coogan's nightmare and features Brydon playing his big scene with Gillian Anderson with a Roger Moore impression. In the place of a straight adaptation what we get is a wonderfully funny look at stars, period dramas, British film-making, celebrities and so on. It has very little structure to speak of but what it does have is a natural development, humour and delivery that makes it interesting and constantly fresh.

I wasn't laughing every second because it isn't that type of comedy but occasionally it was very funny, producing some great scenes and some great dry wit. The "story" (if there is one) focuses on Coogan  his pedantic fame, his exploits and generally the exaggerated version of himself that he has played before. This keeps the film moving forward by providing one central point of reference for everything else to happen around so, although it does feel very fragmented and distracted, really it is more structured than it appears. The most amusing moments do come from the post-modern looks at Coogan's insecurities, the contrast of his family life with the exploits with the stripper etc and generally it makes the film interesting because it does convince as a "reality" of a sort. Having said that though, the film does have some hysterical bits that just hang there by themselves; for example Brydon's Coogan impressions are hilarious, as is the Al Pacino discussion over the end credits. The cast list reads like a who's who of British film and television  some in main roles but many in semi-cameos who do the goods and then move on.

Coogan is naturally the star (no matter what Brydon thinks!) and, although he has played a version of himself or addressed the camera in a post-modern way before, it still works well here. He is convincing and natural and it helps the film produce this "reality" that it really does heavily rely on. Brydon perhaps relies a bit too heavily on impressions but generally he is just as good and the scenes he shares with Coogan tend to be some of the funniest. Although she has largely been overlooked as the critics name names and hand out praise, I think that Naomi Harris deserves a lot of credit for her performance here. Left with a more serious thread to carry, she turns in a totally convincing performance to the point where I could easily believe this is who she is. She also produces an engaging thread around her desire for Coogan, despite having little to work with. I'll admit that I have liked her in most things I have seen her do, find her very attractive and did slightly fall for her "chilled, cool dressing film buff" character (ok, a bit more than slightly) but I still thought she was easily the best performance in the whole film.

The rest of the cast work well within the "reality" of the film and generally produce laughs. Faces like Moran, Fry and Walliams provide some comedy but are little more than cameos. Northam and Anderson are good and support is generally very good from people like Macdonald, Hart, Henderson and others. Winterbottom pulls off the seemingly impossible of holding it all together as director and moving well within the novel and reality  both in terms of story telling but also visually. Overall this will please as many people as it p*sses off I think. Taking the manner of telling of the novel (distracted and digressing) the film moves from a straight telling into a spoof of reality. Saying it like this sounds dull and "seen it all before" but it is an impressive piece of film-making that is brave and, even better, works. As brilliant as it is flawed, this is certainly worth a try whether you know the book or not because, simply put, it is tremendous, tumultuous fun. 21 of 30 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes BBC - A Cock And Bull Story - BBC Films A Cock And Bull Story I'm a grown man, talking to the camera, in a womb. There is nothing playing at the moment, please check again soon. A Cock And Bull Story Synopsis One of English literature's most anarchic classics - The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy - adapted by one of cinema's most daring film-makers, A COCK AND BULL STORY is a comedy from acclaimed director, Michael Winterbottom. Bringing together the cream of British comedy talent, this is a film which perfectly captures the spirit of the novel - a celebration of the wonderful, unfathomable chaos of life itself. A COCK AND BULL STORY is an energetic, laugh out loud adaptation of a book which is unadaptable, and this is wrapped round by an affectionate and equally hilarious account of what it's like trying to make a film - especially when the two lead actors are constantly vying with each other for attention.

Production images View All Photos (3) Movie Info Flipping back and forth between the 18th century and the hapless efforts of the 21st century filmakers, 'Tristram Shandy' is the making of a movie adapted from the notoriously unfilmable English literature masterpiece, 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Sahndy, Gentlemen,' written by Laurence Sterne. The story begins with Tristram Shandy (Steve Coogan) narrating his life story as he sees it. Crammed with literary jokes and dark humor, Shandy's warped childhood tales are constantly interrupted by his family and household, inadvertently revealing far more about himself than any conventional autobiography. At the dramatic moment of Tristram's birth, the first assistant director calls cut, marking the end of a filming day on the. We then see Steve Coogan, the other actors and crew through the course of a chaotic evening on set. Steve Coogan's wife arrives with their six-month-old baby, a journalist is chasing him about a scandalous story, his agent has arrived with a load of Hollywood scripts and the film financiers are threatening to pull the plug.

Rating: R (for language and sexual content) Genre: Michael Winterbottom - Biography - IMDb Michael Winterbottom Biography Showing all 34 items Jump to: Overview (2) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (1) | Trade Mark (6) | Trivia (20) | Personal Quotes (4) Overview (2) 5' 11" (1.8 m) Mini Bio (1) Michael Winterbottom was born on March 29, 1961 in Blackburn, Lancashire, England. He is a director and producer, known for 24 Hour Party People (2002), A Mighty Heart (2007) and The Killer Inside Me (2010). Spouse (1) Trade Mark (6) Often has actors improvise, rather than work exclusively from the script Often has a sequence with the lead characters running or romantically playing on the beach. ( Butterfly Kiss (1995), Jude (1996), I Want You (1998), With or Without You (1999), In This World (2002), 9 Songs (2004)).

For three films in a row ( I Want You (1998), With or Without You (1999) and Wonderland (1999)), had a central character who worked as a hairdresser. Trivia (20) Co-founder of Revolution films (UK); along with producing partner Andrew Eaton . Is a keen admirer of German new wave films, particularly those directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder . Frequently works with actors Christopher Eccleston , Shirley Henderson , John Simm and James Nesbitt . His former partner Sabrina Broadbent wrote a novel, "Descent", which "The Manchester Guardian" describes as "closely based on their life together. Or rather, not together, because the husband in the book is understood to be a workaholic film director who keeps disappearing in pursuit of interesting projects". ("A Winterbottom's Tale", February 1, 2004) Went to college with director Marc Evans ( Resurrection Man (1998), My Little Eye (2002), Trauma (2004)). Winterbottom's company Revolution Films produced Marc Evans ' second film Resurrection Man (1998).

Apparently, his first job on a film shoot was working as Lindsay Anderson 's assistant in his early twenties, a position he described as "...basically holding cups of tea". Was the original director chosen for The Cider House Rules (1999), Goal! The Dream Begins (2005), and Freedomland (2006) and did extensive work before leaving each of those projects. Member of jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998 Attended Oxford before going to Bristol University to study film. Was approached to direct The Cider House Rules (1999). Was approached to direct Good Will Hunting (1997) for $1.5 million but declined. Often flies economy with his crew. Hoped to use the sets of Danny Boyle 's film Sunshine (2007) on the production's off-days to shoot his own science fiction comedy. Permission was never worked out and Winterbottom's film was canceled. Has two daughters with Sabrina Broadbent. Went to Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School in Blackburn. He visited Argentina for to promote his film Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005) in Mar del Plata International Film Festival.

[March 2006] Has made three movies based on novels by Thomas Hardy : Jude (1996), based on "Jude the Obscure," The Claim (2000), re-setting "The Mayor of Casterbridge" from rustic England to a California mining town, and Trishna (2011), an update of "Tess of the d'Urbervilles.". Replaced Danny Cannon as director on Goal after the producers saw some of Danny's early footage and found he was making it more as a drama documentary rather than a straight drama as they wanted. Personal Quotes (4) I don't particularly like the idea that there's an arc to the story and that therefore in this scene you have to convey this bit of information or emotion. I like more the feeling that, of course, there is a shape to the story, but that each scene should feel right, should be true at that moment, and that gradually you accumulate these moments of truth until you get enough of them together that it becomes a story that's interesting. Cinema has been extremely conservative and prudish. I wanted to go to the opposite extreme and show the relationship only through sex.

[on 9 Songs (2004)] When I was at university, the film club always showed In the Realm of the Senses ( In the Realm of the Senses (1976)) at the start of a new year to get people to join. It was full of explicit sex, yet you can buy it in HMV now. Why can a writer engage in sexual imagery with no restrictions and yet a film author can't do the same? See also How did they ever make a movie of…? : 17 successful adaptations of “unadaptable” books · Inventory · The A.V. Club 1. Tristram Shandy: A Cock And Bull Story (2006) Many books’ reputations as being “unadaptable” for the big screen stem from structural or voice idiosyncrasies that don’t translate to film’s more straightforward narrative style—though that hasn’t kept ambitious/foolhardy filmmakers from giving it the old college try, with varying degrees of success.

Laurence Stern’s The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in nine volumes over the course of nearly a decade in the mid-1700s, was long upheld as the epitome of an unadaptable novel, not just for its length, but for its non-linear, digression-filled structure and 18th-century-specific cultural and textual reflexiveness. The lone big-screen adaptation of Stern’s novel, Michael Winterbottom ’s 2006 Tristram Shandy: A Cock And Bull Story, gets around the novel’s problematic reputation by building a movie around that reputation, a film that’s an adaptation only in the most meta sense. A sorta-mockumentary centered on the modern-day filming of a Tristram Shandy period adaptation starring Steve Coogan as both himself and the titular gentleman in the film-within-a-film, A Cock And Bull Story takes great pains to both tell and show its audience, numerous times, how and why its source material is a terrible choice for an adaptation. (“He wants realism?

I’m a grown man, talking to a camera, in a fucking womb.”) As the fake Tristram unravels onscreen, A Cock And Bull Story succeeds in expressing the novel’s essence, if not its content, which is appropriate for, as Coogan puts it, “a post-modern classic written before there was any modernism to be post about.” Source 2. Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) Kurt Vonnegut ’s Slaughterhouse-Five throws together a special set of challenges that make it seem impossible to successfully adapt. Vonnegut spends much of the novel watching the quieter parts of World War II alongside Billy Pilgrim, who’s truly an antiwar hero in his childish, bumbling naïveté. Moreover, Pilgrim has become “unstuck in time,” experiencing his life out of order, sometimes repeatedly; structurally, the novel is a nonlinear narrative presented linearly. He also spends time in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. The biggest challenge, though, is what to do with the narrator, set up as Vonnegut himself: His beautifully plain language throws inevitable death against everyday banality, injecting a sad peacefulness into the novel’s tone.

In keeping remarkably close to the source material, though, screenwriter Stephen Geller and director George Roy Hill succeed where many Vonnegut adaptations fail. They eliminate the narrator and put the camera in his place, exposing Billy’s point of view and creating a quick shorthand for his time-traveling by cutting to similar shapes, settings, or objects. The film stumbles between times as deftly as Pilgrim does in the novel, and by the time Pilgrim is abducted to outer space, it feels obvious, inevitable, and hopeful. 3. Naked Lunch (1991) Anyone who’s read Naked Lunch would have a hard time describing what, if anything, happens in William S. Burroughs’ most famous novel. There’s the Interzone. And Dr. Benway. And more than a few references to jism. But action of the sort that could be translated into a film? That’s harder to come by.

It is, however, an unforgettable book, filled with incomprehensible passages—some of them created by cutting up sentences and pasting them together—but also dazzling setpieces and impressionistic details taken from Burroughs’ life as a world-traveling junkie in the years after he accidentally killed his wife in a drunken reenactment of the William Tell legend in Mexico. A longtime fan of the author, David Cronenberg emphasized the biographical connections in his adaptation, casting Peter Weller as a Burroughs stand-in and letting fact, fiction, and fantasy mix freely in a film set both in the post-war New York that gave birth to the Beat movement, and the dark, Mugwump-haunted reaches of the author’s psyche. It makes only a little more literal sense than the source material, but as a lyrical fantasia on Burroughs’ life and obsessions, it does right by its inspiration. 4.

Fast Food Nation (2006) A straightforward adaptation of Eric Schlosser ’s investigation into how dependent we’ve become on the not-so-nutritious food of McDonald’s and other franchises would probably leave its audiences too disgusted to stay in the theater, between the depictions of obesity and unsanitary food-production conditions. Instead, director Richard Linklater opted for a sprawling, multi-character, Robert Altman-inspired depiction of the web of connections behind each “Do you want fries with that?” This spans from the top, where the marketing director (Greg Kinnear) of a McDonald’s-like chain investigates possible contamination, down to the illegal immigrants who make up the chain’s work force. The film has its share of shocking moments, including an inevitable trip to the slaughterhouse, but it’s more memorable for its depiction of the effects of corporate homogenization on the fictional Colorado town at its center, where residents eat what’s available without much thinking about where their food comes from, where their money goes, or what the consequences of it all might be. 5.

Lolita (1962) “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” asked the tagline for Stanley Kubrick’s scandalous 1962 adaptation of Lolita, echoing the concerns of anyone who’d ever read Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel, or even heard it spoken about in hushed whispers. It wasn’t just the taboo content—a sordid sexual affair between pedophile intellectual Humbert Humbert and a sexually precocious 12-year-old named Dolores Haze after her mother’s death—that made the book seemingly impossible to legally adapt for film in the early ’60s. It was also the book’s tricky, innately literary tone and structure: Much of Lolita’s enduring appeal is rooted in the brutally witty literary voice of the self-serving, patently unreliable narrator, a bitchily brilliant teacher and writer fond of multi-lingual puns, and convinced he’s a victim of fate, not a monstrous child molester. That didn’t stop Stanley Kubrick from attempting the impossible with a film adaptation that stressed the pitch-black comedy at the book’s nasty core while understandably downplaying its forbidden sexuality and underlying romanticism.

Kubrick’s Lolita is a different beast than the book that inspired it. Kubrick dramatically expanded the role of Humbert’s arch-nemesis Clare Quilty (largely to provide a rich showcase for the chameleon-like Peter Sellers), changed the chronology of events by beginning with the ending of the book, and made the title nymphet much more an adult than in the novel. But his film is nevertheless brilliant, deeply sad, and graced with some remarkable performances—most notably, James Mason as Humbert Humbert, Sellers as Quilty, and Shelley Winters as Dolores’ self-deluded mother—in spite of the restrictions under which Kubrick worked. Kubrick’s achievement is even more remarkable when compared to Adrian Lyne’s more sexually explicit, dopily maudlin 1997 adaptation. 6. Orlando (1992) Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography isn’t as dependent on the stream-of-consciousness prose that makes her other books so difficult to adapt, but that doesn’t make an easy project out of Woolf’s centuries-spanning tale of an undying young man who becomes a woman about a century into his life.

Writer/director Sally Potter took a lot of liberties with Woolf’s plot, but her adaptation offers a thematically similar tour of several centuries of British history, and how the roles of women and men have changed over the years. It’s visually gorgeous and anchored by a star-making performance from Tilda Swinton , who’s convincing and sexy on both sides of the gender divide. Bonus sexually ambiguous points: Memoirist and queer icon Quentin Crisp does a neat turn as Queen Elizabeth. 7. American Psycho (2000) There are those who regard Bret Easton Ellis ’ 1991 novel as a modern classic of ferocious, deadpan satire, and those who adhere to the general view that greeted its original publication: that it’s an affectless hash of brand names, record reviews, and torture-porn. Either way, its dulled-out first-person narration, combined with the extreme violent and sexual content, made it seem like a non-starter as a movie property. Then director Mary Harron and screenwriter Guinevere Turner made the material their own by turning it into a period piece set in the mid-1980s.

With a central performance by Christian Bale that wraps an atomic core of pulsating rage inside a sleek, polished yuppie surface, this icy black comedy apotheosizes Ellis’ splatter satire of careerist consumerism, even as it folds the book itself in as one of its targets. Source 8. “The Dead” (1987) Over the course of his career, John Huston earned a reputation as a specialist in movies based on “classic literature,” but most of his triumphs came from a certain kind of literature: Whether it was the hard-boiled detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon), the war stories of Stephen Crane (The Red Badge Of Courage), or Rudyard Kipling’s boy’s-adventure yarns (The Man Who Would Be King), they were simple stories long on action and colorful language, ready for exploitation by good actors. For his last film, though, Huston stretched himself by taking on the final story in James Joyce’s debut collection, Dubliners. It’s a small story, mostly set at an Epiphany party in a few crowded rooms, with a final meditation set inside the hero’s head.

But Huston, working with an expert cast headed by Donal McCann and Huston’s own daughter Anjelica Huston, staged the party scenes so they feel as big as life itself. Then, having shown what he could do with the framework of Joyce’s characters and dialogue, he backs off and conveys the hero’s epiphany by having McCann read the passage over images of winter landscapes. Part of knowing how to adapt the unadaptable is knowing when to let the original author tow you to the finish line. [pagebreak] 9. Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid To Ask) (1972) Studios have been known to buy the rights to bestselling books that are unimaginable as films just for the bragging rights, which may be how someone ended up with the rights to Dr. David Reuben’s blockbuster sex manual, written as a series of short answers to questions about sexual matters. Fortunately, Reuben had unknowingly made an enemy of Woody Allen, who saw Reuben plugging his book on The Tonight Show by recycling Allen’s old standup act without attribution.

(Johnny Carson: “Is sex dirty?” Reuben: “Only if you’re doing it right.”) Appalled by Reuben’s slick, media-friendly glibness and his dopey book, Allen wrote and directed a movie consisting of seven vignettes that stretch the premises of questions from Reuben’s book as far as they can go. As with most sketch-based movies, the film is uneven—the sight of Lou Jacobi in drag never did anybody any good—but the best segments remain high points of Allen’s early period, including Gene Wilder’s performance as a successful Manhattan doctor destroyed by his passionate affair with a sheep, and the concluding episode, “What Happens During Ejaculation?” featuring Allen as a sperm cell anxious that he’ll “end up on the ceiling.” (An eighth segment, starring Allen as a spider and his ex-wife Louise Lasser as a black widow who mates with him, then kills and consumes him, was filmed but deleted from the finished movie. The title: “What Makes A Man A Homosexual?”) Source 10. The Lord Of The Rings trilogy (2001-2003) J.R.R.

Tolkien himself thought nobody could turn his fantasy epic into a dramatic adaptation that audiences could take seriously, and he might have been right—that is, if special effects hadn’t developed to the point they had by the turn of the century, if there hadn’t been backers willing to foot the bill for a series of epic-length films determined to get the details right on the scale they demanded, and if Peter Jackson and his co-adapters hadn’t been ruthless enough with the material to dump characters like Tom Bombadil overboard. Many other attempts to adapt Tolkien into film and other media suffered from being too faithful, in ways that weren’t essential to the story or spirit of the books, but that did eat up that most precious resource to makers of would-be epics: time. Jackson, coming from a background in horror and fantasy movies, was able to apply what he learned from the cinema of Ray Harryhausen , Merian C. Cooper, and Run Run Shaw to create a massive piece of entertainment that’s both true to the books and a celebration of the pleasures of sword fights and CGI gruesomeness. 11.

Mean Girls (2004) Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 book Queen Bees And Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, And Other Realities Of Adolescence caused a stir when it revealed what many young women already knew: Adolescent girls are often the worst, especially toward each other. Half an examination of “girl world,” half an advice book for parents at their wits’ end about what to do with their miserable/unbearable spawn, Wiseman based her nonfiction book on years of research in the field listening to girls discussing how cliques affected their lives. Due to a lack of ongoing narrative, Wiseman’s book didn’t seem like an obvious choice for movie adaptation, but screenwriter Tina Fey not only based 2004’s Mean Girls on the topic of high-school backbiting and hierarchy, but also used Wiseman’s investigative style when introducing Lindsay Lohan ’s character Cady, who observes North Shore High as if she were a zoologist examining a new habitat. 12.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (2009) Like all David Foster Wallace ’s work, his 1999 short-story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men was deemed unadaptable primarily because of his distinctive hyper-articulate and extensive dialogue, which would balloon to untenable length if filmed without significant alterations. Also, it’s a collection without an obvious overall narrative, which seemed to preclude a movie version. During a staged reading in college of the book’s recurring centerpiece segments—men’s misogynist monologues, articulate confessions, and reminiscences of their dads, delivered in response to an unknown interviewer only represented by a recurring “Q”— John Krasinski thought the cumulative emotional effect created a narrative backbone. His solution to the lack of plot was to fill out “Q” as graduate student Sara Quinn (Julianne Nicholson), whom Krasinski claims Wallace blessed over the phone as exactly how he’d conceived of this unknown interrogator. The movie is hit-and-miss: Some of the monologues flounder badly, but others (like Bobby Cannavale’s one-armed pickup artist) knock it out of the park. 13.

Moneyball (2011) While Michael Lewis’ 2003 book Moneyball: The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game has been hailed as an insightful look into how Oakland’s Billy Beane revolutionized the way a small-market baseball team could compete with richer organizations, it hardly comes off as an adaptable tome. Unlike Lewis’ other book about statistical analysis in sports, The Blind Side , there’s no easily teased-out narrative thread. And while such an underdog tale would have great appeal, the book’s detailed discussion of sabermetrics—a specialized technique of analyzing statistics—is dense enough to make even the most ardent baseball fan yawn. Yet Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay builds a narrative construct that hews close to the actual story while using creative license to flesh out Beane (Brad Pitt) and his story, which stands at the center of that narrative. Strong acting turns from Pitt, Jonah Hill (as composite character Peter Brand), and Philip Seymour Hoffman (as A’s manager Art Howe) help spark the central conflicts and create the necessary tension to make Bennett Miller’s deftly directed film come to life. 14. Crash (1996) The J.G.

Ballard novel Crash concerns itself with the obscure, peculiar fetish symphorophilia, which associates watching or staging accidents with sexual arousal. Naming a narrator after himself, Ballard takes a voyeuristic journey into a subculture of former car-accident victims who have come to confuse and intermingle the sensation of crashes and sexual pleasure. It’s a deadly pursuit: Its members stage collisions, and its deranged leader imagines an ecstatic death in a head-on crash with Elizabeth Taylor . Ballard realizes it with appropriately obsessive detail, to the point where the abstractions of the prose dominate the spare remnants of the plot. Material this singularly odd and disturbing generally isn’t in danger of being adapted into a movie—lest it be slapped with the NC-17 it was slapped with—but director David Cronenberg proved ideal for the task, turning it into another of his ongoing series of films about the horrors of the psyche manifesting themselves on the body. Naturally, it polarized critics and audiences sharply—it won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes over the fervent objection of jury president Francis Ford Coppola —but unlike the 2004 Best Picture winner, it’s a Crash that stands the test of time. 15.

Time Regained (1999) How do you go about adapting Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance Of Things Past, a seven-volume, time-jumping, 1.5-million-word behemoth about the nature of memory? For the late Raúl Ruiz, a Chilean director working with the abundant resources of the French film industry, step one was to lose the first six volumes. In two and a half hours, Ruiz designed his movie as a companion to the seventh volume rather than a fully comprehensible work in its own right, which favors Proustian scholars more than the uninitiated. Still, Ruiz and co-writer Gilles Taurand boldly attempt to translate Proust’s narrative digressions into formal flights of fancy. Rather than straighten out the timeline, the film takes off from a single spark of memory—like the bite from the famous madeleine that brings the past rushing to the fore—and turns those moments out of time into dizzying narrative pirouettes. 16.

Where The Wild Things Are (2009) From the moment it was announced that director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers were adapting Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are into a film, the Internet bubbled with contempt, wondering how it was possible to expand a 10-sentence picture book into a 100-minute movie without losing its essential emotional directness and simplicity. Turned out that Jonze and Eggers didn’t entirely need to: The film adaptation is richer and more complicated than the book, with more of a sense of the life of angry, frustrated 9-year-old protagonist Max. Eggers and Jonze spend the extra time letting the audience feel Max’s emotions, as expressed through interactions with the “wild things” that represent different parts of his psyche. It’s an adaptation that thoroughly respects its inspiration, both in the gorgeous visuals, taken from Sendak’s art, and in its storyline, but also in its expression of the storms, rages, confusions, and sudden coolings-off of childhood. And yet it isn’t a slavish adaptation; it’s one that draws out the ideas of a simple book for children, and turns it into a tender adult reminder about what childhood was like.

17. Johnny Got His Gun (1971) Statistically speaking, it’s a fair bet that more people know Johnny Got His Gun from the film clips incorporated into the video for Metallica ’s “One” than have ever actually seen the film, let alone read Dalton Trumbo’s original 1938 novel. Although it only took two years to inspire a radio adaptation of the book (starring James Cagney, no less), another 31 years passed before it transitioned from printed page to silver screen, and even then only because Trumbo wrote and directed the film himself. The challenge: How to visually represent a novel about a World War I soldier who wakes up in a hospital bed to discover that, although his mind is in perfect working order, he’s now a deaf, blind quadruple amputee without teeth or tongue. Using his advantage as the author of the original source material, Trumbo’s cinematic take on the story of Joe Bonham—played in the film by Timothy Bottoms, with the character’s thoughts and memories presented via flashbacks and fantasy sequences—proved so creatively successful that it won the Special Jury Prize at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.

Books on film: Why Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” novels resist adaptation | The Economist Why Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” novels resist adaptation Jul 26th 2016, 16:52 Tweet TERRY PRATCHETT once described life as a film you’ve walked into ten minutes late, and whose plot you have to work out from the clues. It was announced last week that, after more than 70m books sold, translations into 37 languages and merchandise ranging from board games to cookery books, one of his “Discworld” novels was to be made at last into a feature film. A newcomer to Pratchett would be forgiven for feeling a little baffled: how could such a commercially successful series, matched only by “Harry Potter” and “Twilight”, have avoided the siren call of Hollywood for so long? The will-they-won’t-they saga of bringing Pratchett to the big screen is almost as long as the 41-strong novel series itself.

In 1992, Pratchett was approached by an American production company about his novel “Mort”, a dark comedy about the skeletal, scythe-wielding figure of Death taking on an intern. (A fan-made graffiti painting of Death, based on the artwork of another book, “Reaper Man”, is above.) “We’ve been doing market research and the skeleton bit doesn’t work for us, it’s a bit of a downer,” Pratchett recalled the producers saying, “We love it, it’s high concept—just lose the Death angle.” The film went no further. Over the years, the hopes of fans have been raised and dashed. Earlier this year, concept art surfaced which showed that Disney had been considering another “Mort” adaptation in 2010. The book that is now being adapted by the Jim Henson Company—“The Wee Free Men”—is a gleefully impious tale of a nine-year-old witch and her drunken, rowdy Scottish pixie clan. It has already been through the workflow at least once; Sam Raimi, an American director, was attached to it in 2006.

The project fell through when it became clear that everything the book was against—following dreams, finding princes, neat endings—was exactly what film-makers had in mind for it. One explanation for the Sisyphean back-and-forth might be just the fiercely anti-Disney, sceptical bent to Pratchett’s writing. Any book which has as its guiding credo the line: “If you trust in yourself…and believe in your dreams...and follow your star…you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy” is going to find it tough to maintain its integrity once the studio has made it commercially palatable. Or so we might have thought. But Hollywood is rapidly turning subversion of its own tropes into its chief box office asset. “Frozen”, a Disney princess story about the bond between two sisters that made more than $1 billion worldwide, cheerfully rewrote all the accepted kid-friendly rules about dreams and true love. It has ushered in an irreverent revisionist wave from “Into the Woods” to “The Lego Movie” that would comfortably incorporate a strong heroine uninterested in romance, much like “The Wee Free Men”’s Tiffany Aching.

The irony and subversion powering Pratchett’s writing has never had a better time to flourish in Hollywood. Yet even with this change, Pratchett’s works resist easy adaptation. Much as Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” long resisted a film version (and even then produced a mediocre result), Pratchett’s authorial voice is hard to convey on the screen. Pratchett in particular relies on paratext—a novel commenting on being a novel. Reading him is to be endlessly second-guessed. The brilliance of a quip like “Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life” lies in its subversion of expectation, but in a particularly literary way. Its force depends on the eye crossing the page, not a viewer watching images on a screen. However hard Hollywood now wishes to deconstruct its own clichés, it has a limited capacity to convey such metafictional tricks; it is hard to see “Discworld” working without some kind of narrator figure who could perform this function.

Dealing with the authorial voice, especially one given to diversions, paratext and self-awareness, has always been a problem for Hollywood when attempting to adapt satirical novelists. “A Cock and Bull Story”, which features film-makers struggling to adapt Lawrence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” (an 18th-century novel so prone to digression that the narrator takes several volumes to reach his own birth), skilfully manoeuvred the problems of adapting a book about writing a book. They made a film about a film failing to get made, and in doing so, ingeniously translated the spirit of the original. Pratchett’s writing, too, is often about writing itself. If “Discworld” has a central theme it is that all the lies we tell ourselves, the stories and fantasies, have value in and of themselves. A talking skeleton can’t be written out merely because kids will be scared of it: the whole point is that humans young and old have always used phantasms and ghouls to talk about, and face, their fears. Pratchett's version of Death—humane, decent, occasionally befuddled—offers the hope that there is in fact nothing to fear out there in the dark.

This "stories about stories" theme of “Wee Free Men”, and any adaptations that follow it, will be hard to render accurately on film. The signing of Rhianna Pratchett, the late author’s daughter, to write the script may yet provide hope; she, at least, is unlikely to sacrifice her father’s vision to the gods of market research. In “Moving Pictures”, the tenth book in the Discworld series, a power-mad director announces that he wants “a thousand elephants” for one of his films. After a Herculean effort, someone actually manages to fulfil his insane request. Having moved a herd of elephants across several continents, he finds that the movie business has moved on by the time he arrives. Getting to the point where Pratchett’s impish style might find a place in Hollywood has been a long journey—we can only hope it will have time to find its voice before the trend passes. Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that the graffiti pictured is of a character named “Mort”. It is, of course, “Death”. Sorry.

Question: The 2006 film "A Cock and Bull Story" was about an attempt to film what book?
Answer: Tristram Shandy