I also recently finished reading The Last Letter From Your Lover, and The Emperor's Children. I'm about 1/4 of the way through Anna Karenina. (You can follow me on Goodreads here.)
On Sunday, we finally watched the Leonardo DiCaprio version of The Great Gatsby.
All of these pieces of art were lovely (except Annie Hall, I hated Annie Hall), but after the credits rolled on Gatsby, I just felt this overwhelming sadness.
I'm tired of watching movies and reading stories about infidelity. Do we, as a culture, have this idea that staying with your partner, fulfilling your vows, loving one person until death do you part is boring? I don't think it has to be boring. I don't think it has to be cheesy or sappy either, ahem, Nicholas Sparks.
It makes me sad that, off the top of my head, the only happily married book or movie characters I can think of are Arthur and Molly Weasley in the Harry Potter series.
I know that books and movies are a means of escaping your own life for a bit, but why do we want so badly to escape into lives that are even more messed up than our own? What is the appeal of escaping into someone else's life, when theirs is in shambles from their poor decisions or the decisions of their significant other?
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My friend Sara and I went to see Divergent yesterday. We both really enjoyed it, despite both of us having major problems with/reservations about the book (though I hear many of my problems with it get answered in the third book; I just got book two from the library). Shailene Woodley was a much better actress than I expected her to be, and made the character of Tris much more likable than she was in the book. We agreed that it was probably one of the best book-to-movie adaptations we'd seen, with so little detail left out.
On the way back home, we were talking about Woodley's next role in The Fault in Our Stars, which is coming out this summer. I really, really want to see it. Because the author was involved in the production, I figure he couldn't ruin his own book by making the movie not as good, right? Sara didn't want to see it at all, because she loved the book so much and couldn't bear the thought of the movie not living up to the book.
Which makes sense. It's a good, hard read. I've read it twice, and both times Matt has walked in on me clutching the book to my chest and sobbing. It makes you think about life, and death, and it seems like a daunting task to take it from words into pictures. I just hope they can do justice to such a beautiful book.
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Have you seen Divergent? What is your favorite book-to-movie adaptation? Are there any topics that you're tired of reading about?