(no subject)

[thedeadparrot]

So one thing I think that really defines a tragic story to me, is when you can read it/watch it/experience it, know that it will all end horribly, and still desperately hope that it will not. You can see the ways in which everything will fall apart, and all you want is for something different to happen this time, just this once, even though you know it's not going to happen.


(This message is brought to you by Atonement, which still problematically falls under the "girls/women lie about rape all the time!" genre. Everyone is very pretty in it, though?)

Comments

[zulu]

It is a very beautiful movie, isn't it? All those long, long shots. And because I'd read the book first, I didn't mind the ending so much. But man, when I got to the end of the book? I wanted to throw it against the wall. "And all that wasn't true after all!" ARRRGH. And of course the girls-lie-about-rape thing, ugh ugh ugh. I actually think it's better in the movie than in the book, because I think it's more obvious that Lola has been assaulted by what's-his-face. In the book the scenes are spread apart so although the events are clear, they're not immediate. In the movie, the dude is all sneery-face and her wounds are visible and she's obviously scared of him.

[thedeadparrot]

I'm reading the book after seeing the movie (though I was spoiled for the movie anyway), but yeah. I'm impressed at how good the movie is at internalizing everything. A lot of the nuance is lost, of course, but they took the risk of trusting their actors to get most of the feelings across without that much dialogue. I think it ultimately pays off.

[zulu]

Apparently the book is meant to be a stylistic history of modernist and post-modernist fiction? Or that's what I was told, anyway. It begins with Briony having black-and-white motivations for her characters, Evil and Good, like older novels; then, during the thirties, it has a modernist sort of stream-of-consciousness going on; and finally, it gets into the post-modern idea of many narrative voices, all of them and none of them the 'truth'. I don't know if it was meant that way, but it's an interesting reading.