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| Oh look, a waif! |
We had similar trepidation last year about the adaptation of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, an incredibly voice-driven novel with a remarkable narrator and truly inventive flashbacks of the father (we cried for days after the Sixth Borrow chapter... we're not totally heartless). The movie trailer, however, indicated that the original story had been effectively neutered into a feel-good spin on a monumental human tragedy, which is already a pretty odious concept in our book. Apparently, the critics agreed, and Extremely Loud was panned.
If the trailer is any indication, The Book Thief is shaping up to be an equally disappointing, toothless adaptation of the original. The darkness afforded by the book's narrator, Death himself, is completely absent in the trailer. The voiceovers indicate that the morals will be as cheesy as they are ill-defined ("Words will inspire her! Courage will guide her!") and the trailer itself pretty adeptly telegraphs the fact that this movie has nothing to brag about. Cheeck out the title card "From the studio that brought you Life of Pi," which means nothing, plus the boast that the "book was called brilliant," which says nothing about the movie itself.
In our first podcast we talked about how much we hate uplifting human interest war stories, and this looks poised to scrape the sugary bottom of the simpering barrel. We're calling it now -- this movie will be this year's universally-disliked Oscar grubber you'll find in your bargain bin at Wal-Mart next June. We're reading the book instead.
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| Not pictured: childlike innocence, boundless hope, and the triumph of the human spirit. |
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