An unwritten rule of cinema is that great books very rarely make great movies.
It’s not inevitable that a film adaptation of a literary classic will turn out to be a stinker, but plenty do: take Roland Joffe’s disposable and tawdry version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Brian De Palma’s notorious butchering of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and my personal nadir, Peter Jackson’s mangling of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.
There are ways of side-stepping the curse of the literary adaptation, of course, a recent example being Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a picture that kept the title and the location of Martin Amis’s novel but stripped away most of the flesh of the story to make way for Glazer’s chilling vision.
Photo: AP
RaMell Ross’s astonishing Nickel Boys is something else altogether.
Ross’s fiction feature debut — he previously directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening — is adapted by the director and co-writer/producer Joslyn Barnes from the Pulitzer-prize-winning 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead, and it’s an extraordinary achievement. A version that is true to the book, honoring both its spirit and its structure, while also managing to be a genuinely groundbreaking cinematic work. This is a sublime piece of film-making.
The central character in the story is Elwood (Ethan Herisse), an early 1960s African American teenager in racially segregated Tallahassee, Florida. Raised by his doughty, loving grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), Elwood is on track for academic excellence.
Although still a high school student, he has been accepted onto a program of classes at a college in a neighboring town. On his way to the first of these, fate deals a devastating blow. Elwood accepts a ride in a flash car driven by a sharply dressed Black man, a smooth-talking dandy dripping with gold and good humor. But the vehicle is stolen and Elwood soon learns that his plea of being in the wrong place at the wrong time isn’t going to cut any ice with the cops.
He is shipped off to a state-run reform school, the Nickel Academy, where the brutality and cruelty experienced at the hands of the racist guards is mitigated, in part at least, by the close friendship he forms with another boy, Turner (Brandon Wilson).
It’s a wrenching, enraging story. But what gives the film its savage potency is Ross’s radical and daring formal approach. This is a picture that on a fundamental level demands that we relearn our way of looking.
POV POIGNANCY
The most immediately striking of Ross’s techniques is his decision to shoot the film almost entirely from the point of view of its two central characters, Elwood and Turner.
The early part of the film, a patchwork of frayed memories from Elwood’s early years, evokes a child’s eye drawn to sparkles and shiny baubles. The camera tracks the infant Elwood’s gaze, ensnared by a gold bangle on his mother’s arm. Through the wisps of overheard conversation that float through the room like cigar smoke, we grasp that this is a goodbye party for Elwood’s parents, and is likely to be the last time he sees them.
This POV device is disorientating at first, but it soon becomes clear just how effective it is. We experience the sickening challenge of the bullet-eyed stare of a white man locking onto the lens and looking for a reason to attack; we share Elwood’s instinctive response, to drop his gaze to his shoes and avoid confrontation.
In another bruising glimpse of casual discrimination, an elderly man with a smirk of triumph and the tacit backing of a cop prods his walking stick just below the camera lens and into Elwood’s guts. Our glimpses of Elwood’s face, caught in reflections in the polished chrome of an electric iron, or the glass of a shopfront, are treasurable moments.
Most notably, there are two moments of unbearable poignancy featuring Ellis-Taylor, laying out the truth for her grandson, that we watch through his eyes. Another devastating encounter is a chance meeting in a New York bar between the much older Elwood (Daveed Diggs) and another former Nickel boy, Chickie Pete, played by Craig Tate who delivers the most blistering single scene performance of the past year.
The POV shooting style would not be nearly as effective, however, were it not for the quality of the craft elsewhere. The sound design, for example, is a delicate, intricate tapestry that is every bit as meticulously detailed as the production design. And the scrapbook collage of archive footage is crucial to the film’s potency — a device that adds weight and context to the story, and which tightens the threads between timelines that extend almost up to the present day. A masterpiece.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
Despite the intense sunshine, we were hardly breaking a sweat as we cruised along the flat, dedicated bike lane, well protected from the heat by a canopy of trees. The electric assist on the bikes likely made a difference, too. Far removed from the bustle and noise of the Taichung traffic, we admired the serene rural scenery, making our way over rivers, alongside rice paddies and through pear orchards. Our route for the day covered two bike paths that connect in Fengyuan District (豐原) and are best done together. The Hou-Feng Bike Path (后豐鐵馬道) runs southward from Houli District (后里) while the
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Mirror mirror on the wall, what’s the fairest Disney live-action remake of them all? Wait, mirror. Hold on a second. Maybe choosing from the likes of Alice in Wonderland (2010), Mulan (2020) and The Lion King (2019) isn’t such a good idea. Mirror, on second thought, what’s on Netflix? Even the most devoted fans would have to acknowledge that these have not been the most illustrious illustrations of Disney magic. At their best (Pete’s Dragon? Cinderella?) they breathe life into old classics that could use a little updating. At their worst, well, blue Will Smith. Given the rapacious rate of remakes in modern