I will cop to saying that Ishiguro is on my short list of greatest living writers in English and that Remains of the Day (also based on an Ishiguro novel) is one of my two or three all time favorite novel to film adaptations, so I'm not without baggage of my own in this debate.
I'm a little suspicious, though, about people who make films about their own friendships.
There's not a whole lot about Emilio Estevez's The Way that doesn't ring true. Given the fact that the film tackles some of life's deepest emotions and largest themes--grief, love, faith, community--that's quite a compliment.
A repeated hypothesis of Ferguson and his team was that such chutzpah comes from sustained periods of never being challenged--even as to obvious, verifiable facts--once one has been granted "inside" or "expert" status.
Perhaps it is anathema for me to say, being an academic, but there is something refreshing about reading a film book that eschews theory, that is interested in documenting the production history of a beloved film rather than deconstructing it and is more interested in telling us what the people who made the film said than it is in explaining what they (must have) meant.
If it invites but doesn't quite earn comparisons to Michael Mann's Heat, well, at least it has its sights set in the right direction.
While I am on the subject of The Switch not really being a romantic comedy and not really being a Jenifer Aniston film, I may as well go ahead an just say that I think this film has the single worst movie poster I can remember.
I was able to accept this not as a blueprint for how to live my life but as one woman's story about how she chose to try to live hers and things that she learned while doing it.
Kenneth R. Morefield, Peter Waldron, and Cynthia L Morefield podcast about critical backlash.
The Disappearance of Alice Creed has all the ingredients of a horror-porn exploitation film, but its genius lies in withholding enough information from us that while we think we know what we are watching, we aren't entirely sure.
