Fabulous Five Friday: Comic Book Adaptations

I’m sticking with a movie theme for some reason this month. These aren’t necessarily the absolute Top Five adaptations, but they are five that I’ve enjoyed immensely and I think do great service to their source material.

The Netflix take on the MCU: Jessica Jones and Daredevil (2015-ongoing)

I’m putting these both together to 1) make room for another title I really want to include, and 2) because they’re successful for similar reasons. “Dark and gritty” is quickly getting worn out in the world of comic book adaptations, but these titles get it right. Both titles give us imperfect, complicated heroes and two of the most terrifying villains on screen to date. They’re similar in that they’re both different kinds of crime shows, and yet different enough that one doesn’t feel like a rip-off of the other.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

I mentioned the dark and gritty problem above, and this is one adaptation that completely bypasses it for humor and even goofiness without sacrificing character or emotion. The characters and the story are just so much fun, and yet there are moments that made me tear up. Bonus points for making Guardians a top-tier franchise after playing on the B-lists for so long.

Deadpool (2016)

Another one that is just plain fun. Dirty, filthy, meta fun. Ryan Reynolds was born to be the merc with the mouth and I’m so glad he fought for as long and hard as he did to get it made. There have been a lot of arguments as to whether it was really “necessary” to go R-rated; I think it’s a refreshing way to expand comic adaptations out of the paint-by-numbers PG-13 place they’ve ended up lately.

The Dark Knight (2008)

You can’t talk about recent adaptations without talking about Dark Knight, and specifically Heath Ledger’s Joker. I have watched this film probably a dozen times and he blows me away. Every. Single. Time. It’s the rare sequel film that “overstuffs” with two villain plotlines and does it well, surpassing the first film by leaps and bounds.

Persepolis (2007)

The non-superhero black sheep of the list. The original graphic novel memoir by Marjane Satrapi is translated almost exactly to the screen—the animation mimics the art, and very little gets cut or moved around. It’s an absolutely beautiful book that makes for an excellent film.

Any good ones I missed?

Most film adaptations are disappointing in some way or another. Some are mostly minor clips and snips (Harry Potter) while others are egregious (I'm looking at you, Practical Magic). Here are a few I think are not only good, but are arguably as good as or better than the books and stories they sprang from.

That's right, you heard me.

Brokeback Mountain

The original short story is spare and bleak, capturing the voice of the tough cowboy ethos that shapes it. The film captures much of that same tone while making the emotional impact of the story about a thousand times more visceral and gut-wrenching. Heath Ledger was so amazing.

The Shawshank Redemption

Stephen King is a great storyteller. That being said, the film is on a completely different level from the source material. Some of this is due to strong direction, but most of it, I think, is thanks to the cast and their incredible portrayals of the characters.

The Neverending Story

Michael Ende hates the film version of his book. Sorry, but he’s wrong. It takes a different direction from his work, but it uses the perfect amount of source material and originality to make a movie I still watch again and again, even if the effects don’t really hold up.

The Princess Bride

Like Shawshank, the film is actually better than the book. Rob Reiner is a genius and no one will ever be able to replicate the miracle that is The Princess Bride.

Interview with the Vampire

Anne Rice wrote the screenplay for the adaptation, which may explain why it is so much more faithful to the book than the execrable Queen of the Damned (which I still regularly hate-watch, don’t judge me). The moodiness of the setting and the miraculous way it is both a "typical" Hollywood movie and yet something much weirder is kind of magical. It's beautiful to watch and holds up pretty well considering it’s over 20 years old. I think some of the casting is a bit odd, but Brad Pitt is great and tiny baby Kirsten Dunst is amazing.

Fabulous Five Friday: Five Great Essay Collections

 Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion

There is no denying that Didion is the queen of the essay form. Bethlehem is one of her earliest collections, but it’s still my favorite. Though some might find the essays rooted in the current events of the 1960s a bit dated, her personal essays are timeless. Some of her best known pieces come from this collection, like “On Keeping a Notebook,” “On Self-Respect,” and “On Going Home.”

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

Anne Fadiman is a book person after my own heart, only smarter and more articulate. Each essay looks at a personal experience with reading, like learning to love reading by watching her parents, or her family’s obsession with finding errors in their books. Her whole family is bookish and weird and really fun to read about.

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

This collection is not so much a direct analysis of feminism as it is simply a collection of Gay’s pieces from all over the internet. She focuses so much on feminism, directly and indirectly, that the title is still pretty spot-on. The essays cover everything from the day-to-day struggle of being a POC in academia to what it’s like to compete in a Scrabble tournament. Her pop culture criticism is both incisive and highly personal, which something I strive for in my own criticism and she makes for a fantastic teacher.

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

This collection got a lot of buzz when it came out, and for good reason. Jamison writes highly personal essays on the experience of empathy in a style that seems meandering but always comes together in perfect but surprising ways.

Paris Was Ours: Thirty-Two Writers Reflect on the City of Light edited by Penelope Rowlands

Writers—some famous, some less so—write about visiting or living in modern Paris. The different voices and experiences each capture something unique about the city and about what it’s like to be in a famous place that contains so many contradictions. Like with all anthologies, I found some more interesting than others, but none were disappointing.

Fabulous 5 Friday: Books About Clothes and Style

I’m a sucker for style books. Not books about fashion, per se, but about personal style and the relationships we develop with clothing. Humans are highly visual and clothing is one of the many heuristics we use to make judgments, intentional or not. Anyone who says they don’t care about style or only wear what is comfortable is still making a style choice; it’s an unavoidable part of living in society. Humans value self-expression and we communicate through clothing in conscious and unconscious ways. If you doubt this, just think about how you feel when you go out dressed to the nines versus running to the store in your sweatpants. You feel different, don’t you? Whether one of those experiences is “better” than the other is up to personal preference, but they certainly are different. Personally, I find this sort of clothing-as-language phenomenon fascinating and I like to take some time, usually once or twice a year, to look at my closet and see what I’m saying to the world and what I would like to change. I also just really enjoy clothes.

These books are the “guides” (really more like inspiration) I use when my closet cleaning mood strikes. Each must be taken with a grain of salt; they are almost all written by people who work in the fashion world and are privileged financially and socially, and they tend to have a severe lack of body diversity. But they are all fun and helpful in their own, somewhat limited ways.

The Little Black Book of Style by Nina Garcia

You may know Garcia from her regular stint as a judge on Project Runway. She has been an editor and/or fashion director for several big name fashion magazines, most famously Elle and Marie Claire, so she certainly has her fashion credentials. What I really appreciate about Garcia’s take on the genre is that she is straightforward about the difference between having personal style versus simply following fashion. She may work in the fashion world (and come from a stylish, wealthy background) but she appreciates the little personal touches that make a wardrobe something genuinely expressive. She may namedrop like any fashion insider, but she doesn’t let that overshadow a genuine love for self-expression and self-respect. Plus, the watercolor illustrations by Ruben Toledo are fabulous.

The One Hundred by Nina Garcia

Perhaps this is cheating, but I had to give the second choice to Garcia as well (she’s written 4 books so far). The One Hundred is less about the “how to” and more a fun reference guide for the items that have proven themselves as staples time and time again. She gives advice on what pieces are worth investment versus which ones can be cheap fun while also giving little mini-history and pop culture lessons on various iconic items like trench coats and cashmere sweaters. There are a few chapters that are misses (in my personal opinion) but everyone’s list of “must haves” will vary and she acknowledges that, too. This one is also illustrated by Ruben Toledo.

I Love Your Style by Amanda Brooks

Amanda Brooks, much like Nina Garcia, comes from a pretty well-to-do background and has a lot of connections in the fashion world. Even so, she has a decidedly eclectic sense of style, which she illustrates (literally and figuratively) in this style-manual-cum-memoir. The photographs alone are worth the price of admission, but she has some pretty good advice to give, too. Anyone who has made as many questionable clothing decisions as Brooks has to have something worthwhile to teach. The beginning of the book is devoted to her life as a budding fashionista, while the rest is a sort of reference book for particular “types” of style and how that translates in all sorts of different ways for different people. I love looking at the vintage pictures of people like Cher and Bianca Jagger for inspiration, I just wish there was more body diversity.

The Sartorialist by Scott Schuman

Anyone with even a passing interest in clothes or street style blogs knows of The Sartorialist. While everything in the book can be seen online on the original blog, the book itself is like a little trove of amazing images that you can peruse when the mood strikes or you need a little inspiration. Unlike Garcia and Brooks, Scott Schuman isn’t focused on capturing one vision of personal style, but of celebrating it in all kinds of ways and on all types of people. There may still be some snobbery here and there, but it’s overall a supremely open-ended way to look at beauty and self-expression.

The Thoughful Dresser by Linda Grant

This is a book that looks at the personal ways we are affected by clothes, rather than offering any sort of style advice. “The only thing worse than being skint (poor) is looking skint.” Until I read this line in The Thoughtful Dresser, I had never fully processed the way I think about clothes and social class. We all know that clothing can be used to assess wealth on some level, but we forget that clothing can also allow for a sort of dignity that may be otherwise unavailable to someone who is struggling. Every time someone complains that a “poor” person spent money on new clothes instead of some other necessity, I think about this. Grant looks at clothing as a means to various ends: she looks at a woman “saved” by clothing after surviving a concentration camp, at women who were able to turn shopping into an act of independence, and at the many ways we use clothing as a marker of identity.

I haven't been posting these regularly like I had originally planned. My workload has been increasingly unwieldy lately, plus I've taken on some freelance. I'm hoping this new installment will be a renewal and I will be able to start posting weekly again.

(I got the term “genre kryptonite” from Book Riot. It is essentially defined as a genre/type that is a personal weakness, i.e. something that you just can’t resist. The term confused me at first, as I associate kryptonite with something that can destroy you, but that’s not how it’s being used here. These are also a combination of genres and subgenres.)

Nonfiction books about Jane Austen. I have a Jane Austen shelf. I must have read at least 30 nonfiction studies of her work by now, and I never get tired of it. Of all my reading habits, this one makes me miss my college library the most. Since I’ve already done a F5F for Austen I won’t bother listing titles. The link if you would like suggestions: Fabulous Five Friday debut.

Georgian/Victorian/Gilded Age fantasy. Fantasy is often focused on medievalism and pre-modern tropes, which is great but overused. I love that fantasy set in the 19^th and early 20^th century mashes together my favorite historical period to study with magical elements, and the best examples often have that delicious social complexity that makes novels from that period so enjoyable for me. My ultimate favorite in this category is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

Books about feminism and gender. This covers an immense array of possibilities across fiction and non-fiction. I’m especially partial to essay collections and literary studies that use gender studies and feminism as the key reference point. The representative title for me currently is Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist.

Short story collections and anthologies. I’m especially partial to short speculative fiction and “weird” stories, often by authors like Kelly Link, Nalo Hopkinson, Hannu Rajaniemi, Jane Yolen, Alison Nutting, Neil Gaiman, and many others, though I’m also partial to themed anthologies that give you a lot of variety. I’ve collected way more than I’ll ever read, but I’ll keep getting them anyway. My current favorite (most likely since it’s the most recent collection I’ve read) is Nalo Hopkinson’s Falling in Love with Hominids.

Books about Parisian and overall French culture. Francophilia is not rare, but I still find my attraction to these books a bit weird. I’m especially drawn to those “how to be French” lifestyle books, even though they really offer nothing more than surface-level, unrealistic aspirational stuff. But I find something fascinating in looking at a culture that is so incredibly focused on assimilation, and yet cares so little for people’s opinions. One of my favorites is What French Women Know by Debra Ollivier, since she combines her outsider view with an insider’s access (she is an American married to a Frenchman).