Guilty pleasures revisited

[shewhomust]

If there is, after all, such a thing as a guilty pleasure, it might be going to the cinema in the daytime: that always makes me feel delightfully decadent. Especially on a day like today, when the winter sunshine was so clear that despite the cold I wished I'd brought my camera - the strength of the light and shade made the city look spotlit, ready to have its portrait taken.

Another time, though, because today we were going to see A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom's "adaptation" of Tristram Shandy. I loved the book, which is not always a recommendation for a film, but the film doesn't make the usual mistake of extracting the more dramatic parts of the narrative and filming those. Instead, it translates the structure of the book (in which a man is constantly distracted from telling his life story) into a movie about the many distractions from the business of making a movie. (The film's very ingenious web site similarly has that rare thing, an entertaining Flash introduction, about the construction of the web site). Too many film adaptations of books make me wish I'd stayed home and read the book instead; this one co-opts that feeling, functions willingly as an advertisement for the book and so makes my desire to re-read the book not a criticism of the film but a mark of its success.

Comments

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

The only odd thing about that website is that it hides almost completely that this is a British film. Or for those of us who saw the film, have they hidden almost completely that this is an American film? You decide.