Review: "Normal People" on Hulu

By Spencer Coile 

To adapt a work of fiction is to play with fire. I can only imagine that nimbly capturing the spirit of the original text while imbuing it with new levels of creativity is no easy feat. Discourse surrounding literary adaptations usually focuses on how the movie or series fails the original text - either it doesn’t cover everything sufficiently (like The Time Traveler’s Wife, a personal tragedy), it overstays its welcome (The Handmaid’s Tale), or an abundance of creative liberties are taken (recently Little Fires Everywhere). Comparisons are easy to make, and book lovers are quick to critique. 

On its surface, Normal People, now streaming on Hulu, masquerades as a straightforward adaptation. Born from Sally Rooney’s novel of the same name, it follows Connell (Paul Mescal) and Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones), two Irish secondary students who forge a connection despite their uneven social standings. The novel,  and now the BBC/Hulu limited series, chronicles their years-long relationship in all its complexities...

Click to read more ...

Review: "The Little Stranger"

by Chris Feil

Adapted from the Sarah Waters novel, The Little Stranger is a ghost story in a lower register, more a delicate gothic character study than a stone cold chiller. Think of it like a Shirley Jackson tale turned inward, where the separation of class and circumstance draw the demons from within and without. It’s not a horror film to satisfy the jump hungry or the thrill seekers, but one that slowly grips you from behind and one you will unexpectedly recall vividly.

The staples of such subtle genre pieces are all present: a once lively mansion lost to decay, the somewhat reclusive family that remains, the weight of a dead child covering it all in a fine layer of dust. A local doctor Faraday pays a visit to Hundreds Hall to tend to the maid of the Ayres family. Though its residents have worn along with the estate, Faraday is still taken by the memory of when he had visited it as a boy, on the very day that the Ayres daughter Susan became deathly ill.

Click to read more ...

Interview: Nathan Nugent on Cutting those Beautiful Performances in "Room"

Nathan Nugent won an Irish Film & Television Academy statue for his first collaboration with Lenny Abrahamson. "Room" is their third film together.Editing is often referred to as "cutting," arguably a holdover word from the days where film edictors actually had to slice frames apart and then tape them back together. But cutting, figuratively, remains one their undeniable jobs, pruning away at hours and hour of footage for a given movie. It's a puzzle and a discovery as they work at assembling a single identity for a movie that has so many different identities in its unfinished form. Though the days of film editors hunched over their moviolas is over, the job's creative challenge is the same when hunched over the computer.

Moviegoers are probably quickest to note film editing in the action genre, where the speed of cutting tends to make the "invisible art" ever so slightly more visible. But it's a complicated art regardless of genre to create cohesive and rhythmic visual and narrative and performative throughlines with a series of spliced together images and multiple takes.

So we were excited to sit down with rising film editor Nathan Nugent, who has been making a name for himself in films that you might safely call 'actor's pictures.' Room is Nugent's third consecutive film with Lenny Abrahamson who he met through a film producer with whom Abrahamson went to college. As with the birth of many classic collaborations in any industry it was a matter of networking, opportunity and good timing. Or as Nathan humorously puts it.

"He had said to Lenny, 'Oh, you know, you should try Nathan. And I was available and very cheap.'"

What Richard Did (2012), Frank (2014), and Room (2015) followed in close succession. 

NATHANIEL: You've been working with Lenny Abrahamson a lot but you didn't start out in dramas. You started in documentaries. 

NATHAN NUGENT: My wish in film school was always to work in drama. But looking back, I’m glad of that -- that I took that documentary route --  because it certainly had an effect on how I see footage.

NATHANIEL: In what sense?

Nugent's answer and more on Room's beautiful acting after the jump...

Click to read more ...

"Room" and The Case for Jacob Tremblay

Kieran, here with a second look at SAG nominee Jacob Tremblay's work in Room.

My antennae were attuned for several things this past weekend while watching Lenny Abrahamson’s Room for the second time. I’ll say up front that searching for the power of Brie Larson’s accomplished, already heralded performance as Ma was not one of them. That was received on first watch and, frankly hadn’t faded from memory even a little. A rewatch only confirmed the potent emotionality of Larson’s work and it’s fortunate that work this exemplary is being so universally recognized as such—that isn’t always the case. Among other things, I was watching for Jacob Tremblay’s performance as Jack, Ma’s doting and mystified son.

Full disclosure: I often find praise heaped upon juvenile performances incredulous. Like many, I found myself fighting tears (and losing that fight) several times throughout my first viewing, most often during Tremblay’s scenes. The grimness of the initial scenario and the bond between Ma and Jack on the script level had my suspicions raised. Was Tremblay’s performance itself eliciting the emotional response or is it solely because of what’s already built in to the architecture of the piece?

This was my question going into Room for the second time. [More...]

Click to read more ...

After Room Comes The Ring

Jason from MNPP here with a bit of exciting news today - Lenny Abrahamson, the director of this year's Oscar hopeful Room, is lining up his next project and it sounds fascinating. Based on the non-fiction book A Man’s World: The Double Life Of Emile Griffith, which was just published this past September (anybody read it?), it'll tell the story of the titular boxer, described by all with words like "gentle" & "innocent," who nonetheless beat his opponent Benny “The Kid” Paret into a coma (and death 10 days later) in a televised match after Paret called him "maricón" (Spanish for approximately "faggot") during a live weigh-in.

Thing is Griffith was in fact bisexual, and Abrahamson says that "he never seemed conflicted about his sexuality; indeed he found joy in it." Until he was called out in public, apparently. (Then again, it being 1962 when all this went down I suppose he had his some good reasons for his hesitation.) Anyway this sounds like a top-notch leading role for an actor of color, as well as a stellar entryway into discussions of race and sexuality and masculinity, all mixed up, that don't usually get foregrounded like this. This quote's choice:

"You look at how closely his two worlds intersected,” Abrahamson said. “Just how different are they, when the sport is such a celebration of the male body and the beauty of its athleticism. Go one step further, and inject the tiniest sense of sexuality, and people are up in arms. Griffith himself once said a quote that just floored me. ‘They forgave me for killing a man, but they couldn’t forgive me for loving a man.’ That to me was so powerful and such a crazy contradiction. And it is still relevant today."

Sounds to me like Abrahamson already has a pretty strong grasp on the material; let's all cross our fingers that he can use his current heat to get the film together properly. Who would you cast in the lead? Any suggestions?