With nowhere to go in the evenings, I’m finding myself watching more TV and movies than ever before—and as we all know, the best TV and movies are based on books. Yes, it’s true. So which to pick? And which to pick that I can watch with the subscriptions I already have? In case you’re asking yourself the same questions, I looked through the current offerings of Hulu, Netflix, and HBO GO (not Prime Video, sorry, save for one exception) and picked a few of my favorites, in no particular order. What are you watching next? (And what did I miss?) As ever, add on at will in the comments.
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Based on: The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith
Streaming on: Netflix
A truly perfect film based on a truly perfect novel—though this adaptation manages to improve on the book’s ending, which is fairly incredible. This is also fairly good viewing for anyone who wishes they were hanging out in a villa somewhere (though less good viewing for those isolating with friends they don’t trust). –Emily Temple, Senior Editor
My Brilliant Friend (HBO, 2018-present)
Based on: The Neapolitan novels, by Elena Ferrante
Streaming on: HBO GO
As previously reviewed: I can tell you: it is slow. But its slowness is part of what makes it great television. And for the record: I found all four actresses to be phenomenal, especially for being untrained, but also probably because of it. Gaia Girace, who plays teenage Lila, is particularly striking; it’s hard to look away from her when she’s on screen, which surely tracks with Ferrante’s vision.
The show, overall, is very loyal to its source material—it had to be, lest the fans revolt—and so let’s be real: the book is also slow. I don’t mean this as a criticism. My Brilliant Friend is slow, particularly at the beginning, because it is dealing with the minutiae of children’s lives. It has lots of characters whose names and ages and relationships to one another you keep forgetting. It is a thorough, detailed account of the consciousness of one girl living in relative poverty. Like Knausgaard’s My Struggle, with which Ferrante’s works are often paired as an example of “autofiction,” the slowness is part of the point. It’s what makes it feel like life. . . .
We’re not used to slow TV. We’re not used to slow anything anymore. And this show is so slow it has subtitles. I mean, when’s the last time you saw a television show with subtitles? I know: it’s hard to read a television show. That’s not what we come to television for. How are we supposed to also scroll through Twitter or our group text, because one screen is never enough, if we have to read the show we’re watching? Reading is for books! Well, yes. But you might want to bone up on your TV-reading skills. My Brilliant Friend is HBO’s first ever series to be shot in a language other than English—it was produced in conjunction with Italy’s RAI network—but it won’t be the last: they have an Israeli drama, filmed in Hebrew and Arabic, as well as a Spanish-language comedy in the pipeline.For me, there is something deeply refreshing about the kind of attention the subtitles require from the viewer, a kind of attention not demanded by any other popular show on TV right now. You have to keep looking, even though there are a lot of long shots where no one says anything, and where in the book, you’d been hearing Elena’s thoughts. You also have to spend time being fully in the world of the neighborhood, lush in its bleakness, and of Ischia, lush in its lushness. You begin to notice things—facial tics, background space, the lighting. While watching, I thought often of Luca Guadagnino’s recent adaptation of André Aciman Call Me By Your Name. The adaptations faced a similar struggle—how to adapt a novel that relies heavily on the complex interiority of an outwardly quiet first-person narrator—and a similar solution: rely on silence, atmosphere, and acting. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Based on: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, by Stephen King
Streaming on: Netflix
So Andy Dufresne gets sent to prison for the murder of his wife and her lover (“You strike me as a particularly icy and remorseless man, Mr. Dufresne.”) Her lover was a golf pro. And Andy did sit in his car looking at a gun, thinking about something (killing them? killing himself? we’ll never know) before throwing the gun into the river. So he’s sentenced to life, of course, and when they give you life, that’s exactly what they take, don’t you know. First night in Shawshank with the other “fresh fish” and BOOM, the sadistic guard Hadley beats to death some poor fat lad who won’t stop weeping. Red (Morgan Freeman), who has been in there for nearly 20 years at this point, bets on Andy to crack that first night. (“He looked like a stiff breeze would blow him over”) Andy doesn’t make a sound though. Oh, Andy is big into geology, polishing rocks, making them into chess pieces etc. Red is a man who knows how to get things, and so he gets Andy a rock hammer. Now warden Norton, he is one nasty piece of work. Big bible thumper, but also corrupt as all hell. “Put your trust in the lord. Your ass belongs to me.” Andy and Red become fast friends. But oh shit, now Andy has become the target of Boggs and his gang of rapists. Anyway, the rest of Red’s crew (nice fellas mostly) don’t really know what to make of Andy, don’t know how to reconcile his high breeding with the brutality of his crime. How does he endear himself to them you ask? Well, they’re all up on top of the prison one hot afternoon, tarring the roof, and Andy overhears Hadley nattering on about how he got some inheritance but the IRS are gonna take most of it etc etc and Andy, ballsy guy that he is, walks up to Hadley and says “Do you trust your wife?” and Hadley says “That’s funny. You’re gonna look funnier suckin’ my dick with no fuckin’ teeth,” which, as a line, in fairness. Anyway, Hadley gets pissed off at this line of questioning and tries to throw Andy off the roof, but just before he can Andy says “because if you do trust her there’s no reason you can’t keep all that money,” or some such. He agrees to do the paperwork required for a one time cash gift to your spouse (which is tax free, apparently. Or at least it was tax-free in 1940s Maine) in exchange for, wait for it, two beers a piece for every man tarring the roof. Red: “We sat there and drank with the sun on our backs and felt like free men. Hell, we could have been tarring the roof of one of our own homes.” Very nice moment. But let’s not forget about the raping, because that’s still going on. Until Hadley beats the bejesus out of Boggs. Red: “Two things never happened after that. The Sisters never bothered Andy again, and Boggs never walked again.” So what else what else… Oh, Andy starts writing to the prison board to get them sent books (Andy’s a big believer in reading and education). He writes letters every damn day until those books arrive and he builds a library. Oh, he calls it the Brooks Hatlen memorial library, or some such, because Brooks was an old inmate who had a pet crow (by the name of Jake I believe). Brooks got paroled but had been institutionalized, you see, and couldn’t keep pace with the world outside. So he hanged himself in the halfway house he was living in. Very sad. Andy also breaks in to the warden’s office at one point to play some lovely classical music across the PA system for the inmates. That earns in a spell in the hole, but I think we can all agree it was worth it. What else what else . . . –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-40-best-literary-adaptations-to-stream-right-now/
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