The English Patient Film Compared with the Novel
The Novel:
The English Patient is a fantastic novel and is one of the few truly great novels written in the last century. The author, Sri Lankan Michael Ondaatje, switches wonderfully between several scenes: the desert, the Villa San Girolamo in Tuscany, Italy, Dorset in England and Cairo. Each one of these perfectly crafted scenes is brought into being in an exciting and thought provoking way. The book is centred on four main characters: Hana, a Canadian nurse who has taken it upon herself to be separated from the other medical staff and remains behind in a mine-laden villa to tend to just one patient, the English patient; Kip, a Sikh who was,
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The desert in the film is done very well and deserves a lot of credit. I feel that it is portrayed very well. The desert seems to be very much the main scene in the film, with the plot focussing on this aspect of the novel. However, in the novel, the desert is by no means the most important scene; it is in fact the Villa. I personally don't seem to mind this too much and I feel that it is no injustice to the book. I also think that the desert portrays namelessness and nationlessness very well. Although the scene where they are having a Christmas lunch in the dessert is not particularly special and does not really add anything positive to the film, it does portray the theme of namelessness and nationlessness very well, as the idea of having a Christmas lunch in the desert with a man dressed in a father Christmas suit is very obscure.
The scene at El Taj, where Almàsy tries to borrow a jeep from the English is done brilliantly. It is a huge contrast to the rest of the film, as it reminds us that although there is this feeling of nationlessness and namelessness, there is still a war going on, and this comes before anything. So when Almàsy goes to el Taj, we are brought back to reality about how there I this war that is going on. I personally believe that should
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The book Ordinary People was told in the perspective of a depressed teenage boy and his father. The theme of the story is that things happen but it’s not always your fault. Conrad has survival guilt. He feels like it’s his fault that Jordan died, so he takes it out on himself. Calvin feels responsible for Conrad's accident. The book and the movie have a lot of similarities and differences.
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The Polanski film Death and the Maiden is a wonderful and intelligent interpretation of Ariel Dorfman's human rights problem play. Polanski has produced, in this film, an exceptional piece of direction, in which his own personal, emotional input is evident. The main theme of the play is an extremely personal one for both playwright (and scriptwriter) and director. Both Dorfman and Polanski have had to face and flee the horrors of dictatorship and human rights violations: Dorfman in Chile, under General Augusto Pinochet, and Polanski in Poland under the Nazis. But despite this similarity in past experience, significannot
Trainspotting presents an ostensible image of fractured society. The 1996 film opens, famously, with a series of postulated choicesvariables, essentially, in the delineation of identity and opposition. Significant here is the tone in which these options are deliveredit might be considered the rhetorical voice of society, a playful exposition of the pressure placed on individuals to make the "correct" choices, to conform to expectation.
When comparing the book Twilight, written by Stephanie Meyers, with the movie Twilight, screenplay written by Melissa Rosenberg and produced by Catherine Hardwicke, there are multiple visual differences between the two. Some important scenes were changed or even omitted from the original text, leaving noticeable gaps in the movie’s plot. There are big and important differences, which are obvious, while there are also less important differences between them such as names and small missing details. The most important differences between the book and movie were when Bella tells Edward she knows he is a Vampire and when Edward saves Bella from Tyler’s van in the beginning. In reading the book before seeing the movie
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For the past few weeks, I have analyzed the storytelling style of the book and film Big Fish. The biggest difference I noticed was that I thought that the book focused more on the telling of Edwards inane stories, while the film was mostly centered around character development and relationships. I also think that while the book was very euphoric and felt like a children’s bedtime story, the film took a much more mystical and mysterious route, where a childish feel was dormant. Lastly, I thought that in the book the author just threw all the stories together and told them
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The Notebook, written by Nicolas Sparks, can be named one of the best American romantic novels. The book portrays every trait in a guy or girl would desire to have in a significant other. According to Nicolas Sparks, “it is a celebration of how passion can be ageless and timeless, tales that moves us to laughter and tears and makes us believe in true love all over again”.
FILM NOTE -- Sarah's Key, directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance, Niels Arestrup, Frederic Pierrot
In recent years, it has become popular for many of America's great literary masterpieces to be adapted into film versions. As easy a task as it may sound, there are many problems that can arise from trying to adapt a book into a movie, being that the written word is what makes the novel a literary work of art. Many times, it is hard to express the written word on camera because the words that express so much action and feeling can not always be expressed the same way through pictures and acting. One example of this can be found in the comparison of Ken Kesey's novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the film version directed in 1975 by Milos Forman.
When the Sun was A God and With Fire and Sword are two films directed by Jerzy Hoffman, respectively in 2003 and 1999. The films were based on the historical events, illustrating the common matters of individuals’ desire to overpower others with wealth, power, and control in order to take over the throne and land. Both films took place in different settings – Piast dynasty era and Khmelnytsky Uprising era – but they do share some similarities and differences. The reason for why I chose these two films to compare and contrast was due to the fact that they share certain aspects that set the films alike and apart from one another. The aspects are: greed, friendship, loyalty, women, and love.
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