I love movies! And I love books! So, whenever I see I movie where books play a major role in the story, I’m quite pleased. I loved The Ninth Gate with Johnny Depp. :eek: And 1984’s The Neverending Story is a childhood favourite of mine.
So, I’ve decided to start a thread that I’ve been putting off for some time now. I’d like everyone willing to list other films where books play a major role in the story. I’ll mention a third film to get the list started, then everyone else can join in.
Check out Wonder Boys, with Michael Douglas and Toby Maguire - its’ all about writers and the writing process. Douglas is a middle aged college professor who’s been working on his next novel for years; Maguire plays an undergaduate with enormous writing potential and a rather loose relationship with the truth. It’s very funny and pretty isightful, too.
I’ve never seen it, but Wonder Boys sounds like a great addition to the list, Alessan. And I thought about adding the Evil Dead trilogy in my starting list, jjimm, but I was curious about how long it would take someone else to mention them. I didn’t think it would take long.
As for The Princess Bride, while it’s a wonderful movie, I don’t think the bookends of the film - a grandfather reading to his grandson - really make it a good choice for the list. You could compare it to The Neverending Story, where the boy reading the book has a rather direct influence on the actual story.
I’ve never seen The Hours or The English Patient. But I thought of another film - Finding Forrester.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Fahrenheit 451
Expand this to magazine writers, and you can include Almost Famous.
A scrapbook was a pivotal plot device for Mean Girls.
Well, the act of writing itself is seminal to the goings on of Barton Fink, even if the written word is a screenplay and not a book. For similar reasons I enjoyed the letter-writing sequence in The Color Purple and the oral meta storytelling of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Of course, I’m cheerfully ignorng the OP’s book requirement, so feel free to ignore this paragraph.
I enthusiastically second Throw Momma From The Train. “The night was sultry.” Bwah ha ha ha ha ha haah!
Alex and Emma. The main characters are writing a book and it switches from them writing it to the actions in the book. Very well done and one of my favorite movies.
The documentary Stone Reader is a fascinating film about the filmmaker’s search for the author of an out-of-print novel. It deals both with the process of writing and publication and with the effect that books can have on their readers.
Some great suggestions all around. Especially SpoilerVirgin’s Stone Reader. That sounds like an excellent film. And Alex & Emma was a film I wanted to see, but never got to. I don’t rent movies (I love the theatre experience), but I’ll have to start. Although I can see Alex & Emma showing up on TV soon enough. 84 Charing Cross Road sounds good as well. And, even though I never saw it, I should have remembered Adaptation.
La Lectrice (1988), known in English as The Reader. Constance, played by Miou-Miou, is reading aloud to her boyfriend in bed. The book is about Marie, who hires herself out as a reader of books and poems to anyone willing to pay to listen. Marie is also played by Miou-Miou, so one needs to pay attention to see which level of the story is operating at any given time especially since Marie’s personality reflects the particular book that she is reading and the client to whom she is reading it. Still, it’s worth it for anyone who has a love of the written and spoken word.
If Indiana counts, then so does Lord of the Rings (it does open and close with someone writing a book). Of couse the whole series is based on JRRT translating the Red Book of Westmarch.
“Knowing I love my books, he furnish’d me, From my own library, with volumes that I prize above my dukedom. …”
Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books is an adaptation of The Tempest that takes as one of its major visual themes the numerous volumes Prospero has brought to his island: the storyline is interrupted periodically for excerpts from these books, and the text of the play itself is sometimes whirled across the screen.
I don’t think this is on DVD yet, and I have an old rental VHS copy that is a pretty wan visual experience compared with seeing it in a theater (which I did twice when it came out). There are often two or three competing layers, and it’s pretty hard to pry apart on a small screen. Further caveats: the movie is usually puzzling to anyone not a least a little familiar with the play, John Gielgud (Prospero) voices over all the lines even though other actors play the roles on screen, and the movies contains hundreds and hundreds of naked people (of all ages and body types) posed in various painterly tableaux. This freaks some people out.
