Shelf To Screen
Two heavily heralded movie adaptations open this Friday. Getting the most press, of course, is the second Hunger Games movie, Catching Fire. People magazine not only calls it “richer and deeper than last year’s The Hunger Games,” but also has the effrontery to claim it’s better than the book, “adding heft to a story that felt on the page like it was biding its time before the finale.”
Opening in a limited, Oscar-qualifying run (to expand in January) is Philomena, based on The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, by U.K. journalist Martin Sixsmith which recounts the author’s efforts to help the title character, played by Judi Dench, find the son she had been forced to give up fifty years earlier. The book was published here for the first time as a tie-in. Reviews have been stellar (a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes), with Dench considered an Oscar nomination shoe-in.
Two tie-ins arrive next week.
It was touch and go as to whether Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street could be pared down from its 3-hour first cut in time to hit theaters on Christmas Day, but it looks like the editing process is now complete. Based on the memoir by Wall Street trader Jordan Belfort, and called “the most audacious movie about Wall Street ever made” by the Wall Street Journal, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Jonah Hill, Kyle Chandler, Jean Dujardin and the Absolutely Fabulous Joanna Lumley.
The trade paperback tie-in (RH/Bantam) arrives next week; an audio read by Boardwalk Empire‘s Bobby Cannavale, (RH Audio) is listed for release on Dec 17.
Homefront Movie Tie-in Edition, Chuck Logan, (Harper Paperbacks; trade pbk and mass market editions)
Easily confused with the TV show Homeland, the movie Homefront is based on the novel by Chuck Logan, adapted by Sylvester Stallone, starring Jason Statham, and releases Nov. 27. The Hollywood Reporter calls the script “ham-fisted” but says the movie is “sufficiently silly and low-down to be entertaining on a certain marginal level.” Hogan’s earlier movel, Prince of Thieves was adapted as The Town by Ben Affleck.