watch movies based on books and read books that inspired the movie

Frannie witnesses a couple’s clinch in the back room of a bar and when the woman later turns up dead and dismembered in Frannie’s neighborhood, Frannie begins a relationship with the cop investigating the case. But she has a secret: she knows he’s the guy who had a clinch with the soon-to-be-dead girl.

That is a breezy summation of a very complex and erotic mystery novel. Frannie is an English teacher who studies language and writes about dialect and vocabulary, so she has a tendency to analyze everything she hears and reads. The movie did a good job portraying her obsession with words, but where the book is unfliching when it examines the inequities, on both sides, of heterosexual romances, the movie turns the coolly erotic book into a passionate romance. I hope it is also not a spoiler to say that the two endings are vastly different.

If you like setting, lighting and composition, you will enjoy this movie which is drenched in rich reds, earthy browns and tawdry oranges and yellows. Compare this one to the desert setting of the noir After Dark My Sweet if you like mysteries with your movies. But the movie is not as compelling as the book which is a short, intense meditation on the erotic and violence.

I read the book first and then saw the movie last night. The movie was very good, true to the bleak, realistic stance of the movie. It is true that he begins to love his wife more after she is dead, but it is also true that he becomes a stronger, tougher person after she has died and he sets out on his quest to find her murderers.

The Justin of the book is a bit more cunning and savvy than the Justin of the movie, but much of that was explored in interior monologue in the book. Without voiceovers or a strange conversation about his mediocre spy abilities, you would not buy him suddenly understanding how to escape a country without a passport. The Justin of the movie is also a bit updated and he doesn’t have heart palpitations at the thought of touching a button on a computer.

If your stories need sweet, happy endings, skip both, unless you can settle for a resolution with personal justice.

not really the books the movies are based on, but urban legends dispelled by Snopes.com about the movies.

called “Based on a True Story”, that talks about movies and the stories that inspired them and exposes how the movie told the truth or fudged it for dramatic purposes. I got the idea for this goal from that book.