2023-12-20 15:19:37
*Beware of spoilers. Although the use of the word “caution” next to the word spoilers seems like an exaggeration to me*
Of course I saw you leave the world behind About as soon as it came out. After all, this is a star-studded film (Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Maharsala Ali, Kevin Bacon) directed by Sam Ismail and with the duo Michelle and Barack Obama involved in its production. The film is an adaptation of an apocalyptic bestseller written by Roman Allam and set in Long Island. In other words: Nancy Meyers in Apocalypse – the genre I always knew I needed.
Having said all that: It’s an okay movie. Will you enjoy it? If you try to enjoy yourself, you probably will.
Why am I bothering to write regarding him? Oh. While watching I felt that something was being missed. With all due respect to the content of the end of the world, it seems unlikely that this cast and this production company would choose to be involved in a film that *all* What is in it. At this point I did the only logical thing to do: I downloaded the book to audiobook.
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Everything that was missing in the movie was waiting for me in the book:
Friends, I don’t know how to say this, but a very important thing was omitted in the transition between the book and the movie. Ruth’s character: In the movie Ruth is a twenty something year old girl. In the book, Ruth is a sixty-year-old woman. The landlady, the one who wears ironed linen clothes and keeps ironed linen napkins in the kitchen drawers. who wants the guests to leave her house as soon as possible, but behaves as she believes a good person should behave.
In other words: the most interesting character (in my eyes, in my eyes) went down in the edit.
Along with Ruth, other details that make a book or movie interesting have disappeared: the objects The beautiful and inviting house in the book was replaced by a rich-almost-generic, cold, multi-angled Netflix house (by the way, it’s a real house in Old Westbury and you can see more pictures of it here). The clothes are uninspired and real literary events like the list of groceries that Amanda buys in the pompous supermarket of the rich town are completely gone.
In the book, the list covers half a page:
With all due respect to Apocalypse, it’s things like this shopping list that make this book what it is.
And those who do not understand something so simple and basic, can easily find themselves turning a main character from a sixty-year-old woman to a twenty-year-old girl.
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Shopping lists that a person makes on vacation, knows each of us who has been on vacation in a rented house somewhere else, embodies everything we think regarding who we are and everyone we want to be. This list teaches us right at the beginning of the book everything we need to know regarding Amanda and her aspirations of belonging and everything Roman Allam thinks we need to know regarding bourgeois America in 2020.
Here is the list:
She bought yogurt and blueberries. She bought sliced turkey, whole-grain bread, that pebbly mud-colored mustard, and mayonnaise. She bought potato chips and tortilla chips and jarred salsa full of cilantro . . . organic hot dogs and inexpensive buds and the same ketchup everyone bought. She bought cold, hard lemons and seltzer and Tito’s vodka and two bottles of nine-dollar red wine. She bought dried spaghetti and salted butter and a head of garlic. She bought thick-cut bacon and a two-pound bag of flour and twelve-dollar maple syrup in a faceted glass bottle like a tacky perfume. She bought a pound of ground coffee . . . those fancy crackers you put out when there were guests, and Ritz crackers, which everyone liked best, and crumbly white cheddar cheese and extra-garlicky hummus and an unsliced hard salami and . . . packages of cookies from Pepperidge Farm and three pints of Ben & Jerry’s politically virtuous ice cream and a Duncan Hines boxed mix for a yellow cake and a Duncan Hines tub of chocolate frosting with a red plastic lid, because parenthood had taught her that on a vacation’s inevitable rainy day you might while away an hour by baking a boxed cake. She bought two tumescent zucchini, a ag of snap peas, a bouquet of curling kale so green it was almost black. She bought a bottle of olive oil and a box of Entenmann’s crumb-topped doughnutsa bunch of bananas and a bag of white nectarines and two plastic packages of strawberriesa dozen brown eggs, a plastic box of prewashed spinach, a plastic container of olives, some heirloom tomatoes wrapped in crinkling cellophane, marbled green and shocking orange. She bought three pounds of ground beef and two packages of hamburger buns, their bottoms dusty with flour, and a jar of locally made pickles. She bought four avocados and three limes . . . it was more than two hundred dollars, but never mind
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To enjoyment. To the enjoyment of vacations. To the enjoyment of any moment in life, I guess. Enjoying a moment is a victory
(things sixty-year-old Sharot knows how to say at the end of the world)
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Here’s the trailer, so be it.
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#Nancy #Meyers #Apocalypse