Tag: film

Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 6—Yukio Mishima

by Sean Gill

Posted on by Zack Ravas

“I wrote ‘Patriotism’ from the point of view of the young officer who could not help choosing suicide because he could not take part in the Ni Ni Roku Incident. This is neither a comedy nor a tragedy but simply a story of happiness…To choose the place where one dies is also the greatest joy in life.” —Yukio Mishima, in a 1966 postscript to his short story, “Patriotism”  Army Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama sits on a Noh stage with his wife, Reiko (Yoshiko Tsuruoka). The only real ornamentation in the spare white room is an enormous kakemono banner, bearing the Chinese […]

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Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 2—Richard Wright

by Sean Gill

Posted on by Zack Ravas

1951 Richard Wright is “Bigger Thomas” “I became convinced that if I did not write of Bigger as I saw and felt him, if I did not try to make him a living personality and at the same time a symbol of all the larger things I felt and saw in him, I’d be reacting as Bigger himself reacted: that is, I’d be acting out of fear if I let what I thought whites would say constrict and paralyze me…The writing of it turned into a way of living for me…I kept out of the story as much as possible, […]

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Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 1—Stephen King

by Sean Gill

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Why? Simple self-promotion? For fun? Sheer ego? “Because no one else can?”         To wrest back the measure of control which a solitary typist enjoys? Is it fear of living merely a life of the mind? The need to act out a fantasy? Or is it a public therapy, an exorcism of demons? Typically an author’s on-screen role in an adaptation is that of a background artist: blink and you’ll miss Kurt Vonnegut (a pedestrian in Mother Night), Amy Tan (a house partier in The Joy Luck Club), Chuck Palahniuk (an airline passenger in Choke), or John le Carré (a […]

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Q&A with Mick LaSalle: ‘Dream State’ & the American Soul

by Zack Ravas

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Local readers likely know Mick LaSalle as the longtime film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he’s worked since 1985. What they may or may not know is that he’s also an accomplished author: we featured his short story “Fresh Kills” in Issue 108, and he has several books to his name, including Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood, about the actresses who rose to fame during that brief window of time before Hollywood censorship took hold; and The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses. His latest book, Dream State: California in the […]

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‘Sleeping with Strangers’ by David Thomson: In Great Company

by Zack Ravas

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Reading the latest book by acclaimed film critic David Thomson, Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire (348 pages; Vintage), now out in paperback, one can’t help but suspect the book’s thesis may have changed over the course of its writing. A mixture of memoir, criticism, and film theory (“Why am I giving you history and memoir?” Thomson asks early on. “Because you cannot get close to movies without grasping the mindset in which they were received. When you go to the movies, you take your history with you. The fantasy is about you.”), the book was prompted by […]

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It Came From the Fiction Aisle: ZYZZYVA Recommends Literary Horror Adaptations

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Posted on by editor

If you’re anything like the ZYZZYVA team, you occasionally like to spend Halloween curled up in front of your screen of choice for a frightening film (or two…or three). From Rosemary’s Baby to The Exorcist, we can’t help but observe the fact that many – if not most – of the iconic horror movies of the last fifty years have drawn their source material from the written word. In celebration of the holiday, we thought we’d recommend a selection of some of our favorite or under-appreciated horror movies adapted from works of fiction for you to check out. Pin: A Plastic Nightmare (1988) – Andrew Neiderman’s […]

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