All posts tagged: Nick Hornby

gatsby

10 Movies…That Are Insane Adaptations of Famous Books (To Prepare You For the New ‘Great Gatsby’)

Published by Brian Boone

I haven’t seen The Great Gatsby yet, but I can tell already that it just doesn’t add up. The production seems to have missed the point—it’s not about the glitz and glamor and pop songs—it’s about the death of dreams and the danger of being a complete and total sellout, ironically enough. Here are 10 other literary adaptations that were kind of out of control. His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass (2007) When you adapt a children’s fantasy novel about goin’ off to kill God, you kind of have to tone that down for the multiplex audiences, and put a lot of polar bears on the promo materials. The Great Gatsby (1974) It’s happened before! Gatsby (Robert Redford) is a leering douchebag who is still in love with Daisy, and we can’t understand why, because Mia Farrow plays her as a hysteric gasbag. And while Luhrmann’s adaptation seems to favor color and sparkles, this movie is just a sea of white and a celebration of nostalgia—ironic for a book known for its color symbolism and …

Popdose 2010: Will Harris’s Top Albums and Songs

Published by Will Harris

I don’t even know why I’m here, frankly. I think it’s pretty well documented that all I do these days is write about television and interview people for Bullz-Eye ’til the cows come home. I’ve barely had time to write my columns for Popdose. (In case you’ve forgotten, “Hooks ‘N’ You” and “You’re the Voice” are mine.) Once upon a time, though, I used to be a music critic, dammit…and once you’ve had opinions about music, you’ll always have opinions about music. As such, here are my thoughts on the albums and songs that grabbed me this year. This may be the first time I’ve actually written about most of them, but you can damn well be sure that I’ve spent plenty of time listening to them. Favorite Albums 1. Tom Jones: Praise & Blame It’s a pretty consistent tradition that my #1 slot on my Best Albums list of any given year belongs to an artist whose career I’ve followed for quite some time, but Sir Tom earned his spot fair and square. Kicking …

Death by Power Ballad: Foreigner, “Out of the Blue”

Published by Rob Smith

“It’s always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.” — Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape) I dislike Rob Sheffield for many reasons—his writing comes off as pompous, hipper-than-thou snark (and that’s just for the stuff he likes); his greasy, perpetual grad student look smacks so obviously of affectation; his voice on those VH1 shows sounds like he’s gargling bathwater with a tampon shoved up each nostril; and he made music writing safe for a whole army of people just like him (read Spin lately?). I also dislike him out of insane jealousy; in spite of all the above, he wrote one of the most moving books about music and music fans I’ve ever read. The bastard done really good. Go to Amazon now and purchase a copy, or borrow one from your local library, that most wonderful of socialist institutions. A song I’d relegated to the leaky, cobwebby space in the back of my mind recently came to find me. I’d been in …