Book vs. Movie: The Real Animal House/Animal House

I must admit, I have not seen Animal House (1978) as many times as I should have. My dad was always a big fan, but I’m guessing he didn’t want me to watch it considering the questionable moral content. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have wanted me to read one of the Animal House writers Chris Miller’s book The Real Animal House (2006).

The story is that Miller wrote a bunch of stories about his fraternity experiences at Dartmouth for National Lampoon (yes, it used to be a magazine). At some point the NL folks wanted to make a movie so Chris, Harold Ramis and Douglas Kenney pooled every story they ever experienced or heard about fraternities and created Animal House, one of the greatest comedies of all time.

Well, Miller’s The Real Animal House collects all of his memories and stories. Part autobiography, part oral history, Miller switches from first to third person as he gets to college and becomes Pinto. The shift is a bit distracting, but once you really get into the tales of Adelphian lore, you don’t really notice it anymore.

And let me tell you, there are some gross stories in here. If you thought the movie had some risque moments, you might not want to check the book out, but if that kind of stuff doesn’t bother you, I really recommend this book. Aside from being highly entertaining and funny, it’s really interesting to be transferred to the wild world of fraternity life in the early 60s as rock and roll was really taking root and students were trying everything they could to make the cold New Hampshire winters pass in the at-the-time all male world of Dartmoth. I’m not saying this was necessarily how all college life was in the 60s, but it’s a cool look. Plus, it reminded be a little of my fraternity days back at Ohio Wesleyan. We were never as crazy as either the book or movie fraternities, but there are definitely some characters and moments that echoed my experiences, though, luckily I never got stuck with a flattering nickname (we pretty much called everyone by their last name all the time, with a few exceptions).

Anyway, if you haven’t seen Animal House you really should. It’s the rare movie that doesn’t really have one central character and yet you never really seem to notice. All the actors deliver stellar performances and there’s something new to laugh at every time you check it out. I also recommend viewing the special features, one of which catches up with the characters, the other interviews many of the actors a few years ago about their experience with Animal House, even Kevin Bacon.

I picked the book up at my local Barnes and Noble in hardcover for around 6 or 7 bucks and I highly recommend it if you can find it for that price, otherwise the hardcover is $24.99. I tend not to buy new, full price hardcovers because I’m pretty cheap, but the low price, the subject matter and the super cool cover (Google it, uploading pics is a pain) all encouraged me buying it and I recommend you do too.

Halloween Scene/Book Vs. Movie: The Stepford Wives (1975)

Sometime this year I picked up a copy of The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin at the fantastic Building 19 (one of the best things about New England, as I’ve talked about before). I’m a slow reader but the book was pretty short, so it didn’t take me too long to get through it. And it was a good read. I was impressed with how much Levin was able to fit into (I think) less than 120 pages. Not really knowing more than the basic “something’s weird about the women of Stepford, they’re TOO good at being house wives” idea, I was pleasantly surprised as I read through and found a building sense of dread as Joanna loses friends and a little bit of her mind as all the women around her either are or are turned into the “perfect housewife.”

It also hit on one of the themes that I personally find to be the scariest in fiction/life, which is the main person telling the truth, but no one believes them (as I mentioned in the my riveting review of Dying to Belong). You really get a sense of that as Joanna’s liberated female friends start joining the clean house club.

Since it’s been a while since I’ve read the book, I’ll talk more about the movie which watched yesterday, though the movie follows along pretty closely. In the movie version, which was written by the insanely brilliant screenwriter William Goldman, Joanna and her family move from New York City to Stepford, CT. Everything’s fine at first, though you start to see some cracks in Joanna’s relationship with her husband. It seems like he’s been making a lot of big decisions without really consulting with her, like moving and joining up with a men only men’s club in Stepford. As she meets the other women of Stepford, Joanna comes to realize that they’re all the poster children for good housekeeping, worried more about the appearance of their homes and children than any real social issues. This doesn’t sit well with Joanna or her new friend Bobbie who also recently moved to Stepford. Both women try to find other like-minded women in town, but come up short with one exception, Charmaine (played by Ginger from Gilligan’s Island!). As time goes on, Charmaine goes from free wheeling to kitchen cleaning, which completely freaks Bobby out. Both Bobbie and Joanna try to get their husbands to move out of Stepford because they’re genuinely scared about what’s going to happen. Then Bobbie “goes away for the weekend” with her husband and comes back Stepford-ized. Now Joanna’s really freaked out. She goes to an out-of-town shrink who tells her to go home, get her kids and get the hell out of Stepford. When Joanna does, she’s met with hostility and her kids are missing. From there she’s making a mad dash around town to find her kids, but comes face to face with the real reason why the women of Stepford seem so perfect. SPOILER, they’re robots.

It’s actually cooler than that might sound. The set-up is that a bunch of the men in the men’s club are genius scientist type guys. One is an animatronics expert from Disney World, one’s a famous artist, one studies voices and tricks the women into recording a list of words for his “private study.” There’s also a number of companies like General Electric and other computer companies. It’s actually kind of a brilliant plot element, as dreamed up by Levin in the book and put on screen by Goldman. The men even go so far as to steal Joanna’s dog and keeping it in their clubhouse (a huge old mansion), presumably to get the dog to become familiar with the Joanna-bot. There’s some really great touches in there that you can thank both Levin and Goldman for.

I can’t remember the exact ending of the book, but in the movie SPOILER Joanna comes face to face with her robot replacement and the robot (presumably) kills her. The robot then takes her place and you end on the bleakest shot of beautiful women walking around the supermarket you’ll ever see. It’s just so hopeless, which is the real gut punch for me. There’s also such a sense of betrayal that feel towards Joanna’s husband. He seems like an okay dude in the beginning, but then he signs up with these dudes who want to kill his wife and replace her with “the perfect wife.” Jeez, man, you’ve gotta be stone cold to do something like that. The whole point, from the men’s perspective, is that you work hard, you might as well have the perfect woman who will have awesome sex with you, clean up after you and never give you any problems. Or have independent thought. I think it’s a cool commentary on the time that it was written but can still be read and watched with an eye towards today.

The movie was longer than I expected, almost two hours, but it does a great job of doing the slow build. I can see how it might be boring for some people, but, even though I hadn’t seen it before, I knew what to look for because I had read the book (like when the men are meeting at Joanna’s house and one of them draws her, the drawing is like the kiss of death, once you’ve got it and have finished the word recordings after living there for four months, your donezo). So it was kind of like I had seen the movie. All the major beats are still there. I think the main differences are the seasons, I remember there being snow in the book, but it’s rain in the movie. And like I said, I can’t remember the specifics of the book’s ending, though Joanna does end up getting replaced.

The big question for me is, what do they do with the original wife. Do they get flat out killed? Do their memories get erased? These dudes are basically mad scientists who run a small town, so they’ve got a good amount of options. I’d also like to see someone like Dirty Harry roll into town and offer up some justice. Maybe I’ll start writing my script treatment…

Oh, one last thing, I forgot to mention initially. According to IMDB Goldman’s original intent for the movie adaptation would be that all the women would be walking around looking like Playboy Playmates, wearing short shorts and what not. So how did the movie end up feature what look like Southern belles in big floppy hats and long dresses? Well one of the producers agreed to finance the film only if his wife could get a role in it. And, while she was pretty, she wasn’t the type that Hef would put on the cover of his mag, so they had to switch the WHOLE look that they were going for because this woman looked homely. I know they just remade this move with Nicole Kidman a few years ago (haven’t seen it), but I’d like to see a remake that’s more of a period piece, set in the 70s with this look. Mostly because 70s Playmates were super hot! Who’s with me?!

Book vs. Movie: The Virgin Suicides

So, remember when I said that I didn’t read books too often? Well, after finishing Slam I looked at the growing stack of novels I have next to my bed and picked one kind of at random. It was Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993). Someone had put it on the free table at work and I snatched it up, not really knowing anything about it.

So I started reading it and was hooked instantly. It only took me about three dedicated days of reading to get through it (so about a week, real time) and it was one of the most moving, ghostly reading experiences I’ve ever had. The story follows the Lisbon Family as all five of the daughters kill themselves over the span of a year, the first of which Cecilia, predates her sisters by a full year. What really grabbed me about the telling of the tale was that the narrator speaks in the “we” and comes from the point of view of one of the boys in the neighborhood who fell in a sort of love with the girls and desperately wanted to help them. After they killed themselves, the boys spend the rest of their lives (at least to the point we find them in the book), trying to figure out why these five young women took their lives.

Another element of the book that got me was the way that Eugenides packed each page with so many characters, either actually involved in the story or just mentioned by name. Almost all of them seem incidental at first, but come back into play later on. The great thing about it, though, is that I never felt lost. Maybe I didn’t take much stock in such casually mentioned characters, but they all came back in one way or another, which really makes the reader feel like a part of these boys’ (and later mens’) club of failed avenging heroes.

The sense of not being able to penetrate another person is one that I’ve often thought about. Even the girls’ own father who lived under the same roof as them had no idea what was going through their heads as they planned an elaborate suicide plan that involved a number of the neighborhood boys. No matter how hard you try to decode someone’s thoughts and actions, you just can’t get inside their heads. The best you can do is gather accounts to try and put the puzzle together.

Sophia Coppola’s adaptation (1999) is pretty faithful to the book, but not necessarily to the version in my brain. But I think a lot of that comes from the basic differences between books and movies. For instance, in the book, you don’t really get a sense of the girls as individuals until the narrator does which is well into the book. Of course, in a movie, you can obviously see the differences. Though, I do have to give props to the casting folks for making the non Kirsten Dunst sisters all look pretty similar and easily confused.

Aside from Dunst who nails the promiscuous and evocative Lux to a T, the casting didn’t quite do it for me. I didn’t get the same feel from Kathleen Turner’s mother character as I did in the book, even though she looks almost exactly like how I pictured her. The way its conveyed in the book, it’s hard to not feel like she’s majorly to blame for the girls’ suicides. Again, I’m thinking this is because we actually see her reactions to things like her first daughter’s suicide.

I was really most curious to see how Coppola and Co. handled the first person plural narrator of the book in the film (he always uses “we” and never deviates). She got Giovanni Ribisi, an actor I’ve liked since I randomly rented Suburbia at the age of 16 and developed a pretty deep man crush on. Anyway, he does a great job, but isn’t utilized enough to really set the same tone as the book. The lack of entrenchment along with the neighborhood boys leads to more focus on the girls, which almost completely removes the element of being an outsider looking in on them which is central to the novel. Heck, it’s hard to be an outsider when you’re right in their living room as they play Chinese checkers and watch wildlife shows.

One of the downsides to watching such a faithful adaptation so soon after reading the book (I finished it Saturday in between and after errands I didn’t want to run) is that you know when everything’s coming and what’s going to happen. I didn’t feel that way watching Virgin Suicides. I was mostly curious to see how Coppola translated such an artfully crafted novel onto the screen. And kudos to her for doing such a great job. The movie never lags (it’s just over an hour and a half) and, while you’re nowhere near as firmly entrenched with the neighborhood kids as you are in the book, you still develop an attachment for these girls and desperately want to help them, even though it’s a forgone conclusion from about the second line of the script that they’re not going to make it.

All in all, I enjoyed both works, though obviously I liked the book better. I can’t recommend the book enough to people. Heck, if it only took me a few days to read, you should be able to get through it quickly. But, if books aren’t your thing, I also give the movie my thumb’s up.