Page to screen: The highs and lows of 2023
The final curtain of the year 2023 is upon us. December, as always, brings with it cold weather and cosy retrospection. Once the awards season kicks into gear, there is the inevitable temptation to look back at all the books, films and shows that kept us company. The page-to-screen pipeline kept pumping out the adaptations. The triumph and tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, as documented by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin in American Prometheus, got the Christopher Nolan treatment, going from the book shelf to the box office without losing an atom of credibility. The joy and uncertainty of adolescence, as captured by Judy Blume in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, got the Kelly Fremon Craig treatment, only gaining in its resonance. Getting a blockbuster biopic like Oppenheimer and a teeny triumph like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret in the same year reflects the wealth of source material that remains readily available for cinematic translation.
For history buffs and film lovers alike, there is no denying Oppenheimer was the marquee cinema event of the year. Its unlikely pairing with Barbie became a pop-cultural totem of sorts. Nolan put a biography of over 700 pages into a particle accelerator to get to the core of a subject full of contradictions. Just because this was a retelling of history, not one of his high-concept sci-fi movies, didn’t mean he lost his maximalist tendencies and love for nonlinearity. The film repeatedly turns in on itself. Watching the building of the A-bomb and its fallout in parallel forces us to see how creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin. The intense gaze of a haunted Cillian Murphy become a window into a soul tormented by visions of a hidden universe and trapped in a prison of his own guilt.
If Oppenheimer didn’t convince the sceptics who place a much-too-high personal premium on the printed word, Killers of the Flower Moon surely did. Indeed, who better than Martin Scorsese could challenge the assumptions of those who take for granted the cultural superiority of the source text over the film? Rather than merely retrace the facts and figures from David Grann’s 2017 book, Scorsese and his co-writer Eric Roth take the investigation into an American genocide and reshape it into a story about a marriage blighted by greed and white entitlement. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart and Robert De Niro’s William Hale embody the inherent gangsterism of cutthroat capitalism. Think Jordan Belfort and Jimmy Conway, only far more insidious.
Capitalist expansion takes no prisoners. Even today, the big oil companies treat tribal sovereignty as an obstacle but hardly as an insurmountable one. In the face of such a threat, how can a historically marginalised community of people get the interlopers off their land? In Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, inspired by Swedish author Andrea Malm’s 2021 manifesto, Michael (played by indigenous actor Forrest Goodluck) picks fights with the local oil riggers working near his home on the North Dakota reservation. When picking fights with oil riggers does about nothing, he turns to more radical tactics. Given his expertise in making home made explosives, he is recruited by a rag-tag cadre of eco-activists plotting to bomb an oil pipeline in Texas.
To combat the existential threat of climate change may necessitate an escalation in tactics, argued Malm. Non-violent demonstrations won’t cut it any more. Malm called for the “intelligent sabotage” of the fossil-fuel infrastructure poisoning our world. His book, however, wasn’t a how-to guide for blowing up a pipeline, but why we may need to. The polemical tone was meant to adrenalise people into action, not fire up anarchists to blow shit up. Spurred by this moral case for property destruction as a climate justice strategy, Goldhaber presents not a documentary of curious provocation, but a fictionalised complement to a clarion call.
A powder-keg of an idea gets the treatment it merits — as a ticking-clock heist thriller. Flashbacks reveal each of the activists has personal reasons for joining a radical movement, be it a family tragedy or oil spills poisoning their land and water. Goldhaber is conscious of the likely disapprovals of violence as a means of resistance. So, he writes them into the film. Members of the group express concern over the bombing possibly damaging public support and ultimately bringing about no change. Nonetheless, the film urges us to stop fence-sitting if we want to defeat the climate crisis. As one of the members declares with unflinching conviction, “I’m not thinking about it, I’m doing it.”
More than 80 years after the publication of his debut children’s book The Gremlins, Roald Dahl continues to hold the imagination of both adults-in-waiting and adults. A Willy Wonka origin story from the makers of Paddington is currently playing in cinemas around the world. Indeed, the more fascinating adaptation of Dahl’s work came earlier in the year from Wes Anderson. Each of the four meticulously controlled dioramas of the author’s lesser-known short stories — The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher and Poison — is full of love and reverence for the source. But what makes the films so fascinating is how Anderson confronts Dahl’s complicated legacy through the artifice of his production. The author becomes a character in himself as the filmmaker examines each story from an angle not considered in the original text.
Since its launch in 2019, Apple TV+ has slowly grown into the go-to steaming platform for sci-fi fans. This year, the home of For All Mankind, Foundation and Severance dropped the first season of Silo, based on Hugh Howey’s book series of the same name. Holed up in an underground bunker are the last remnants of mankind struggling to navigate a totalitarian bureaucracy and challenge its historical erasure. A dystopian thriller alive with ideas, it is as bracing and gripping as genre TV gets.
Chief among the disappointments that left many, if not all, readers and viewers griping was the third and hopefully last of the Agatha Christie adaptations from Kenneth Branagh. With Branagh on board as Hercule Poirot, Murder on the Orient Express derailed and Death on the Nile sank without a trace. This time around, A Haunting in Venice got lost in the shadows and showed few signs of life. Amazon’s rendition of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six sounded too much like a bland one-note tune for a story loosely inspired by Fleetwood Mac. As the episodes went on, the satire of Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl felt too soft around the edges on screen.
As we finish looking back on 2023, we also can’t help but look forward to 2024, a year which promises high-profile book adaptations of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Janice YK Lee’s The Expatriates, and Edward Ashton’s Mickey 17, to name a few. So, do stay tuned for another banner year of literary and cinematic riches.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.
The final curtain of the year 2023 is upon us. December, as always, brings with it cold weather and cosy retrospection. Once the awards season kicks into gear, there is the inevitable temptation to look back at all the books, films and shows that kept us company. The page-to-screen pipeline kept pumping out the adaptations. The triumph and tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, as documented by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin in American Prometheus, got the Christopher Nolan treatment, going from the book shelf to the box office without losing an atom of credibility. The joy and uncertainty of adolescence, as captured by Judy Blume in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, got the Kelly Fremon Craig treatment, only gaining in its resonance. Getting a blockbuster biopic like Oppenheimer and a teeny triumph like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret in the same year reflects the wealth of source material that remains readily available for cinematic translation.
For history buffs and film lovers alike, there is no denying Oppenheimer was the marquee cinema event of the year. Its unlikely pairing with Barbie became a pop-cultural totem of sorts. Nolan put a biography of over 700 pages into a particle accelerator to get to the core of a subject full of contradictions. Just because this was a retelling of history, not one of his high-concept sci-fi movies, didn’t mean he lost his maximalist tendencies and love for nonlinearity. The film repeatedly turns in on itself. Watching the building of the A-bomb and its fallout in parallel forces us to see how creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin. The intense gaze of a haunted Cillian Murphy become a window into a soul tormented by visions of a hidden universe and trapped in a prison of his own guilt.
If Oppenheimer didn’t convince the sceptics who place a much-too-high personal premium on the printed word, Killers of the Flower Moon surely did. Indeed, who better than Martin Scorsese could challenge the assumptions of those who take for granted the cultural superiority of the source text over the film? Rather than merely retrace the facts and figures from David Grann’s 2017 book, Scorsese and his co-writer Eric Roth take the investigation into an American genocide and reshape it into a story about a marriage blighted by greed and white entitlement. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart and Robert De Niro’s William Hale embody the inherent gangsterism of cutthroat capitalism. Think Jordan Belfort and Jimmy Conway, only far more insidious.
Capitalist expansion takes no prisoners. Even today, the big oil companies treat tribal sovereignty as an obstacle but hardly as an insurmountable one. In the face of such a threat, how can a historically marginalised community of people get the interlopers off their land? In Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, inspired by Swedish author Andrea Malm’s 2021 manifesto, Michael (played by indigenous actor Forrest Goodluck) picks fights with the local oil riggers working near his home on the North Dakota reservation. When picking fights with oil riggers does about nothing, he turns to more radical tactics. Given his expertise in making home made explosives, he is recruited by a rag-tag cadre of eco-activists plotting to bomb an oil pipeline in Texas.
To combat the existential threat of climate change may necessitate an escalation in tactics, argued Malm. Non-violent demonstrations won’t cut it any more. Malm called for the “intelligent sabotage” of the fossil-fuel infrastructure poisoning our world. His book, however, wasn’t a how-to guide for blowing up a pipeline, but why we may need to. The polemical tone was meant to adrenalise people into action, not fire up anarchists to blow shit up. Spurred by this moral case for property destruction as a climate justice strategy, Goldhaber presents not a documentary of curious provocation, but a fictionalised complement to a clarion call.
A powder-keg of an idea gets the treatment it merits — as a ticking-clock heist thriller. Flashbacks reveal each of the activists has personal reasons for joining a radical movement, be it a family tragedy or oil spills poisoning their land and water. Goldhaber is conscious of the likely disapprovals of violence as a means of resistance. So, he writes them into the film. Members of the group express concern over the bombing possibly damaging public support and ultimately bringing about no change. Nonetheless, the film urges us to stop fence-sitting if we want to defeat the climate crisis. As one of the members declares with unflinching conviction, “I’m not thinking about it, I’m doing it.”
More than 80 years after the publication of his debut children’s book The Gremlins, Roald Dahl continues to hold the imagination of both adults-in-waiting and adults. A Willy Wonka origin story from the makers of Paddington is currently playing in cinemas around the world. Indeed, the more fascinating adaptation of Dahl’s work came earlier in the year from Wes Anderson. Each of the four meticulously controlled dioramas of the author’s lesser-known short stories — The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher and Poison — is full of love and reverence for the source. But what makes the films so fascinating is how Anderson confronts Dahl’s complicated legacy through the artifice of his production. The author becomes a character in himself as the filmmaker examines each story from an angle not considered in the original text.
Since its launch in 2019, Apple TV+ has slowly grown into the go-to steaming platform for sci-fi fans. This year, the home of For All Mankind, Foundation and Severance dropped the first season of Silo, based on Hugh Howey’s book series of the same name. Holed up in an underground bunker are the last remnants of mankind struggling to navigate a totalitarian bureaucracy and challenge its historical erasure. A dystopian thriller alive with ideas, it is as bracing and gripping as genre TV gets.
Chief among the disappointments that left many, if not all, readers and viewers griping was the third and hopefully last of the Agatha Christie adaptations from Kenneth Branagh. With Branagh on board as Hercule Poirot, Murder on the Orient Express derailed and Death on the Nile sank without a trace. This time around, A Haunting in Venice got lost in the shadows and showed few signs of life. Amazon’s rendition of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six sounded too much like a bland one-note tune for a story loosely inspired by Fleetwood Mac. As the episodes went on, the satire of Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl felt too soft around the edges on screen.
As we finish looking back on 2023, we also can’t help but look forward to 2024, a year which promises high-profile book adaptations of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Janice YK Lee’s The Expatriates, and Edward Ashton’s Mickey 17, to name a few. So, do stay tuned for another banner year of literary and cinematic riches.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.
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