The source material for this film, "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" by David Foster Wallace (DFW), is a compilation of unrelated stories tied together thematicaly. These stories are verbose, precise in the their language, concise, and morally ambiguous.
The are the direct translation of their book equivalents. It seems, when creating the scrip John Krasinski didn't want to compromise the character richness and straightforwardly quoted them throughout the film. Which is great, because I simply love the way they are written in the book. Now it's just a club of expressive reading, where actors animate the characters into the real world.
However, the film suffers from the interdependent decisions of John Krasinski that diluted the complicated brilliance of the book (the compromise which, it seems ought to be payed in a film adaptation). Conceptually, I like that John K went toward knitting this compilation of male characters together through expanding on the life of the woman interviewer, which as the book author himself explained was the silent, but major, part of his book. In isolation it sounds like a wonderful plan. However, it doesn't seem to work/the execution wasn't persuasive enough.
The woman interviewer is haunted by manly, selfish, self-consciously serene, and unapologetic stories, which despite their disturbing nature earn sympathy. At least in the book they do. The movie makes it seem like every men the interviewer meets is a cartoon cut-out of a male stereotype, despairing her. In the book these stories are meant to be terrible, but human. In the movie, when contextualised by the interviewer, all of them become alien and cold (except the story of the towel boy).
Still, wonderful visualization of the book, withstanding only as its companion. Without the book and the enjoyment of the book, the film is probably somewhere around 4/10.
The are the direct translation of their book equivalents. It seems, when creating the scrip John Krasinski didn't want to compromise the character richness and straightforwardly quoted them throughout the film. Which is great, because I simply love the way they are written in the book. Now it's just a club of expressive reading, where actors animate the characters into the real world.
However, the film suffers from the interdependent decisions of John Krasinski that diluted the complicated brilliance of the book (the compromise which, it seems ought to be payed in a film adaptation). Conceptually, I like that John K went toward knitting this compilation of male characters together through expanding on the life of the woman interviewer, which as the book author himself explained was the silent, but major, part of his book. In isolation it sounds like a wonderful plan. However, it doesn't seem to work/the execution wasn't persuasive enough.
The woman interviewer is haunted by manly, selfish, self-consciously serene, and unapologetic stories, which despite their disturbing nature earn sympathy. At least in the book they do. The movie makes it seem like every men the interviewer meets is a cartoon cut-out of a male stereotype, despairing her. In the book these stories are meant to be terrible, but human. In the movie, when contextualised by the interviewer, all of them become alien and cold (except the story of the towel boy).
Still, wonderful visualization of the book, withstanding only as its companion. Without the book and the enjoyment of the book, the film is probably somewhere around 4/10.