You Haven't Read the Book. Now See the Movie.

We continue to make our way through the Oscar nominees, most recently having watched "Precious"

and "Up in the Air."

Both these movies are based on novels: The official title of "Precious" is "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire";

"Up in the Air" is based on the novel of the same name by Walter Kirn.


While both of these movies are perfectly fine as far as they go ("Up in the Air" is more entertaining than "Precious," but the latter is worth seeing if only for Mo'Nique's academy-award winning portrayal of Precious's abhorrent mother), what struck us upon watching them is how utterly unnecessary they both are. We haven't read either of the books, but we cannot imagine that the movies add much of anything to one's appreciation for the books' underlying stories.

The basic problem is that the stories are not especially "visual." "Precious" is the story of a teenage girl (played by Gabourey Sidibe) in Harlem, who is pregnant (for the second time) after being raped (for at least the second time) by her father. The movie tells of her gradual self-empowerment through education. "Up in the Air" is the story of Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a man who fires people for a living. He practically lives in airports, and he is working towards his goal of racking up 10,000,000 frequent flier miles.

"Up in the Air" does have a distinctive "look" to it: a sort of washed-out monochromatic blue palette conveys the soullessness of the modern airport and also reinforces the essential sameness of all these "non-places." The only real cinematic moments in "Precious" are those that convey the title character's fantasies, whether they be of musical superstardom or of transporting herself into a foreign film playing on television.

There's certainly nothing wrong with adapting a book for a film, and we would imagine that the authors of these novels are pleased by the final products. Both movies display technical skill on the part of the filmmakers (both directors received Oscar nominations), and both are chock full of strong acting performances: In addition to Mo'Nique, Sidibe received a Best Actress nomination, and the cast of "Up in the Air" received three nominations, including Best Actor (Clooney) and two for Supporting Actress (Vera Farmiga--who is terrific--and Anna Kendrick). But we're still left to wonder why the writers and directors felt the compulsion to turn these particular books into movies.

And then, of course, we realized why: The filmmakers, Lee Daniels ("Precious") and Jason Reitman ("Up in the Air"), presumably love the source material. They read these books and were inspired, uplifted, devastated--whatever. They probably told all their friends to read these books; they probably talked them up whenever they could. But they realized then that we are living in a somewhat post-literate age. Nobody reads books anymore. So if the stories they loved were to be disseminated to the broadest possible audience, they were going to have to be liberated from the gilded cage of the front and back covers.