DVD Review: “Script to Screen” Collection review
Literary adaptations on big screen have always been a tricky business. Across countries and languages there are numerous examples of how sometimes brilliant literary work has been reduced to mediocre movies (example from closer home: Mahashweta Devi’s Hazar Chaurasi Ki Maa, filmed by Govind Nihalani), and how sometimes great literature has been made into even greater cinema (example from closer home: Bhisham Sahani’s Tamas, filmed again by Govind Nihalani). While bad literature can almost never be converted into good cinema, there are many good novels that have been made into forgettable films. But despite all that and more, literature continues to be an important source of cinema (the only exception perhaps is our own Bollywood which only rarely taps into India’s rich literary heritage but all the time lament about the lack of good stories, especially at (very often) times when it has to get ‘inspired’ by a foreign (read ‘mostly Hollywood’) film.
It is in this context that the recent series of DVDs brought out by Big Home Videos, under the title “Script to Screen”, makes for an interesting package. The package has 22 titles, and it’s an interesting mix of films, some of them probably the best ever made across genres. The stories of these films are so well known that they do not require re-rendering of even plot outlines here, and most of them have even cinematically excelled to warrant specific details. Of the lot, my picks are definitely A Beautiful Mind, Forrest Gump, Love Story, No Country for Old Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Out of Africa and The Day of the Jackal. Each one of them comes with a classic story, but what makes them special is that their directors have put their own distinctive touches into them, giving them a distinct identity of their own.
It’s always a matter of debate whether a novel or a story is better to read than to watch on the big screen (since the former allows you to create your own imaginary worlds while the latter takes you to worlds that you are made to watch), but when the characters are played as brilliantly as by Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks, Jack Nicholson, Edward Fox, Clint Eastwood or Meryl Streep, it’s time to store the tome away and put the DVD into the player.
When I say that such and such films are my picks, it does not mean that the others in the package are bad, though sometimes they just pass the muster when compared to the original novels/stories. The list gets completed with films like A Mighty Heart, Black Beauty, Pride & Prejudice, The Kite Runner, Wuthering Heights, The Pelican Brief, The Rainmaker and The Firm, which range from compelling to just so, so adaptations of their original literature.
At Rs 499 for each DVD, the films do not come cheap, but some, if not all, of them are definite collectibles in any movie maniac’s library. For starters, I have gone for One Flew Over….(can anyone beat Jack Nicholson and Louis Fletcher’s performances), No Country for Old Men (this one for the unpredictability of the Coen brothers in whatever they do), The Kite Runner (well, not as powerfully addictive as the novel) and A Mighty Heart (for a change, Angelina Jolie minus the glam quotient plus our own Irrfan Khan as a Pakistani investigator). No Country for Old Men comes with bonus features “Working with the Coens”, “The Making of…” and “Diary of a Country Sheriff”, sections that more than make up for the steep cost, while The Kite Runner and A Mighty Heart DVDs come with a reality slice in the form of Public Service Announcements and other add-ons, particularly in the latter details about the Committee to Protect Journalists and the “Making of” section that takes one to the world of beheaded Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl and his wife Mariane.
Just a word of advice to Big Home Videos: if you are marketing DVDs in the Indian market, should not you add subtitles of some of the prominent Indian languages too, if you really want these films to travel beyond the English-speaking moviegoers? The four DVDs I have watched have subtitles in many European languages (The Kite Runner and No Country…even have Arabic subtitles), many of which are spoken by far less number of people than most of the major Indian tongues. Strange, because with Indian subtitles, these films can travel much more within India.
