Plus, it’s all a matter of taste. Obviously, lots of folks smarter than me liked NO COUNTRY.

I have to confess that I have not seen the adaptations of Vonnegut, but I read ALL of Vonnegut voraciously, so maybe I need to rent these flicks . . .

I know a lot of great writers and savvy readers who HATE Cormac McCarthy. I LIKE McCarthy – some books better than others – but I like him, in general. The way his sentences ramble in ALL THE PRETTY HORSES drove a mentor of mine insane, but I thought it fit with the theme – rambling, adventurous – and it was musical to me. Again, it’s a matter of taste. His style is simpler in THE ROAD.
You SHOULD read THE ROAD. That would be great if we collaborated. Let’s do it. It’s a short book – a fast read. I liked it. But I do wonder how the movie will be made, since so much of the story is internal. But the casting of Viggo — BRILLIANT. A great choice – and not just cause I’m a Viggo fan. He fits the character perfectly. So I have high hopes again . . .

Haven’t read the book of course…I’m going to have to make that disclosure a lot with you. As for the source material being not the best (and you did point out that the book’s flaws should have made it a better movie than book, which I think is probably correct even if you didn’t care for the result), I think that may be a commonality in successful adaptations.

Taking a dense, subtle work of literature and trying to cram it as best you can into a movie often comes off, even if handsome and artsy like “Atonement”, as somewhat hollow yet full of itself. An example where I’ve actually read and seen is screenwriter Buck Henry and director Mike Nichols’ attempt at Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22″, which came off like pretty much every Kurt Vonnegut movie after “Slaughterhouse Five” (which is a pretty great overlooked film by George Roy Hill) in having an adventurous ambition and being intermittently brilliant but failing to capture the intoxicating tone and scope of the novel. Sort of a mad rush to cram the most significant actions and images into them without the time or tools to develop their significance thematically (hence the use of way over-explanatory imagery to hammer the themes into it, which you are very keen in bringing up).

The best results often come, as is the case with Eastwood’s “The Bridges of Madison County” and many of Kubrick’s works, from taking a clumbsy, brief and under-thought source novel as a blueprint to build a more profound work of sound and vision.

But did you really not care for the film “No Country For Old Men”? That was the kind of profoundly shaking theatrical experience that left me confused but invigorated and eventually finding it one of the most enriching of my life (the closest example of a movie affecting me like that in the theater that I’m pulling up right now is Todd Solondz’s “Happiness”). I understood my friends’ frustrations with it, but the protagonist confusion and subliminal transition from raw depictions of violence to resigned everything’s gone to shit suggestion and the ostensive heroes either giving up or being annihilated left me pondering the inevitability of violence and evil for months afterward, best of all because it didn’t offer easy resolutions or answers. Fuck, what a movie.