The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood by Julie Salamon.
Detailed behind-the-scenes about DePalma's adaptation of the Tom Wolfe novel that covers pre-production through the fallout over its release. I think my appreciation of most movies would benefit from this sort of critical scrutiny that rarely appears to happen - even for movies that
didn't bomb at the box office.
The King of Chess by Ah Cheng
Pretty good first novella by an important Cultural Revolution-generation Mainland author. It was of further interest to me because it's been adapted to film at least twice, the latter of which I saw
recently. That adaptation -- which was a Hong Kong production -- adds a large frame story set in late-80s Taipei and changes the narrator from one of the educated youths sent to labor in rural Yunnan during the Revolution, to a sort of Cultural Revolution tourist from Taiwan who somehow accompanied his relative into Southern China. I suspect this was to connect or double the experiences of the Chinese in the novella with with those of their analogous cohorts in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and to situate it temporally, but it seems like a really odd concept to me.
The movie is also much more melodramatic than the book, which I think handles the tension between nostalgia and detached irony more-effectively.
The other day I watched The Bird People of China, which is a very different movie about semi-willing tourists (this time Japanese) cast adrift in Yunnan. That movie seems to exploit a more-conventionally exotic, mythological portrayal of an indigenous culture another step removed from the grimy "official Chinese" towns. Just another set of connections to keep in mind when I watch the first (Chinese) adaptation of The King of Chess.
Black Alice by Thom Demijohn (Thomas M. Disch and John Sladek)
Very strange, creepy later civil rights-era (written in the late 60s) thriller about a seedy man who stages the abduction of his schizophrenic daughter, has her skin dyed black and imprisons her in a mixed-ethnicity brothel in Norfolk VA (that caters to local frats and Klansmen). All part of a largely-incompetent scheme to embezzle money from the girl's trust fund.
There's a good deal of misanthropic humor to be taken, especially from the father's pompous internal monologues, comparing himself to Nietzsche as well as famous "heroic criminal masterminds" such as Macbeth without even a hint of self-awareness.
The title is a reference to Alice in Wonderland and how Alice enters a looking-glass world by taking a pill that turns her black. There are actually multiple nests here in that the girl already has her own inner worlds as a child with multiple personalities, and much of her insanity was also engineered by her father, though I actually thought Alice's schizophrenia was the least compelling and mysterious device in the novel.