We’re thrilled to have Phillip Lopate on our line up for our November 12^th reading at Shrine.  Check out his article in this summer’s Bookforum: “Adapt This.”  The essay reinvigorates the conversation about the notorious difficulty of turning novels into films.  He offers a list of artful, worthy, even “sublime” film adaptations, and examines the approaches successful (and unsuccessful) directors or screenwriters have taken to their source material—Hyper-Naturalism, Avant-Garde Stylization, and intentional Infidelity.  Most illuminating for us is his objection to the argument that “films can’t think”—they can show us many things, but they can’t “depict consciousness” or render metaphor on the screen.  He asserts, instead, “when I am in thrall to a sublime film masterpiece, such as Ophuls’ The Earrings of Mme de or Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (both, by the way, literary adaptations), I experience it as a continuous flow of consciousness—observant, melancholy, detached, worldly, commenting…thought.” And as a bonus: we have a new “Must Watch” list.