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Apr. 29th, 2007 01:10 amI just finished watching 84, Charing Cross Road, the version with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins, based on the book by Helene Hanff. I love the book and its two sequels, which are nonfiction and detail the long friendship between Hanff and the employees of a bookshop in London at the address which forms the title, and what came of that friendship. The first book is letters; the second and third are first-person.
They're wonderful books, in part because of their honesty, and in part because they aren't fiction and are all the more heartwrenching for being real. Unfortunately, while the movie is extremely well done in places--I get the feeling that the actors are spot-on in their characterizations--it makes a couple of missteps, and ends by missing an important fact: that it was the publishing of the first book that enabled Ms. Hanff to get to London in the end. Leaving that out lessens the impact of the story a good deal.
Still, it's a good movie, worth seeing if the viewer has already read the books. Start with the books, though. They won't take you long.
(The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street
Q's Legacy)
They're wonderful books, in part because of their honesty, and in part because they aren't fiction and are all the more heartwrenching for being real. Unfortunately, while the movie is extremely well done in places--I get the feeling that the actors are spot-on in their characterizations--it makes a couple of missteps, and ends by missing an important fact: that it was the publishing of the first book that enabled Ms. Hanff to get to London in the end. Leaving that out lessens the impact of the story a good deal.
Still, it's a good movie, worth seeing if the viewer has already read the books. Start with the books, though. They won't take you long.
(The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street
Q's Legacy)
