Oh the insufferable snobbery of the fanboy. I can remember when I wouldn't have a movie tie-in cover on my shelves. Most egregious instance? For years the only available copy of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the Blade Runner tie. At the height of my PKD-mania I couldn't read that key novel because I hadn't found an untainted edition. (I still haven't.) Eventually I got over my distaste and bought the damn thing (retail!), and felt a little silly about the years I had held out.
Like a lot of lifelong readers (I suppose) I resent the way movies dominate our culture. More, I hate how they consume our culture, voraciously swallowing up books, comics, old TV shows, the life stories of the famous and the heart warming triumphs of the obscure - anything to keep the film rolling. And afterward all of it, whether real event or artful fiction, is forever a kind of shadowy appendage of the movie, at least to the majority of people.
I remember seeing Kanon's earlier books in stores, but I missed this one somehow. I've only seen a few clips from the movie. It, like the poster/cover seen here, is pastiche, meant to resemble something the studio (Warner Brothers) might have made sixty years ago. Steven Soderbergh is a great director, and something of a chameleon, so I'll have to catch the whole thing one of these days to see just how far he ran with it. In the meantime I wonder what Kanon thinks of the whole thing. Based on what little I've seen, I can't help feeling that shooting in black and white was a very good idea - but trying to emulate Warner's midcentury style may have been a very bad one.
I used the word pastiche above, but of course the poster is more than that. It's an outright lift. A shameless, didn't even bother to file the serial numbers off, bare-faced, brilliant steal, and the reason the book caught my eye in the first place.
The setting (Berlin, immediately post-war) and the protagonist (an American correspondent who lived in the city before the war, now returned) are almost irresistable, given my recent reading. And it certainly got enough praise from the critics. We'll see. In the meantime, I'm not going to pick an excerpt out of a book I haven't even read, so here's a zinger from Ugarte, as played by Peter Lorre:
"You know, Rick, I have many friends in Casablanca, but somehow, just because you despise me, you are the only one I trust."