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Sunday, February 26, 2012

Book & Film review: One Day by David Nicholls/Lone Scherfig


One day, the book written by David Nicholls, explores the friendship between two people, Emma and Dexter. After hooking up on graduation day, they embark on a life-long friendship, which is annually updated on July 15th, the day they met. The book was a wonderful read about the parallel lives of the two characters. What I loved most about the book was that it had a realistic feel to it as it revealed the dashed dreams, struggles, fears and fall outs of their lives. Life isn't always what it cuts out to be and sometimes what you are looking for was right in front of you.

I was looking forward to watching the movie One Day, based on the book of the same name but I was disappointed with the movie as it failed to convey the emotions and characterisation of the book as well as it could have. The problem I found with the movie was they tried to replicate the book exactly. However because it spans over 2 decades it was like a snippet of what occurred without the character development and depth.

Jim Sturgess who played Dexter did a great job at portraying the bad boy image whilst being sympathetic. I love Anne Hathaway as an actress but her inconsistent british accent never quite materialised into something remotely authentic.

I feel if I hadn't read the novel beforehand, the movie would have been confusing and choppy. The background the novel had gave me allowed me to fill in the missing bits and relate the characters on the screen to the characters in the novel and enjoy the movie to a certain degree.

In conclusion, watchable but not entirely successful.

6/10

2 comments:

suzie wuzie said...

i watched the film first and was shocked to see anne hathaway die! :'( so now i don't really want to read the book. but i do agree with you that if you haven't read the book, the movie would've been confusing- coz it took me a while to get the gist of the movie.

Anonymous said...

Geez, Spoiled it for me, Suzie Wuzie!