![]() ![]() ![]() Recently deserted by his supermodel wife, Amanda, and repressing his grief over the death of his mother a year prior, the disillusioned twenty-something struggles to remember a time when his ambitions of making it in the big city meant more to him than burying his feelings of inadequacy under a mountain of white powder. Living life in the fast lane of 1980s Manhattan, the would-be-writer spends his days going through the motions as a fact checker for a prestigious magazine, reserving his nights for imbibing in various forms of self-destruction. Jay McInerney’s iconic debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, invites readers into the cocaine and doubt-fueled mind of a nameless narrator endeavoring to see a future beyond the haze of terrible choices he’s made of late. In the process, I hope to unveil how these two vastly different mediums work together to tell the same story, from cover to credits. In this column, I’ll be checking out old and new adaptations to further explore both sides of that experience. As a lifelong bookworm and cinephile, I've discovered that whether I read the book before or after seeing the movie can have a profound influence on my enjoyment of the story across both mediums. While we've all uttered some version of this sentiment at one point or another, there have been those rare occasions when the opposite is true. "Don't judge a book by its movie" is another common jab. "The book was better" is a phrase heard often in conversations about book-to-film adaptations. ![]()
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