Adaptation

I finished reading The Summer of Love by Debbie Dreschler, continuing and completing the spousal book club set, and that one was good too! At night I went back to the Crosstown Theater to see One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. I had never seen the movie before. I had very mixed feelings about the book, but I tend to like Miloš Forman so I wanted to give it a shot. The movie avoids the most egregious things about the books. It avoids the over-the-top racist caricatures of the orderlies. And it avoids the at least blatant and explicit misogyny concerning Nurse Ratched (though maybe making it more implicit...which maybe it's worse...but I think it's possible to read the way she's played with some sympathy...though Candy is still used by the plot as an object). And while if it avoids the worst aspects of the book, it also mostly avoids what's best in the book: primarily regarding the treatment of and sympathy for mental illness (I mean, it is more kind of internal things that are harder to capture in a movie that are what's good in the book...also the choice of narrative voice in the book was good, which probably would have been difficult to capture in the movie without a voiceover, which probably wouldn't have worked, so not faulting them for that, just noting the difference). The acting in the movie is good (and I'm mostly talking about everyone except for Jack Nicholson, who is just doing his most obnoxious Jack Nicholson thing through the whole thing...but McMurphy is just a big shitbag and Jack is perfect for playing him so there's that!). All in all, it's an alright movie...just kind of stuck in the middle of its uneven source material, avoiding its lowest lows but also not able to reach its highs. So I guess I'm about as ambivalent about it as I am about the book.