Writing
fromThe New Yorker
1 hour agoAndrew Martin on the Post-Lockdown Period
A narrator can be dissociated by depression yet remain credible through self-awareness, trapped in personal perspective and occasionally dramatic in self-diagnosis.
Having washed up on the Orkney island of Hoy, Megan spends most of the film's present tense in bed recovering when she's not telling DCI MacKelly (Tam Dean Burn) what happened after she, her best friend Lexi (a sparky Sophie Skelton), captain Daniel (Akshay Khanna) and mystery man Mike (Nick Skaugen), a last-minute replacement for Lexi's boyfriend Adam (Mark Strepan), set off on their voyage.
For a man who wrote an entire movie about how awful adapting a book into a movie can be, Charlie Kaufman has really developed it into a unique skill. The Oscar-winning screenwriter is best known for original stories like Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but he's recently branched out and adapted a children's book into the surprisingly cerebral animated movie Orion and the Dark.
He'd been shooting large-format prints of lakes in Ontario, he explains, and was trying to capture the mist that rises off their mirrored surface at dawn. "It was really the fog that interested me-much more than the lakes," he says. "The right combination of fog and morning light and the lake reflecting it all was somehow very spooky and serene at the same time."