For as much as I saw last weekend, I really dropped the ball this weekend. Oh, well. Both were quality watches.
The Dry 2: Force of Nature – I felt so privileged to be able to see the sequel to The Dry in Australia just a week after it first premiered. My sister on the other hand, was pissed. She loved the first film and all of the books just as much as I did, so not being able to see it when it was first released was a huge bummer for her. All she had to go on was the fact that I said I liked it and that it seemed pretty darn faithful to the source material. Of course, and I said this at the time, Force of Nature was our least favorite in the Aaron Falk trilogy, but that still doesn’t mean it was a bad novel. In fact, it was very good. This time around, the story was a bit less personal as Aaron and his partner in the financial crimes division try to aid in the search for Alice, a woman they were using as an informant against the company she worked for. She’s likely dead, and Aaron is grasping at straws trying to help find a woman where his mother was gravely injured during his childhood. The acting is superb, and the drabness of the vast bushland makes this for a tense and thrilling watch. I love this world Jane Harper has created and I can only hope that the final, and excellent book, also gets a proper adaptation.
Turtles All the Way Down – I just realized that both films I watched this weekend were adapted from novels. It’s actually quite wild how much media out there has come from the written word. People are so creative, but why not adapt a good story if they’ll let you? John Green hasn’t written a proper novel since this 2017 release of the same name, so it was a pleasant surprise to see this get the “big screen” treatment. I put that term in quotes because it actually debuted on Max, but still, a win is a win, I guess. Aza is a teenaged girl who suffers from extreme anxiety that sometimes manifests itself in OCD. I might have taken a few psychology courses in college, but I’m not going to try and pretend to know the intricacies of these particular mental illnesses. I do think Green has personal experience, which is why my relative, who has a doctorate in psychology, loved this book so much. It seemed to put to words what people suffering from these illnesses are going through, at least to a degree not really explored that much. In this novel, Aza’s particular fear is in bacteria, more specifically C. diff. Her obsession seems to consume most of her waking life, making it hard to connect with people or try new things. This one, as most of Green’s work, is a tear-jerker, but this was such a faithful adaptation of the source material. Check it out if you have the ability.