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Ink to Celluloid In 1902, a Parisian stage conjurer named Georges Melies combined elements from Jules Vernes' "From the Earth to the Moon" and H.G. Wells _ "The First Men in the Moon" and offered the early movie going public "Le Voyage das la Lune" (A Trip to the Moon), at 21 minutes arguably the first instance of literature to full length film. Ever since, literature has been the foundation of the film industry. More often than not, the celluloid does not fulfill the promise of the print, but now and then it does. Two recent films expertly bring the text to life. Spike Lee's polished and masterful adaptation of "The 25th Hour" by David Benioff, and "The Pianist" from the pen of Wladyslaw Szpilman and brought to the screen through the experienced direction of Roman Polanski.
The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman, a young Warsaw pianist, played Chopin's "Nocturne in C Sharp Minor" live on the radio, while German shells exploded outside -- so loudly that he couldn't hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: Later that day, a German bomb destroyed the power station, and Polish Radio went off the air. The war cast Warsaw into the horror of occupation, the ghetto, the rounding up of the Jews, the uprising and the evacuation of the city -- events that killed most of Szpilman's friends and all of his family. But incredibly he survived among the ruins of his beloved city. The Pianist is both an extraordinary story of one man's tenacity in the face of death, and a testament to the resilience of humanity itself -- Szpilman's life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. That officer died in a Russian POW camp, but he left behind a diary expressing his fierce despair at the barbarity of National Socialism. Extracts from the diary are published here for the first time, alongside Szpilman's memoir.
25th Hour All Monty Brogan ever really wanted when he grew up was to be a fireman. Now he's about to start a seven-year stretch in the federal penitentiary for drug dealing. With just twenty-four hours of freedom to go, he prowls the city with his girlfriend and his two best friends from high school-a high-flying bond trader and an idealistic teacher. As the minutes count down, Monty seizes one last chance to stack the odds in his favor. Hurtling from the money pits of Wall Street to Manhattan's downtown lounge and club scene, from the enclaves of the Russian mob to the old immigrant neighborhoods, The 25th Hour evokes the pulsing rhythms and diamond-hard edges of a city in the raw, illusory hours between midnight and dawn. A taut and mesmerizing tale of an urban purgatory suspended between the crime and the punishment, The 25th Hour heralds the arrival of a major player in contemporary noir fiction.
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