Something Different

Alright y'all since it has been so long since my last post I figured I would throw you a curve ball and do something that I have never done before. I am going to be talking about a book that I have recently read and a movie that I have recently seen again. After reading this book and seeing this movie I realized there are similarities there and I wanted to post something that was more like a discussion about how they are similar even though they were made many years apart. The book is "Breakfast At Tiffany's" by Truman Capote and the movie is "Crazy/Beautiful" starring Kirsten Dunst and Jay Hernandez and directed by John Stockwell. 

Now if any of you faithful readers know the book or the movie or both you will know just how different they are. Or rather how different they seem to be on the surface. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is the story of a young man who meets a young broken woman who is doing her best to continue running from her past. These two strangers live in the same building and meet rather accidentally and in a strange twist of fate they become friendly. Holly is a sad, lonely and rather lost young woman who finds solace in $50 for the powder room and walking by Tiffany's when she gets the mean reds. The only person she truly loves at all the world is her slow-witted brother Fred. The narrator finds himself swept up in her crazy world and despite his efforts not to finds himself wanting to save her. 

"Crazy/Beautiful" is a movie about a wealthy politician's daughter who has a darkness in her that she tries to simultaneously hide and run from by drinking, doing drugs and pushing the limits that are set for her as much as possible. She meets a young Hispanic man while doing trash pick-up community service. He is from a poor, one-parent household with very little opportunity. With that in mind he becomes a straight and narrow type of guy. He takes a bus an hour each way to get to the better school, he studies hard, is part of the football team and follows all the rules to the letter. His dream is to make it to Annapolis and become a pilot. When he first meets Nicole he knows that she is a distraction but he can't seem to stay away. What follows is a dangerous downward spiral that almost tears both of them apart.

Like I said at the beginning, these two don't seem to have all that much in common. But the longer I watched the movie the more I realized just how similar they are. They are both tales of women that have lost their ways and can't seem to find their way back without a guide. In "Crazy/Beautiful" Nicole, our heroine, escapes from her past with booze and drugs, and in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" Holly escapes with men and delusions. Two very different escapes but we have to remember that 'Holly' escaped in the late fifties when women were still fighting the lady-like restrictions of the early fifties. In the nineties when 'Nicole' was escaping it was the norm for young wealthy women to be taking designer drugs and "rebelling." However different they may seem these two women were actually very much alike in their need to run run from the things that they couldn't face. 

In the midst of their escaping they both found men that became a guide for them. I don't want to give anything away so I'm not going to say much more but both women go through intense journeys in very different ways. But for me they were also very similar in the ways they handled their journeys and the way they were both desperately looking for something to hold on to in a world that seems to be continuously rocking them. 

Because this is a review blog I want to say that I loved "Breakfast at Tiffany's." I thought that it was well written and very different then the movie but I kind of enjoyed that part of it. I read the 50th Anniversary edition which included three other short stories by Capote. All were strange and intricate and incredibly well written. I must say that I really love his writing and look forward to reading more of his work. The story of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" has always been a favorite of mine and granted it was the movie I knew but the basic story was something that I loved and I loved it in book form just as much.

Well that's it for this round cats and kittens. I hope you enjoyed this new thing that I did here. I just thought that I would try something new and see where it got me. It might be something that I do again and it might be a one time thing but I know that either way I really enjoyed it, a one-sided discussion about two things I really love. Books and movies. What could be more fun than that? Please feel free to comment with some of your ideas on the subject of the similarities between "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "Crazy/Beautiful."