#unreliable-narrator

#unreliable-narrator

Tony Volcano Ventura is a streetwise baby. He's 2 when we pick up with him, which immediately puts this in the category of "weird books." "I know people don't usually remember their baby years," young Tony begins his narration, "but I do." Ipso facto, weird book, on account of its being narrated by a toddler, one who rides dogs under moonlight, dodges cops in alleys, and receives enigmatic assignments via the fax machine the moon gave to him.

When the people who are after me get here, they'll arrest me and put me on trial, or they'll disappear me to some black site. Or they won't bother with any of that and they'll just kill me. All of these seem like plausible outcomes, but in the novel's prologue, the narrator seems much more confident of her success: I am a fucking genius, a gorgeous fucking genius, and the only thing left to do is sit down and write.

There's a refrain that follows Sean Hayes around in The Unknown, and it doesn't take much to hear echoes of The Phantom of the Opera in the way the playwright David Cale has arranged its scansion and melody. "I wish you'd wanted me," Hayes's character, Elliott, a playwright who's on a digital-detox retreat upstate, hears a mysterious voice singing somewhere outside his window.

Adapted from Julia May Jonas' critically acclaimed debut novel, Vladimir follows an unnamed middle-aged woman (Weisz), a writer, professor, wife, and mother who feels increasingly dissatisfied with her own life. Her husband (Slattery), also a professor, has been accused of inappropriate relationships with former students and is under review. This didn't come as a shock to her, as they have an open marriage, but she dislikes the personal scrutiny it has brought.

I think Malcolm is unreliable only in the sense that he's trapped in his own perspective and, partly as a result of his depression, not especially sensitive to the feelings of the other people around him (namely, the woman he's marrying). I think the clarity and the self-awareness with which he recounts the crisis, though, indicates that he's a fundamentally trustworthy narrator.

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."