Review of The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007) by Serdar C — 20 Jun 2009

Paul Auster is one of my favoritte writers and it's great that he is also doing movies. But this film shows that some stories that work very well on paper just don't work on the screen. Watching the final scene of this movie, I thought to myself, if this was on paper I'd buy it but on screen it just looks ridiculous. In a few scenes he just shows the typewriter, I think he wants to tell "Ok, I thought this would make a good movie but now that I'm shooting it I see that it won't. But I can't quit! If I could just write on the screen..".

A writer (David Thwlis) goes to the his friends house in the country after finishing his last novel that took three years to write. He just wants to do nothing. But inspiration comes for a new story and he falls in love with his muse. It's a naive story and it's not that bad but when he writes for movies, I think he should stay away from the fantasy, because he is so good with words but he can't tell everything he thinks through the actors on the screen, so it's better if he writes more realistic stories for the movies, like he did in "Smoke"..

EDIT: Ok, I didn't know this movie was based on one of his books. Not the whole book, but it's the movie of a character in "The Book of Illusions". He tells the movie in full details in about 30 pages and it's pretty much the movie I saw and I was right, it works better on paper. In the book only a few people gets to see the movie, I'm sure Paul Auster didn't want it to be the fact for this one too but it did. I am gonna give an extra half star for the beauty of the book but the movie is still bad, sorry Pauly.