Word: book
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Carter's cause. And as if we weren't more than inundated with inspirational themes, we even have a parallel story of another poor black boy Lesra Martin (Vicellous Shannon) who also has to overcome hardships of race, and who becomes a good friend of Carter after reading his book...
Readers of Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, Angela's Ashes, may have wondered from whence the title of the book came. Upon seeing the film, it becomes clear that the title refers to the ashes that grow on the end of the cigarettes that Angela, McCourt's mother, smokes continuously as she worries her way through poverty, saddled with several children and an alcoholic husband who can't seem to hold...
...attempt on the part of viewers to speculate on the deeper meanings of these ashes and what they signify would be pointless in this weak cinematic adaptation of the book. What works for the book--different incidents from McCourt's childhood that connect to create a rich, moving mosaic of his life growing up in Ireland--fails miserably on-screen. Episodic and unsatisfyingly static, the film is bound to disappoint fans of McCourt's memoir...
...Angela has just given birth to her first daughter, adding to her family of four sons. Shortly afterward, the daughter dies. Unfortunately the viewer doesn't have time to care whether the infant lives or dies, thus revealing the first of many flaws in the film: in adapting the book to film, the filmmakers tried to cram as much of the book as possible into a two-hour movie, and this simply doesn't work...
...director, Alan Parker, worked with Laura Jones to write the screenplay, and the film is very faithful to the book--too faithful, perhaps. Like a complex organ hymn being plinked out on an electric keyboard, the film plays the same basic melody as the memoir but fails to bring out the nuances of McCourt's writing, while these nuances are precisely what made Angela's Ashes a great work rather than a mere string of anecdotes...