cahn

Interesting! I can see that coming to it with my own lenses is a Thing here. I will admit that I saw the movie pretty much immediately after reading the book, so in some sense I approached it more of an illustration of the book than its own entity. So I was probably primed to be more annoyed with the book in general. But Nick: I mean, you live in the US, you have a life there, you are supposed to figure out the norms of these kinds of things, cultural conditioning aside, especially as a tenured professor of history whose whole... career?... revolves around understanding how cultural norms differ?? I am also coming from a cultural lens in which I had to figure out a whole bunch of these kinds of things myself (not the wealth thing, ha, but other similar types of "WE DO NOT TALK ABOUT THESE THINGS" or "WE NORMALIZE THESE THINGS") -- it wasn't nearly the same, since I was born in and grew up in the US, and Nick didn't, so I'm obviously being too harsh on him, but I'm very sure that fueled my annoyance with him for not figuring them out.

I was rather annoyed with Astrid's storyline in the book, because it was clear that there was no real resolution to it, that Michael hadn't really changed, that she totally needed to get rid of him, and that the arc of storyline was going to eventually bend that way, after more heartache (which indeed happened in the second book). So although it was more complex, which I enjoyed (and I understood sacrificing that complexity so the movie wasn't super long -- I mean, see also my super short attention span), on balance I didn't like it any more than I liked the movie storyline. I also seem to remember Charlie not being so much of a thing in the movie? which I also approved of, as I also have sort of a kneejerk reaction to storylines where the next love interest is queued up. (...which is hypocritical of me, but hey, sometimes I want to watch people making more emotionally healthy life decisions than I did at that age :) )

I agree that the men are passive (and more so in the movie than the book), but that's a convention of the genre so it really didn't bother me (it in fact bothered me more that Rachel was such a cipher in the book, because you can get away in a romance novel/movie with the guy being a black hole, but not the girl). I also, after reading both the book and the movie, have no idea what Nick likes, besides various kinds of food. (Man, the food porn in the books is pretty great, I must admit.)