MovieChat Forums > La Virgen de los Sicarios (2000) Discussion > reading the book

reading the book

posted 17 years ago by londonpaul
1 reply | jump to latest

I just started reading the book, about 1/3 of the way through, and you can pick up a lot of the movie in it, almost as if they used the book as the script. I didn't particularly like the movie, but I did like the way it depicted the streetlife. At first I thought it was a bit over the top, but someone in my office is actually from Colombia, his mother took him away from there when he was only 2 but has returned since to visit, and he's seen the movie and has told me that the movie pretty much shows how things actually are. In fact, he said he cut his trip short because he was afraid of being there.

PL

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[–] companion-unobtrusive 16 years ago

In my opinion it's much better to read the book. The book is much more descriptive and elegant in its treatment of the themes, and especially more shocking in depiction of the killings. The only thing is it's in a Spanish that's incredibly hard to read without having studied the language for some time.

The movie is essentially a direct translation from book to film, with some minor differences which seem intentional. The dialogue from the book is often word for word, but the narrative in between is lost as the cinematography fails to fill in these gaps which are the best parts about the book, in my opinion. The movie also lacks of some literary aspects of the book, including the implicit reader to whom the narrator speaks and explains details throughout the book.

Overall I appreciate the contributions that Shroeder was attempting to make artistically, namely with the HD filming, but I think that it fails to convey the message with the same power that the books achieves. In other words, if you can, read it in Spanish, otherwise see the movie.