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On this 11th of September I first thought to write about the World Trade Center, which almost seems inevitable. It is all over the television, with documentaries, news and movies. A couple of days ago I saw ‘102 minutes that changed America’, which is made up of actual footage shot by both news crews and amateurs and shows the 102 minutes after the first tower got hit in real time. It was a very impressive film to watch. The fact that it aired on a commercial network meant that it had a lot of commercial breaks, which usually is very annoying. Now, however, the breaks gave very welcome and necessary relief from the heavy images shown. The film is brilliantly edited and is a much see for everyone.

Today I had planned to watch another WTC movie, which featured Nicolas Cage as a fire fighter. I had heard about it before and the reviews weren’t bad. However, I didn’t like it at all. This could have been due to the fact that it was shown on a network for which we don’t have a perfect cable signal. The picture was dark and grainy, as was the film, which meant I could hardly make anything out. Moreover, the movie didn’t engulf me from the beginning. I got distracted, which a good movie wouldn’t let happen. Therefore, after a half an hour, I decided to go watch something else.

About a week ago there were to movies on television. Watching two movies in one evening, however, is a bit too much, which meant I watched one and taped the other (yes I still have a VCR). I watched ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’, with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and I quite enjoyed it. I taped ‘Emma’, with Gwyneth Paltrow. I am a huge fan of Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ and I always love to see a series or a movie based on any of Jane Austen’s works. Recently I had seen the latest BBC series of Emma and had been very disappointed. It seemed as if all the things in the book that were anticipated and longed for for years, such as the arrival of Frank Churchill, took only 5 minutes in the series. The talk about and longing for a ball should take a long time. In the series it was suggested once and a couple of second later there they had it. No, I was very annoyed; they didn’t do a very good job. Maybe they tried to follow the book too strictly and didn’t realize that TV is a different medium and requires creative thinking of your own. You can’t just take the book and put it literally on the screen.

Gwyneth Paltrow, however, was great as Emma. A movie is even shorter than a four-part television series, but they managed to put everything in that was necessary to convey what every character was about. They left out the anxious wait for a ball here and a picnic there and just floated easily from the one to the other. They also left out some background stuff about the minor characters, which the series should have done as well. In a book it is all quite interesting, but trying to stuff it in a short series or a movie isn’t doable, at least not if you want it to be good.

These days require creativity. This ‘Emma’ had some very clever ways of jumping from one point in time to the next and added something to the original book. That can sometimes be enough to make it work. You don’t have to be as extreme as they did in ‘Clueless’ (which is a movie that is even better) or ‘Lost in Austen’ (which is a television series in which a modern girl switches places with Elizabeth Bennet, very Post Modern), but you have to do something, subtle or extreme. Nowadays I’m not satisfied <span style="

“> anymore when someone just transfers the book to film without thinking and leaving it at that. Luckily some people do it right.