The Book Thief

Today is my dad's birthday. Incidentally, it's also the day we got a half day in school, which really only lasts three hours. We are back home by 10:30, so to many it hardly seems worth it at all to even come to school. Especially when it snows a lot on the night before, making you think that possibly there will be a cancellation, or at the very least the day would be postponed. But alas, as every student awoke this morning, they found that they did indeed still have lessons to attend. But I digress.

So many years, I worry that my dad should do more things that he wants to do, instead of just spending them at home as he would pretty much any other day. The only thing so far that I have witnessed him do is stay home from work, and then there was the movie.

Around noon, my dad drove us to the movie theater to see the new film The Book Thief. I was interested to see it because I absolutely adore the book by Markus Zusak. What I love best about the book is its characters, and how the whole book is from the point of view of Death. It's cleverly written, an it took Markus three years to complete, which shows me how much he cared to make this book something special. No matter how many times I read it, the ending always makes me cry. Death even tells you the ending multiple times before it occurs, and yet it still gets me every time. That being said, the movie was pretty well done. It was very true to the book, obviously with a few short cuts to make the plot go faster than it did in the book, where the author could be more laborious with his descriptions and the thoughts of each character. This film was definitely cast brilliantly. Many of the characters appeared exactly as I had pictured them in my mind, and the same for the settings. I don't think I would see the movie again, only because there were too many differences from the book that I was scrutinizing it too much and it wasn't as good as it would have been otherwise. But still, I have to say they did a fantastic job. One thing I think everyone can pull out of the book and the movie is that it really accentuates the importance of books in our lives. Their popularity has not diminished over time, even with the advancements of cinema. You can get so wrapped up in a book that you're turning pages and you don't even realize it, and that's a wonderful thing.