Genius

My Wanita got an unlimited cinema card some months ago and I decided to have one as well. So this month I bought a card, 19 euro a month and you can see movies in the cinema unlimited. As much as you can eat, oh now, as much as you can see. We decided to go one a week to the cinema together and we would see two movies. It's a relatively a cheap way of holiday entertainment and as this is an all you can see card, we see the movies we wouldn't go to otherwise.

So yesterday I saw Genius. An interesting film about the writer Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law) and his editor  Maxwell Perkins (Colin Firth). My wife chose the film because of Colin
Firth, I was curious of Thomas Wolfe.

I understand it's difficult to explain what the role of an editor is in a book. And there is a scene in the film where Perkins says to Wolfe: "Is this book better because I edited it or is it just a different book, and should we not have edited it at all, because the original was as it should be? That is what we editors lie awake at night."
I think that captures the essence of the dilemma of the editor. I like the movie very much. The movie is played at an old cinema in The Hague and there was the audience was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. That is amazing considering the amount of coughs in The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam...





So, I wouldn't start reading a book by Thomas Wolfe if I had not seen this film. And that's one of the advantages of such a card. Between Inferno and Jack Reacher there is a Genius.