Book Trailer Thursday: Rabbit, Run
Posted by: Daniel Kraus
The more people keep talking about how irrelevant book trailers are, the less I’m inclined to believe them. Last week Salon devoted (another) lengthy piece to this (apparently irrelevant) topic. We’re going to talk this thing into relevancy if we’re not careful, folks.
“Alas, Web videos are even more numerous than books, and as with books, the vast majority of them go unwatched and uncelebrated,” wrote Salon’s Laura Miller. Are book trailers really that pervasive? To test this theory, I chose a modern classic–John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), certainly not a book that lends itself to book trailering–and did myself a bit of googling. And boom!
(Sorry, no embed available.)
A student production, yes, but not a bad one. In fact, I’ll admit it–if these kids went ahead with their feature film version, I’d buy a ticket. If nothing else, it made me remember how young the characters were in that book. For some reason Updike’s prose always has me imagining everyone as graying oldsters.
But wait, there’s more!
Here’s another student production, described thusly:
english project for the stupid book, “Rabbit Run”
Can’t you feel the love? This one portrays Rabbit Angstrom as a roid-ragey freak who grunts stuff like “Whassup, baby?” I can’t help but sympathize with the motivated English teacher out there who pushed his students to understand Updike only to be rewarded with this disturbing document. To be fair, it does cover all of Rabbit‘s major plot points: broken dreams, marital infidelity… uh… video game tournaments…
Need a palate cleanser? Eminem, take it away.
February 12th, 2010 at 9:29 am
I like your point about talking book trailers into relevancy. I also find student-made trailers more interesting than the professional ones, even if they’re more painful to watch–how often do we get to really see young people interacting with literature?