About a Boy (film)

About a Boy is a film adaption of Nick Hornby's book, About a Boy. It was first shown in theaters on 2002-04-26. It stars Hugh Grant as Will Freeman, Nicholas Hoult as Marcus Brewer, and Toni Collette as Fiona Brewer.

I knew about this film when it first came out because a girl I was dating when the movie came out, or shortly after we broke up, was a huge Hugh Grant fan. This caused me to be able to identify the book when I saw it in stores being re-released for the film, and, it, along with High Fidelity brought mw to Nick Honrby, whose fiction I have grown to love a great deal.

Status

I don't own the film, but I finally watched it on 2018-09-02, after finishing the book the day before.

Review

Good

• Excluding the ending, the movie is pretty true to the book. All the major scenes are there, both Will and Marcus have voice-overs for their internal monologue, and a lot of the dialogue and jokes remain.
• The movie was cast very well. Hugh Grant plays a perfect Will, handsome and useless. Both Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collette fit their roles neatly as well.

Bad

• The ending was completely re-written. While it wasn't a bad ending, I really liked the book's ending. I understand why they switched it, there wasn't enough time to flesh out Ellie or Marcus's father, but it is still a shame to miss it.
• Taking out all references to Nirvana and Kurt Cobain not only took away the double meaning of the title, but also eliminated an important temporal event that rooted the story.
• Part of Will's character is that he doesn't have any real talents other than superficial things, so, his ability to play guitar at the end didn't fit.

Ugly

• Nothing.

Links

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About_a_Boy_(film) - Wikipedia.
• imdb.com/title/tt0276751 - IMDb.