Ulysses

Having finished James Joyce's monumental masterpiece "Ulysses" at about two in the morning last night, I decided to reward myself today by finally viewing Joseph Strick's critically acclaimed adaptation of the work. I was highly interested in seeing how certain mindbogglingly difficult and seemingly unfilmable sections from the novel were portrayed by his lens, and I was left impressed and entertained. While a truly proper adaptation of Joyce's massive literary landmark would be about twelve times the length of this experiment, Strick's "Ulysses" is a fine and almost flawless attempt at condensing and adapting the perplexing classic to the big screen. The performers chosen are all excellent, both visually and performance-wise the actors embody what one's mind likely interpreted the iconic characters whilst reading the original work.

Although I seem to be solely using this review to be comparing the film to the book, I should also point out that even if the novel never existed, this would be among the greatest movies of its kind. This is an avant garde journey through the streets of Dublin that is crafted brilliantly on all cinematic fronts. The many beautiful locations are shot with lovely black and white cinematography, (as I already mentioned) the performances are fantastic, the editing is noticeably well done, and the final product has the ability to be both a companion to Joyce's novel and a wonderful work of art in its own right. Here, you will find much to love, and the two hour running time flies by. Seriously, this film feels much faster than two hours, similarly to how the original novel felt much shorter than 700 pages (at least in my opinion anyway, since many others loathe the book and find it tedious and WAY overlong).

Joyce's prose seems necessary to be heard rather than just read, and the final segment, this being Molly Bloom's beautiful (and dirty) soliloquy, masters the challenge of reading the master's work aloud. It is read with grace, passion, and character in a way that conveys all of the humor and pain and extreme sexual desire hidden within Joyce's many pages of inner monologue. This is a (or perhaps THE) masterpiece of the little-practiced genre of "stream of consciousness filmmaking".