this is inevitably going to be half a book review lol. anyway. to be honest i never even really liked the book much. the book is much more linear than the movie, it's at least somewhat interesting from the start up to when there's the timeskip to when everyone's adults. and that's when it became boring as hell to me. and i feel like making this, they knew that, otherwise they wouldn't have done the really weird structural/editing changes. there's just so little done to elevate or de-escalate any kind of action, it's just this constant level of drama (a low one at that)... the book barely had a damn climax, and what they tried to shoehorn in didnt really work either. i suppose i understand what they were trying to do but it just made it feel so odd and messy with the tone of the story all over the place too. which i guess is the point but. i never really gave a shit about the characters in the book and that carried over to the movie. though boris was the best aspect of the book and at least carried over to the most interesting dude in the movie too

even though i'm not all that fond of the goldfinch in either iteration i will say at least watching the movie made me think more about how there are so many people on this earth, and about the chance meetings we have with people, and how we all go our separate ways. perhaps thats because the other day i reconnected with an old high school friend i haven't talked to in almost half a decade and was thinking about that kind of thing. a lot of big picture thinking...

when reading and watching i really did want to like it more... (there was the hype of the fact they shot a lot of the downtown nyc scenes in my college neighborhood in my last year there... i recall standing around the night they did that flowershop scene, it was so cold that day...) but after reading the book i recall thinking i have no idea how they are going to make this work as a movie. i just did not see it translating well... and tbh it kind of really didnt