"Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything..."- Jack Kerouac, On the Road

          One of my favourite things about being a female cinephile (I guess it's the same for guys) is that I tend to watch practically every film of an actor I am currently obsessing over. There have been quite a few over the years. One of which was Tom Sturridge. Now he hasn't come in a lot of films, so it also became a sort of anticipation-mixed-celebrity crushing in which I wait and wait for the next film he does to gush over how brilliant and *obviously* gorgeous he is. The last proper film he came in was The Boat that Rocked in 2009, which I love. It was then that he became attached to play Carlo Marx in the film adaptation of Beat Bible, On the Road.


           Now I had not really heard a lot about the book before this even though I had gone through my Bob Dylan phase. But then I went ahead and bought it and read it and loved it. I started listening to Allen Ginsberg reading Howl on Youtube whenever I felt pissed off, and collecting Charles Bukowski poems from Tumblr. So you can say that I was hooked onto this idea. But then the film never released last year as it was supposed to.


         Finally, after waiting for nearly two years, when the hormones have worn off and all I want is to see a decent albeit bound-to-be-slightly-disappointing adaptation, the trailer to On the Road has been released. I like the trailer. I had inhibitions about Garrett Hedlund and Kristen Stewart playing iconic characters like Dean Moriarty and Marylou, but they look good, or rather good enough. I have been a fan of Sam Riley ever since I saw the incredible Control, so I think he'll do this well. And the rest of the cast, which has Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams, Viggo Mortensen and yes, Sturridge (a part of me can't help but cry "YAAAAY!!") look pretty spot on though even though I pictured them a little differently. My favourite part of the trailer is of course that they used possibly my favourite quote from the book in it, the quote that made me sit back and think that I am reading something important here,

“And I shambled after as I've been doing my whole life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

        I have seen parts of The Motorcycle Diaries so Walter Salles looks like an able director. The look is great. Things are loud and mad. And I know Oscars just got over and I should not be thinking of all this, but the two male leads and perhaps Stewart and Mortensen could get awards recognition for this film. So yes, all in all, the trailer does make me feel that the wait has been worth it. As it says in the book, "...and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell."