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In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.

And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.

Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.

Charlie St. Cloud

A few months after September 11, 2001, NBC news producer Ben Sherwood quit his job to write a book. It was a wistful little tale of the love, loss, hope and the great beyond set in a small town on the East Coast. He even went to a small town on the East Coast to find a realistic setting for the book. The Death And Life Of Charlie St. Cloud met with a certain amount of acclaim and promptly became a bestseller. A breezy read at less than 300 pages, the novel has a sweet simplicity to it that would naturally lend itself to the screen. Get the right people together and you just might have a decent slightly supernatural drama for late summer. Filmed in Canada to keep down production costs, the film is opening on enough screens that it is likely to make enough money to bring in a healthy profit. The question is: which is a better treatment of the story: a brief novel set on the east coast, or the cinematic drama filmed in Vancouver?

The Book

The Death And Life of Charlie St. Cloud opens with an intro related by a minor character in the story who turns out to be dead. The fact that this isn’t terribly interesting is one of many failures of a remarkably unsophisticated book. Ben Sherwood seems to want to tell a simple story about love, loss and coming of age. And while the story itself explores these themes in a clear and concise way, the prose does so in a way that only barely manages to muster up anything terribly clever or insightful.

The story takes place in a tiny fishing village in New England. It’s based on an actual town, but Sherwood’s idealized writing makes it feel intensely sanitized. Sherwood saddles the story with a style that feels somewhere between Frank Capra, Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney. It’s disturbingly wholesome from beginning to end - even when the title character has sex with the ghost of a woman who has not died. (But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

From the quaint confines of the tiny New England fishing village, we are introduced to Charlie, a regular guy with a heart of gold who makes a promise to his little brother - something involving playing catch on a regular basis - a promise that gets considerably more complicated when a trip to a Red Sox game results in an auto accident that nearly kills both of them. Sam dies. Charlie doesn’t. And so, Charlie ends up going to a wooded area near a cemetery to play catch with the ghost of his little brother every single night.

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