From a book to a movie. The good and the bad.

[Jacq]

I have a three-pages long rant regarding film-book comparisons, but I will sum it up thusly:
Movies are not books.
It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine when people get angry about "This and this and this and that were cut out" when they see a film adaptation. It's like they fail to realize the media are different and not everyone (I want to say "no one in their right mind") wants to see a six-hour movie. That doesn't mean there aren't good and bad adaptations, just that other things need to be taken into account aside from a 100% loyal adaptation of the written.
Now anyways...

Coraline was rad - I enjoyed the flick moreso then the book, I think. Must be LAIKA. :3

I enjoyed The Golden Compass film very much. They DID mention the Magisterium, but the influence of the church was much more visual, which makes sense. I'll point you to my paragraph above regarding the ending. The <SPOILER> at the end of the book does not follow traditional film format and the producers had no way of knowing how well the flick would do - it was necessary to have the film stand alone. Though I missed the inclusion of the severed head, it looks like they're cutting that whole subplot out.

I loved The Bridge To Teribithia. It was just as good (if not better) then the book, and far and away superior to the television adaptation I remember watching in school when I was 8.

Twilight was horrible. But the book was horrible, so you can't expect too much.
(*dodges tomatoes* Yes, I hated Twilight. Maybe it's because I'm not 12, but that is a seriously unhealthy relationship and it makes me sad that girls identify with the protagonist, who is incapable of doing anything except martyr herself.)

What Dreams May Come was also a good to-film adaptation. It misses something from the book, but I think that's just that the movie is passive, while the book is meant to be active (as in, you are meant to put it down and think about that content every once in a while.)

There are a LOT of adaptations I dislike, but my dinner is ready and this post is already very long. So goodbye.

[EricG1793]

My dad and I watched The City of Ember on Sunday evening. It's been around two years since I've read this series, but I think the conversion came out nicely. I think the actors were matched up to their characters well, although I'm not in to show/movie business at all so I have no idea who'd be better or worse.

I'm not sure if there were any scenes cut in the conversion, but it seemed as though there was a bit too much trying to find the way out of Ember, not enough action, and not enough time explaining what's going at the beginning and who's who.

There were two instances in the movie when I was like, "That's so obviously computer-simulated...." but the effects were otherwise very good.

The set was excellent as well. They did a good job portraying a city that's losing the battle against entropy.

My favorite character was... Sloan? ... the pipeworks worker. "That's not my job!" The funniest part for me was when Doon asked him if there was a key to get to the Generator. He said yes, and they asked where it is. He replied, "How should I know; it's not my job!" LOL

[Zirsta]

Yeah, I saw The City of Ember about two weeks ago. They did do a good job not messing it up, that's for sure. They didn't cut anything fatally important, and I liked ow they added more clues to the instructions out of Ember, since it seemed a little to self explanatory in the book, in my opinion. Only, the giant mole was a little.... weird. It wasn't even mentioned in the book that the animals were giant or anything.

[EricG1793]

^ Speaking of the mole, I don't remember the mayor getting eaten in the book; I seem to remember the mayor being in trouble with his people in the next book when they started to move out of Ember, or was that just a conversation?

[Zirsta]

You're right. The mayor drowned trying to get out of Ember on his own. It's not mentioned in the first book, but rather The People of Sparks. A couple of my friends were rather ticked at the giant mole, because they were never mentioned in the books.

[Silverclaw]

While I try to be accepting and understand that the movie cannot be the same as the book, I'm usually disapointed by the movie. I may be being picky, but I think that when I'm watching a movie and going: I, who knows nothing about movies, (though I do know about theatre, which is similar,) could have written a script that was truer to the book, or captured the essence better, etc., and I thinking of all these specific changes I would make, then there's a problem.
Harry Potter: Pretty good, I'd say. Mostly true to the books, and not bad movies in their own right. The 5th one left out a bit to much though.
The Golden Compass: So-so. It stuck to the plot, and the special effects were pretty cool, but it seemed a little.......... superficial. One of my favorite things about the book is that at first glance it's a light-hearted, if slightly dark, childrens story, but when you read between the lines, it's something much more contreversial. There was really none of that in the movie, but since it was a mainstream movie, it would be hard to put in subtley enough that only book enthusiasts would get it. Then again, maybe they did and I just didn't get it, but I doubt it.
Twilight: Not great. I try to apreciate the movie for what it's worth, but I keep seeing all the flaws. My main issue is that I used to love Twilight, but the more popular and comercial it got the more I fell out of love with it, and the movie was sort of the last straw. It's a little sad, because Twilight is what introduced me, at age 11, to the wonders of YA fantasy, and I still love it for that.
Inkheart: pretty bad. It wasn't a bad movie, but it didn't really capture the essence of the book at all. The characters looked allright but the portrayal was a little off. The movie was more of a standard, shallow but enjoyable fantasy, but the book was much deeper. Of course, I could never really be happy with the movie, since it's one of my favorite books. It was the first book I truly fell in love with, and more importantly, the book that made me wanted to write. So when I heard about the movie, my first thought was "No, not Inkheart. Please, any other book. Just let this one be." I was kind of dreading the release, and really only went out of curiousity and for my little sister, who was dying to see it. Thankfully it wasn't as bad as I anticipated, but I still left wishing they had left it alone. The biggest problem is that the true greatness of Inkheart is not in the plot, but simply in the wonderful storytelling, which is hard to replicate on screen.
Eragon: terrible. The setting was wrong, the plot was wrong, the characters were WRONG, the basic them was completely and utterly WRONG. If I continue, I'll rant for pages.
In general, I have 2 fundemental objections to movie adaptations of books.
One, movies are a far more comercial media then books. Authors write because they love it, or they need to, or the stupid characters won't stop yelling at them untill they're written down, or a variety of other reasons. Moviemakers make movies for money. No matter how sincere, or how much they love the trade, they're looking for a big earner. By transferring the story to a more comercial media, you are comercializing it, and taking away some of the magic.
Two, much as we want to see our beloved characters on screen, they will never be as good as what we imagine. It's better to let people form their own images, rather than giving it to them. Books where you imagined the characters, setting, and events are far more personal and induvidual then if you're seeing the world how someone else imagined it.

[Kathy Li]

Just a few thoughts on upcoming adaptations...

Is anybody else as worried as I am about Where the Wild Things Are? I mean, first off, doing it live action shows some serious chutzpah, but given how thin the "story" of the Sendak book is, they could be seriously twisting some stuff around to make it work as a feature-length film. OTOH, it could be freaking brilliant. Ah, well.

Since I never read Angels & Demons I'm not sure I care. (facehands) Illuminati? Really?

Land of the Lost, well, it pretty much doesn't matter what the heck they do. I mean to old people like me the Kroft Superstar Show was a classic, but it was so low-budget and goofy and weird that they could do practically anything and it would be ok as long as there were rafts, dinosaurs, and Holly.

Now, The Time Traveler's Wife...omg, is that something they could screw up. That book is so delicately balanced and complex and just plain weird with all the hopping about through time ... it'll take a seriously brilliant screenplay and director to pull this one off.

I'm frankly quite worried about Whiteout. I love that comic. I loved the sequel. Hell, I even loved the parody cross over with Barry Ween. And the movie version was originally scheduled to come out last year. When a studio delays releasing a film for over a year, you know it's in trouble. Now, Kate Beckinsale ain't how I envisioned Marshall Carrie Stetko, but she could pull it off. And it's about time Rucka hit the big screen; his books were made to be Bruckheimer productions.

Astro Boy... well... it almost looks like Tezuka...but ....

[kididio18]

Memoria of a Geisha was a good book but I think that the movie sucked. They left out so much of the detail and they changed alot of it around. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was ok. They lefy out siblings in the movies but other then that it was pretty good.


"Pain is inevitable, Suffering is optional."

[illiriam]

I am slightly concerned about Where the Wild Things Are, because it was my mom's favorite to read to me, and as such, one of my favorites. I hope they do it justice.
Kathy li, I haven;t read Angels and Demons either, but I do enjoy some of Dan Brown's other works. I believe that A&D is supposed to happen before The Da Vinci Code, so this should be interesting.
As for Memoirs of a Geisha, I haven't read or seen it in a while, but I do remember being pretty satisfied after leaving the theater. They did take scenes out that I felt should have been in there, and added new scenes in, but I felt that it all contributed to the story. I felt that the added scenes simply could have been something like a deleted scenes from the book; just because it wasn't in the book doesn't mean it didn't semm probable within the story lines.
I'm still not sure how I felt about The Other Boleyn Girl. It was a good movie, and went along with the book alright, but I seem to feel something was missing.

I used to think that a movie should stay the same as the book, and was outraged whenever anything was taken out or added. I have changes my mind, and I don't know if it was a sudden occurrence or if it happened slowly, over time. Now, I just think that a movie should stay along the lines of the book (otherwise you can't even tell what it was based off of) and that any deviations should fit into the story and contribute. We may (or may no) want a word for word retelling of the book, but we definitely want a story that feels like the book, and leaves us feeling satisfied with it.

[Silverclaw]

I'm not sure about Where The Wild Things Are either. The previews seem all right, but.... missing something. I thought the Angels and Demons movie was ok, the Da Vinci Code was better but I liked the book more too.

[mollyculeofwater]

yeha

I thought Harry Potter had good books and movies!

[Mona0622]

Ballet Shoes: The movie lost a lot of the book, and changed a lot. They made the three Fossil sisters older, and added in a romance that was completely uncalled for. Besides, Pauline is very thin, not the opposite. I think most of all though, that it lost it's side that was about how hard it was for them t make ends meet, and that they replaced it with the side that was the ambition to be famous. That ruined it for me.

yes, I know that this was from a while ago, but I'm just now coming back onto the site.

I didn't know that they made Ballet Shoes into a movie. When did they do that? Are they doing the other two also?

[Kathy Li]

It was originally done as a tv movie on the BBC (I think it was a Christmas special), although it did see some theatrical release internationally. The IMDb entry for it is here, and the BBC website is here. Haven't seen any plans to adapt any of the other Noel Streatfeild books.

[Garrett Fitzgerald]

I had just enough chutzpah that when they I saw the casting call for WTWTA on somebody's Livejournal (I think), I emailed asking if Max absolutely had to be a boy. :-) (Erin's grandpa used to call her "Hurricane Erin", so I figured she had a decent chance of pulling off a wild rumpus...)

Edit: We saw and liked Ballet Shoes -- we caught it on DVD a few months back. Since we hadn't read the original, we didn't need to worry about changes in the adaptation.

Edit again: And Emma's going to Brown in the fall. I've been plotting alumni methods for stalking for a few weeks now, but haven't come up with anything better than showing up for an off-year Commencement Procession. Yet. :-)

[Silverclaw]

I saw Where the Wild Things Are, and thought it was pretty good. I was expecting a little kids movie, and it really wasn't. The wild things were great, but I wasn't crazy about the ending.