Whenever a book is slated to be made into a movie, people always wonder whether or not it's going to hold up during the conversion process. It should be pretty evident by now that they're not going to. They can't; it's not possible. There are always going to be story elements, exposition, setting details, etc. left out simply because of time constraints. A novel is simply too long to translate into a 2 hour movie. And children's books are usually too short to fill 100 minutes, so things are usually added to the story, again causing people like it less than the book.
In that case, I think people should just stop going into the movie with the mindset that it'll be a perfect visual representationof the book and take it as its own entity. That's probably hard for people to do, to keep an open mind about, but the two mediums are vastly different, able to invoke emotions in different ways. Given the proper direction, an actor can portray a sadness that we can immediately feel with their eyes alone, while an author may need several clever metaphors to get the point across. But perhaps those metaphors provide a more specific description of the characters true feelings. It's a problem that cannot really be solved outside of narration, which shouldn't be used with certain movie genres entirely.
It goes without saying that a lot of critically acclaimed movies start their lives as books, but in most cases the phrase "not as good as the book" still gets thrown around. I get it, everyone gets it. People should stop saying it altogether. In my opinion, if a movie is clearly superior to its book form, it was poorly written.
Now that I think about it, I should probably read Choke before that movie comes out.
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4 comments:
I know you and I have had a drunken discussion about this before, especially pertaining to comic book movies. I really do try to not compare the two, unfortunately sometimes if it is a book I read (like Eragon or Golden Compass) and the movie is bad, I cannot help, but say that the book was better.
But, Lord of the Rings or Chronicles of Narnia, those movies were great adaptations of books. 300 was an absolute marvel compared to the comic (which was great, but the movie blew it out of the water)...
I always love when people want to brag about reading books, for example, i love the people who say things like "oh, the book for I am Legend was so much better than the movie." I would love to know 5 years ago, how many people actually read the book as compared to all the people who say, or have read it now. I think some people just love being into that status thing. Just like people who love to tell you how they used to listen to a band before they became big. Everyone has heard a band before they became big, and it is cool to say that you were listening to them back in the day, but I really hate when people start saying how they no longer like the band because they are popular....wow, that became a rant, sorry...
Yeah, that whole recent reading thing annoys me too. I will admit, though, that sometimes I try to read a book before I see the movie if I think the movie will do a poor job of including all the details (like I did with the DaVinci Code and Hitchhikers Guide). Otherwise I'm perfectly fine not reading the book.
And graphic novel translations seem to be easier to produce, since so much of the content is dialog. I guess its just harder to convey something like descriptions involving smell or touch through a visual medium.
I completely know what you mean.
Right now I have a huge fear, that the Watchmen movie will suck balls. Yeah they got Zach Snyder (300) to direct, but turning 300 into a movie, fairly easy, it's basically one giant storyboard. It was a four issue miniseries in an oversized format. Not a ton of dialog, instead beautiful art and great visual battle scenes.
Watchmen, completely different. It was a 12 issue maxiseries. It takes like a year to read because there are so many words.
The reason it is so great is because there are so many small storylines throughout, that make the overall story so much better. It's not one of those stories where you can boil it down to a simple story and tell it in 2 hours. It needs to either be a 2-part movie or a 4 hour movie.
Yeah, I have a feeling that movie is going to cut a lot of subplots out. Maybe even entire characters. Either that or they'll act like the audience knows the subject matter already and not have any back story at all.
Hopefully its neither of those, though, and the movie winds up as great as the novel.
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