Archive for the ‘Books’ tag
Movies based on books? Not exactly a novel idea.
If you’ve seen a movie made in the last year or two, it’s probably based on a graphic novel or comic book. Let’s face it, the geeks are growing up and influencing everything. Even Hollywood is no longer safe. In fact, this years two biggest movies The Dark Knight and Iron Man were based on comic books.
Heath Ledger: Great casting choice for the Joker
Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, and Michael Caine took some pretty comic-y characters, and transformed them into “real” people.
But remember back in a time long ago (ok, maybe it never ended) when movies were based on books? Honest to God, black text on a white page, no pretty pictures, novels? And of course, you’d have the people who had read the book having these long, drawn out annoying arguments about whether the movie was better or worse than the book. As Hollywood rapidly runs out of original ideas, these movies are making a huge comeback, especially in the children’s fantasy genre. Just to name a few, Harry Potter, The Golden Compass, Narnia, etc. etc. So what’s really the deal with these movies?
Novels converted into screenplays have always been a mixed bag. It’s great to see a well made film adaptation of your favourite books, where the characters, scenes and dialogue are well fleshed out in the screenplay, and where everything comes to life. The Lord of the Rings is a good relatively recent example. It had a great screenplay, great effects, and excellent actors. There was very little to complain about.
Paul Walker: Bad Casting Choice. For Anything.
On the flip side, there’s also the very high risk of the books content being churned into something that Hollywood feels would be more acceptable to the masses, with the resulting product being something barely recognizable from the original. Take “Timeline” for example, a novel that was designed to break thestereotypes that surround modern views on the Middle Ages. It took our modern conceptions of the old world, dashed them down, and gave us a whole new look at life in the 1600s.
The movie was pretty good too. And by “pretty good”, I mean “a farcical disaster”. It took all the stereotypes it could find about the Middle Ages, stuffed it into one movie, added some terrible acting, some cheesy special effects, and then rushed it out into theatres. Unfortunately, this seems to be a characteristic of almost all of Crichtons book-to-movies.
An odd occurrence is when a movie adapted from the screenplay becomes iconic in itself; the source material becomes irrelevant, as the movie has become strong enough to stand on it’s own. In the case of a movie like The Godfather (originally written by Mario Puzo), the movie stays relatively close to the source material. Some scenes are almost word for word from the novel. However, the content matter is something that works much better on the silver screen than in prose. Reading about a gun fight just doesn’t have the same effect as watching it. And I don’t think there’s any way to represent Marlon Brando saying “Bonnnaaserrraa” in text.
Bonnnassera!
Ultimately, I think that a movie doesn’t necessarily have to follow the source material to be good; a good movie will always be good, and a bad movie bad, regardless of the source material. Some people tend to lose sight of this fact when talking about screenplay adaptations. The movie could be brilliant, but still regarded as “bad” in the eyes of some, since it strayed from the original source material. Don’t think about the book, just enjoy the movie!*
*or walk out halfway if it’s really terrible.
http://theuncritic.org