See, I hated the book. 5 & 6 just didn't do it for me. But from everything I hear, it looks like the movies are getting progressively better whilst the books get steadily worse.

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and the way the PCs react to him.

Heh.

Anyways - what you say here is pretty much what I'm hearing from all the reasonable movie reviewers I've been reading. Makes me want to see the movie more than the fanboy responses I've seen, and definitely more than the "it's different from the book so it's bad" crowd.

My friends went to see it at 3AM on Imax last night. They invited me along, but I told them they were crazy. Will probably make a date of it with my lady this weekend. She's never read the book, so has nothing to compare it to. Will she like it, do you think? She's only ever seen the movies, never read any of the books.

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I think that by and large, the qualities that make a book awesome aren't the qualities that make movies awesome, and it's rare when you find something that jines up.

*smirk* And haven't I just learned all about this from my adaptation class - learning that what works in prose isn't necessarily going to work visually on the big screen. (I got a B on my script, btw.)

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I got a B on a script for my adaptation as well when I was a junior in college. I adapted "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" by JD Salinger. What did you adapt?

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It was actually Sonny's lover, Lucy Mancini, whose vagina was too big, the implication being that even though he's married, she sleeps with Sonny because he's the only man she's ever met who is sufficiently well-endowed to satisfy her.

Sonny's wife, Sandra, is a pretty good sport about the whole thing (at least in the book), the implication being that she's pretty tired of getting railed by someone who is sufficiently well-endowed to satisfy even the gaping Lucy Mancini.

Yeah, it's probably best that they left all that out.

I wonder if anyone ever told Mario Puzo about the clitoris?

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Considering the culture he's writing about, it shouldn't come as such a shock.

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Be that as it may, I will never forgive Peter Jackson for leaving Tom Bombadil out of "Fellowship." NEVER!

He is dead to me...

:-P

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I'll never forgive the academy for rewarding those horrid pieces of casting gone awry.

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The Godfather wasn't a great book, but it wasn't a terrible book, either. The thing to keep in mind is that Puzo's writing about people who are, quite simply, monsters- by their own choice or not.

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If you eliminated every scene from the book "Order of the Phoenix" that didn't advance the plot, it would fit into a half-hour television show with time for commercials.

(Haven't seen the movie, but that book did much of nothing for 900 pages, IMO.)

((Still gonna go see it because, y'know, huge fan.))

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The graphic novels are, in my humblest opinion, awesome. The movie completely destroyed the characters, and all in all it just hurt to watch.

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"and the way the PCs react to him"

Sounds like someone's ready for RPG night this week.

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Ah, see, for plain old story-telling, I am liking the books less and less as they progress and the movies more and more. The books, with each subsequent one since 3, are feeling more clunky - she is having to work harder to do what she wants to do and while that doesn't make the books BAD, per se, it makes them a lot less...smooth. Meanwhile the movie makers are getting better at distilling things down to a central story line and they are getting better at hitting those emotional points that are so belabored in the books.

I agree about the rest, though - movies are defined by what is there, not by absence.

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The problem with the books at about the point you're talking about is that they seem to be written more and more to be made into a movie. I can't come up with any specific example, but more and more it just feels like it's being distilled into what might make a good movie scene as opposed to a good book scene.

The latest one (whatever it was called - can't remember and can't be buggered to look it up) seemed the worst of the lot and made me realize they had been going that way for a few books now. If the Deathly Hallows follows the same progression I think people will be disappointed by it.

Hopefully I'm wrong.

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Damn straight.

I wish people would get that about Disney, come to think of it--the company has a few giant flaws, but "making movies that ZOMG deviate from the original fairy tales" doesn't count.

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I challenge one specific movie: Hunchback. Not because Quasi lives-- everyone in my class knew that in the book, he dies. No, because almost everyone knew he was supposed to die at the end, and everyone assumed that it was because he fell off the cathedral and Phoebus didn't catch him.
Except, um, no. It doesn't happen that way.
So changing the story in a way that it is clear it has been changed, but misleading for *how*, that bugs me. I don't mind changing folklore; stories is stories, and it's not like there's a One True Cinderella (one shoe to rule them all...) but a genre of similar stories. It's collaborative fiction.

(Pocahontas? Nope, not touching.)

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Have you ever read a book based on a movie which was better than the movie? Ie: The movie came first, rather than the book?

This is not an accusation. Just pondering.

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A book based on a movie? You mean, a novelization?

I still adore the Close Encounters of the Third Kind novel.

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OTOH, when a book (series) is almost entirely source material, what then?

I'm thinking of LotR, of course.

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The expectations of people who loved the books are a heavy burden for a movie to bear. The Starship Troopers movie is a good example. Most people hated it, because it bore only a superficial resemblance to the book and greatly distorted the book's message. I watched the movie before reading the book, and enjoyed it, because I went in expecting a fun action movie about Space Nazis fighting Giant Bugs, and that was exactly what I got.

Granted, now that I've gone back and read the book and most of Heinlein's other books, I like the book much better, but I still insist the movie isn't as bad as it's made out to be.

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Starship Troopers was a fine "blow the bugs away" movie that neatly skirted the whole "price of freedom" theme of the book, but the movie did such a good job with the shooting and the dying (even if I am dissapointed that the mobile infantry was undergeared compared to the book - I mean, seriously, making the mini-nukes squad support, and the lack of exo-skeleton armor, but I suppose that sort of special effects takes money, which was needed for the bugs)

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I had the same reaction to Serenity. I saw it and thought "there is NO WAY anyone who hasn't seen Firefly will get this movie." And then I spoke to my dad, who had seen it unbeknownst to me, and he got it just fine. Granted, there's probably a lot he missed - I somehow doubt he wailed in anguish when OMG SPOILER - but it just goes to show.

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I saw Serenity first and it was a fine film; then I watched Firefly and Serenity again at the end and it's a better film. I think it often works that way, you can get most things coming in part way through, but you GET it if you've had the build up.

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I hated the book, especially the Umbridge character. This may be the first HP movie I like more than the book. I really felt like she redeemed herself with "Half-Blood Prince," truly moved the plot forward.

The problem with Rowling is that she's become so big no editor will properly contain her, and she needs to listen to her editors. I found seven easily spotted errors in the last book, and when you have that much money and distribution, errors like that should be caught.

But she also needs an editor that will challenge her story, not just correct typos.

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I just read the book last week and I was confused by the movie. They did distill it down a lot, and I think they were skipping stuff that would have made it a little clearer as to what was happening.

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Of course, without the Hospital scene we're also unlikely to get the "character X was the possible alternative" scene in the film of book 6. Which means that various bits of fan speculation are unlikely to come to pass in book 7.

Which is interesting :->

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Movies tend to ride on cinematography, powerful acting performances, and script writing. Books tend to ride on ideas, descriptions, and engrossing plotlines. It's why Stephen King books usually need huge modifications to adapt to the silver screen - while the cinematography is usually pretty easy to translate, he tends to have understated character types and plot resolutions that are not very visually impressive (barring his quick and dirty short stories or Green Mile). You'll also notice that all of the actors that tend to steal the show in King adapted movies bring their own personalities that give life to the understated characters - Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman, Ian McKellan. Tom Hanks, who is pretty adaptable but doesn't have much innate definition, was almost a prop in Green Mile and could easily have been replaced and Tim Robbins could also have been a million other actors in Shawshank.

Anyway, my point before I got irrevocably lost on a tangent was that descriptions and background only do so much for a movie. Movie flows are much more fast paced and if you spend too much time dicking around on enriching the characters without being clear and straightforward and letting the viewers know this will be important, you get Lord of the Rings I, which was decent eye candy but rife with masturbatory scenes that get the fanboys' juices flowing without really adding much universal appeal.

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if you spend too much time dicking around on enriching the characters without being clear and straightforward and letting the viewers know this will be important, you get Lord of the Rings I, which was decent eye candy but rife with masturbatory scenes that get the fanboys' juices flowing without really adding much universal appeal.

Considering that Lord of the Rings is one of the top 50 most-grossing movies of all time, adjusted for inflation, I think the words "without adding much universal appeal" is one of the least defensible statements ever made.

Unless, of course, you think that Lord of the Rings was flowing with such universal appeal to begin with that adding the masturbatory scenes didn't kill it.

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It's not nearly as good as the book. A few parts are better, but most don't have the depth. But it's very nice anyway.

Exactly.

And the question you have to answer is: is it worth $8? And is it worth the screaming children?

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I can like books and movies separatelt even if they are quite different. However, with things like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen I get a huge hate on if the movie is bad and/or vastly different, because then the actual property will never be made well, a.k.a. Fuck Constantine.

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Same here for LXG. I was thinking "OK, they threw in Tom Sawyer to appeal to the Americans, whatever." But they made a totally sucktacular action-adventure movie. And, they had the plot turn on (I don't CARE if this is a spoiler, no-one should see the movie) Dorian Gray (also added to the movie, for some weird reason, why expand a crossover character if you're not planning to abide by the source material; in fact, the filmakers even got his LOOKS wrong because they were looking at the wrong PORTRAIT on the collected GN cover) dying if he saw his picture. It sucks enough, as an Oscar Wilde fan, to know that this is not what happened in the books, but the fact that when we first meet him, there is a HUGE GAP on the wall where his EVIL DORIAN-KILLING PORTRAIT had been hung, right where he could LOOK AT IT AND DIIIIIIIIIE! is crappy plotting no matter what the source material.

I only get pissy about changes if they miss something very important or screw up the book. As for Harry Potter, I hated the fact that they left out the Animagus/Patronus connection in the movie of Prisoner of Azkaban. For reasons obvious to those who read the book and spoilery to those who want to, this was a big missing gap in the subtext of the movie, which was too bad, because it was otherwise really well done, with great respect to JK Rowling and the audience.

I don't freaking care that Hermione's dress was pink in the Goblet of Fire movie and periwinkle in the book. If the periwinkle color had been an important plot-point, I'd feel differently. If they'd put Ron in REALLY NICE dress robes instead of the character-developing all-the-Weasleys-could-afford ones, that'd be different. (In other costuming changes, the costumers of Gone with the Wind asked Margaret Mitchell if there was a REASON Scarlett O'Hara wore so much green, and she said, no, she just liked green herself. Since Scarlett had Mitchell's green eyes, it makes sense. The costumes in the film are much more varied and symbolic in coloration; for instance, the red dress she wears to Ashley's birthday is much, much more "fallen woman" than the green-velvet bustle gown described in the book, no matter how large its rose trimming or low-cut, and the white outfit she wears earlier shows that, really, that particular embrace with Ashley WAS innocent. But the sprigged barbeque dress and the dress made from curtains are much as described in the book, because they fit the visual symbolism.)


As for Stephen King, discussed in threads above, I was very disappointed by the change in the ending of Apt Pupil. It was too "LOOKIT ME, MA, I'M MAKING WRITERLY CONNECTIONS," compared to the chilling-in-its-calm-telling ending of the novella. And, up until then, except for leaving out a few dream sequences that would have made it NC-17, it had been a faithful AND good adaptation.

Finally, we were discussing Big Fish last week. It didn't make a good book, in my opinion, the grand stories didn't tell well in the simple style the author used, but they worked damn well in Tim Burtony technicolor.

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On a slightly different track, I saw Serenity before watching Firefly. The movie stood on it's own quite well, and gave me the information I needed. Sure, I wasn't affected by the death of Wash or Book as much as if I'd seen the show first, but the movie still communicated it was a tragedy. But a lot of my friends felt you could only appreciate the movie having seen (and memorized) the series.

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My dear, it was Lucy Mancini who had the huge vagina, not Sonny's wife-that's why he loved doing her all the time, she fit his "huge" manhood.

Or did you skip that part of the book? Come on, I know you were into knowing Sonny's dick size (KIDDING!!!)

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On an unrelated topic -- your posts haven't been showing up on my friends list for a month now! I thought you died or something.

--m4

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what's funny is king has said he writes in a sort of movie style, in that what he "sees" in his head is very visual... he was inspired by all those old saturday shorts. i also think that shawshank is one of his best novellas, and certainly one of his best movies. (usually they all suck because it's hard to translate his supernatural stuff to the screen... either the director sucks or the effects suck or both.) i do think that the movie might actually have been better than the story, though, because it kind of opened up the world for me. sorta like fight club.

the only thing that pissed me off about them leaving things out of a harry potter movie was in prizoner of azkaban... they didn't go into the whole mauraders' histories, so it didn't explain why harry thought he saw his dad across the lake. that i think shouldn't have been left out.

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