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Wednesday, December 15, 2004
The Thursday Bookworm
I had these all answered and then I clicked "add entry" and my DSL modem spazzed and my entry was eaten by this blasted machine. And it was long and well-thought-out too. So I had to go away from the computer for a while before I had the energy to try to re-create it. No promises though.
I am a slave to surveys, as anyone who has spent three seconds reading this journal probably knows. This one is from The Thursday Bookworm. I've lifted these surveys from KiwiRia before but this is the first time I've gone to the source myself.
1. What is your favorite movie adapted from a book that you have actually read? Was it pretty true to the original author's vision, or was too much vital information left out or changed?
Pride and Prejudice -- the 5-hour A&E/BBC version. Even after repeated viewings I still do not find flaws in it.
A close second on this one is To Kill A Mockingbird.
2. What, in your opinion, is the worst movie adaptation of a book? What did you not like about it?
Possession by A.S. Byatt. The book was so rich, so fascinating -- and the movie was a hollow shell, with two Americans in the lead of what is a very British story (and one of them wasn't even pretending to be British; they wrote his character as an American, which was a travesty in this case).
3. Have you ever liked the movie version of a book despite its glaring differences from the original story?
This is going to be very shocking to people who know me. Debi, are you sitting down? Susan? Everyone else? OK. I really, really like Patricia Rozema's movie Mansfield Park. In all honesty, I rented it once (for free, from the library) because I wanted to be able to criticize it and know what I was criticizing. But wow. For once in my life I was able to separate the movie from the book (which I love) and enjoy the movie as its own work even though it deviated in staggering ways from the source material. It was an interpretation rather than a retelling, which is something I usually do not let filmmakers get away with, when defenders of movies which deviate from the original use it as their reasoning. Usually I say, if you're not going to tell the story the way the author intended it, you can write your own story with your own characters and not try to ride on the author's coattails. But maybe it was because Rozema strayed so far from the original in so many ways that I was able to forgive her for it in this case, I don't know. All I know is that I really enjoyed this pretty, emotionally rich, originally-directed film, even with its flaws (and there were a few, even apart from the adaptation thing).
And then there are movies that have been part of our lives and culture for so long, so thoroughly ingrained in our childhoods, that we can like them even though they stray wildly from the books on which they were based. Two that come ot mind are The Wizard of Oz and "Little House on the Prairie".
4. Have you ever seen a movie adaptation that actually made you go out and read that book after seeing the film?
Hmm. Pollyanna. The Man from Snowy River (a really great Australian poem is the basis for this pretty movie). The Fiddler on the Roof (Sholem Alecheim's stories are hard to get through if I read a lot of them at a time, but one at a time, they were very interesting). Bambi (didn't like the book). Forrest Gump (book was execrable). I don't remember if I read Pygmalion before I saw My Fair Lady or not. I have gone seeking autobiographies of the people depicted in The Sound of Music. And I know there are some examples I'm forgetting here.
And there are a lot of adaptations where I'm already familiar with the book, but watching the movie gives me the itch to read that particular book again. Just about any film adaptation will do that to me.
5. Have you ever seen a movie without knowing beforehand that it had first been published in book form?
Mostly when I was little -- things like Mary Poppins, etc. Well, here's a big example: Every single Disney animated feature film up until The Lion King was based on outside source material, and I had no idea about some of those -- again, when I was little. I know there are some from my adulthood too but I just can't think of them offhand.
One question that was left off here that I think is a good one is: Are there any adaptations where you like the movie better than the book? And two that come to mind here are The Black Stallion (heart-poundingly beautiful movie, just stunning, based on an average-at-best boy-and-horse book -- but let's give the author credit; from what I understand he wrote it in high school) and Forrest Gump as mentioned before. I don't love the movie of that one, but I couldn't even get five pages into the book. Oh, and Wings of the Dove. I just cannot get into Henry James -- and I'm not afraid of older literature. He is just so dry and bleak in his writing style; I can read a page and have no idea what I've just read. But the 1997 movie of this is, well, very racy, and also quite engaging.
