I feel like at various times this week, I mentally threw down tons of detailed discourses on tons of subjects that I would write about today. Like on book-to-movie adaptations and why people get so worked up about it....and I think at 5 this morning I was reciting my dream to myself so I would remember and tell you all about it.
The thing about me, is that whenever I start thinking up some argument or my opinions on a subject, I'll really think it over, and once it's properly sorted out, I'll forget all about it. You know, it's sort of like writing stories that I do--as long as they're unfinished, they'll come back to me and I'll
DID YOU KNOW that the last thing I wrote/finished for my superhero series was over a year ago?? That means that all the things I've thought up for that series in the past year have never been written. I believe I've got a few pages on the second installment, but that's it. Kinda intense slacking on my part, seeing as I try to think about these storylines most every day.
I saw WATCHMEN this weekend, which is one of the reasons I was going to talk about film adaptations. Especially after seeing the Harry Potter, it became clear to me how some people get it right, and some people get it oh so wrong.
Some of that film was actually and literally taken straight from the pages, frame by frame emulated in moving sequence. Dialogue, too, whole scenes copied word-for-word. And then there were the deviations and abridgments one expects in an adaptation. I know they toted it as being super faithful to the graphic novel, but some times the undiluted passages came over extremely dull. And the stuff they changed in order to make it all fit (and to make the ending more palatable to a modern audience) was really rather contrived. (Also, the acting was horrendous.)
Alan Moore, the writer of Watchmen, has for years insisted that should a movie ever be made of his work, he would refuse to see it. You'll note his name is no where to be seen on that DVD. His reason being that when he set out to do what he did, he was aiming to reinvent the way comics did things. He was going to show the world what comics could do, narratively, visually. Things that only comics could do, a showcase not only for his art but for his art form. To make a movie, a different art form, from it would defeat much of its purpose.
And in the WATCHMEN's case, he was pretty much right. Normally, I would take a different stance about this, but that particular film was a poor adaptation, and chances are no one could have done better. Normally, my opinion is this:
Comparing a book to the film adaptation (specifically, criticizing the film for not matching up to the book point for point) is like comparing a sculpture inspired by a painting. Say someone paints a beautiful tree, and then someone decides to sculpt that same tree, only in the three dimensional medium of stone or what have you. The content is the same, the heart of it is the same, but clearly the methods of delivering the content to your eyes is utterly different. They're meant to be.
Saying something like "the Harry Potter movies are inferior to the books because they don't show every little detail" is like saying, "this sculpture is all wrong. Look, they even messed up the color of the sky! No, wait, they didn't even bother putting the sky in!" Well DUH you can't put a sky in a sculpture, just like you can't put fourteen pages of a character's thoughts into a 2 and a half hour movie.
What you have to do is see if the movie is, at it's very core, the same as the book. Does it impart all the meaning as the book? Does it make you feel the same? Then, as long as the movie is well made--by movie making standards--then that's a good adaptation, whether you like it or the book better. If you absolutely have to know what Harry was thinking at any given moment, you're welcome to read the book.
That's not a very good example of complaints the book fans have with the movies, but I can't actually think of any real ones at the moment. My point is, good books are defined by a set of standards, and good films have their own set. You can't judge the movie simply by how it fails to be a book.
Unless it's WATCHMEN, which, even as a movie, could have been improved greatly. I remember in ninth grade having to film a couple of scenes from Romeo and Juliet for English class--if you can imagine us standing around in silly costumes reading the foreign text in listless and unschooled voices.........that was WATCHMEN.
Well that's not really how I meant to spend this Thursday. Oh well. It was probably more interesting than how I spent the week, which was pretty uneventful as far as I can tell. Saw STAR TREK again at the cheap theater with Carolyn and Jacqi. I unashamedly wore my Ops shirt there, and I think the ticket lady was laughing at it, but it was very hard to tell whether or not she was actually laughing, and if so, what specifically she was laughing at.
-Steph
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