At the movies from the bookstore
Jul. 18th, 2009 04:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
float_on_alrightMovies based on books seem to be more popular than ever and so I've decided to give my opinion on the general "book to movie" debate.
No matter what directors/writers/etc. do, the readers in the audience will always say "that didn't happen in the book", "it didn't happen like that", "they left out the part where (fill in the blank)", etc. It's unavoidable. Fans of books are passionate people, but often, these same fans are least able to judge the movie because they are too wrapped up in judging whether or not the movie was the book. I have often been guilty.
Taking a step back, I'd like to say that anyone who makes a decent movie out of a book generally regarded as great should be congratulated. Film can do wonderful, magical things but books often use point of view, voice, word choice, types of narration to capture the audience's imagination that film is unable to recreate. For example, Twilight is a first person point of view narrative and it is the voice and tone of the story that enraptured it's fans because if we're being honest, there is not a lot of variety amongst the plots in vampire love stories.
Imagine what the movie would have been like if Kristin Stewart had talked over every scene. I think it's fairly obvious that narration such as that would not work in film. If you're a fan, you know that a different studio was originally going to film Twilight and that the script they had written was so wildly different, it was said that the plot was unrecognizable and if it hadn't had the same title with the same character names, no one would have connected the book with the movie. A movie that makes such radical changes should never bother associating with the book.
When you translate book to movie, we've established there are some things that just don't work. In a movie you get (basically) 2-3 hours to tell a story (approx.150 pages worth of script for a 2.5 hour movie) that someone else used 250-700 pages to write. Film does have the advantage of showing you the setting where a book needs to describe it, but film has to take a story told all in words, words that are often the ramblings of a particular character, and make a coherent and enjoyable audio/visual story. I love The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, but the reason I was able to enjoy the movie Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was because I knew that it would be impossible to make things like Adams' tangent about bypasses apart of a visual narrative. I accepted beforehand that the written narrative would have be considerably changed for the visual narrative to work.
The movie is not the book. It's the movie. If it helps, think of the movie as an homage. You don't want an exact replica like a painter who paints a copy of another's painting. You might be impressed (or not) by the ability to technically copy the original (or not) but there is personal no art to it (talent maybe but not creativity). And it's obvious which is the original. An homage takes a different approach, often using a different medium or a different style, giving it new life and hopefully new fans. A good homage will still capture what people recognize and love about the original. I've begun approaching all movies made from books with this mindset because it allows me to watch and enjoy a good movie and if I am disappointed it's movie-merit based, not because there were a few details from the book missing. All I ask, is that film stick to the basics of the book. Things like theme, general plot, and well, the "essence" of the story should stay intact.
No matter what directors/writers/etc. do, the readers in the audience will always say "that didn't happen in the book", "it didn't happen like that", "they left out the part where (fill in the blank)", etc. It's unavoidable. Fans of books are passionate people, but often, these same fans are least able to judge the movie because they are too wrapped up in judging whether or not the movie was the book. I have often been guilty.
Taking a step back, I'd like to say that anyone who makes a decent movie out of a book generally regarded as great should be congratulated. Film can do wonderful, magical things but books often use point of view, voice, word choice, types of narration to capture the audience's imagination that film is unable to recreate. For example, Twilight is a first person point of view narrative and it is the voice and tone of the story that enraptured it's fans because if we're being honest, there is not a lot of variety amongst the plots in vampire love stories.
Imagine what the movie would have been like if Kristin Stewart had talked over every scene. I think it's fairly obvious that narration such as that would not work in film. If you're a fan, you know that a different studio was originally going to film Twilight and that the script they had written was so wildly different, it was said that the plot was unrecognizable and if it hadn't had the same title with the same character names, no one would have connected the book with the movie. A movie that makes such radical changes should never bother associating with the book.
When you translate book to movie, we've established there are some things that just don't work. In a movie you get (basically) 2-3 hours to tell a story (approx.150 pages worth of script for a 2.5 hour movie) that someone else used 250-700 pages to write. Film does have the advantage of showing you the setting where a book needs to describe it, but film has to take a story told all in words, words that are often the ramblings of a particular character, and make a coherent and enjoyable audio/visual story. I love The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, but the reason I was able to enjoy the movie Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was because I knew that it would be impossible to make things like Adams' tangent about bypasses apart of a visual narrative. I accepted beforehand that the written narrative would have be considerably changed for the visual narrative to work.
The movie is not the book. It's the movie. If it helps, think of the movie as an homage. You don't want an exact replica like a painter who paints a copy of another's painting. You might be impressed (or not) by the ability to technically copy the original (or not) but there is personal no art to it (talent maybe but not creativity). And it's obvious which is the original. An homage takes a different approach, often using a different medium or a different style, giving it new life and hopefully new fans. A good homage will still capture what people recognize and love about the original. I've begun approaching all movies made from books with this mindset because it allows me to watch and enjoy a good movie and if I am disappointed it's movie-merit based, not because there were a few details from the book missing. All I ask, is that film stick to the basics of the book. Things like theme, general plot, and well, the "essence" of the story should stay intact.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}