I felt confusion and then pique when Scatman Crothers received an axe to his stomach. As a preteen in the theater watching The Shining, I thought I knew the story. I read a whole lotta Stephen King as a kid and when Scatman gets offed by Jack Nicholson, I was offended that Stanley Kubrick decided to kill off one of the heroes of the book. What I didn’t understand then was this was a Kubrick film and not a King book.
Richard Schickel writes about Hollywood adapting movies from books in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times. You can read it here, but let me summarize: Hollywood improves low culture books, ruins high culture books and tries to capture middle brow books like Harry Potter and Gone with the Wind. He also thinks movies are closest to Victorian literature, in that they are narrative-driven.
Although he doesn’t say it, I assume he meant standard-fare movies, movies for unwashed masses at the multiplex. There are lots of movies out there that are not narrative-driven. Besides famous foreign art films like Breathless and La Doche Vita, there are American films like Waking Life, Magnolia, and perhaps the entire oeuvre of Robert Altman.
Unlike in my pre-teen years, I now believe novels and movies to be apples and oranges. Charlie Kaufman certainly proved that with his film, Adaptation, which has zip to do about orchid thieves. I prefer to movies to change the book, otherwise I might as well stay home. Silence of the Lambs was so thoroughly like the book that I was bored. They should carry the spirit of the book. The movie Troy was a complete stranger to Homer’s Iliad, but it certainly nailed the hubris and pointlessness of the battle. I could have done without the prerequisite “NOooooooo” scene, in which the hero cries out when he sees a friend about to be hurt, but petulant Pitt seemed as narcissistic as Achilles ever could be.
Of course it would take a director with balls as big as church bells to do something drastically different to the Harry Potter franchise. The Potter books and movies are fine entertainment, but I giggle like a little girl thinking of what a maverick director like Kubrick or a visual artist like Mathew Barney, or a whackjob like Alejandro Jodorowsky could do to a Potter film.
But people are comforted by predictability. Even French movies are easy to predict—a main character will die. Our lives governed by enough chaos as is, a little celluloid familiarity is a good thing I suppose. So Harry Potter will do exactly as the book has plotted him to do. But I recommend only reading books that can’t possibly be turned into movies. Gertrude Stein, anyone?
Richard Schickel writes about Hollywood adapting movies from books in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times. You can read it here, but let me summarize: Hollywood improves low culture books, ruins high culture books and tries to capture middle brow books like Harry Potter and Gone with the Wind. He also thinks movies are closest to Victorian literature, in that they are narrative-driven.
Although he doesn’t say it, I assume he meant standard-fare movies, movies for unwashed masses at the multiplex. There are lots of movies out there that are not narrative-driven. Besides famous foreign art films like Breathless and La Doche Vita, there are American films like Waking Life, Magnolia, and perhaps the entire oeuvre of Robert Altman.
Unlike in my pre-teen years, I now believe novels and movies to be apples and oranges. Charlie Kaufman certainly proved that with his film, Adaptation, which has zip to do about orchid thieves. I prefer to movies to change the book, otherwise I might as well stay home. Silence of the Lambs was so thoroughly like the book that I was bored. They should carry the spirit of the book. The movie Troy was a complete stranger to Homer’s Iliad, but it certainly nailed the hubris and pointlessness of the battle. I could have done without the prerequisite “NOooooooo” scene, in which the hero cries out when he sees a friend about to be hurt, but petulant Pitt seemed as narcissistic as Achilles ever could be.
Of course it would take a director with balls as big as church bells to do something drastically different to the Harry Potter franchise. The Potter books and movies are fine entertainment, but I giggle like a little girl thinking of what a maverick director like Kubrick or a visual artist like Mathew Barney, or a whackjob like Alejandro Jodorowsky could do to a Potter film.
But people are comforted by predictability. Even French movies are easy to predict—a main character will die. Our lives governed by enough chaos as is, a little celluloid familiarity is a good thing I suppose. So Harry Potter will do exactly as the book has plotted him to do. But I recommend only reading books that can’t possibly be turned into movies. Gertrude Stein, anyone?
1 comment:
Thank you. And thank you for your thoughts on the heartbreaking process known as adaptation; they were great.
I've always had the fantasy of adapting James Joyce's Ulysses into a miniseries. A pipe dream for sure, but aren't all fantasies pipe dreams?
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