Deis' Literary Chaos - Page 3

quote BullFish

On adaptions:

I am inclined to agree. The best example I can thin of are Harry Potter, so bear with me.

The novels, when the came out, or moreso became popular (I love telling people how I read them the years or so before they became popular) they were incredible. As a pre-pubescent boy, I loved the idea that a normal boy, like myself, would become something awesome and get to shoot things out of my wand (lolwut?). But, when I heard they were making them into a film, I was skeptical, for the reason you listed in your first post. Books are made to be read, as simplistic as that is. If these novels were meant to be plays, they would have stage directions. If they were meant to be interpreted as songs, they would have music accompanying them. They do not. Therefore, they are words.

The Harry Potter films, whilst amazing as films about a boy wizard, were not amazing as films based on a book. There is just way too much detail, in as little as one sentence, to be put into a movie. It is those little sentence long descriptions or the like that make the novel a masterpiece, and, unfortunately, it is these simple sentences which are ignored. This trend does follow suit in most adaptions, too. Lord of the Rings is probably the best novel to film adaptation, in my opinion, if simply for Peter Jackson's love of the text.

Plays to films, comics to films, video games to films: they are all often not as good as the original, because, as I said before, the originals were not made to be films.

<sub>I disagree with the Harry Potter comparison, and im a harry potter fan and read all books to date. I think the movies are fantastic, hell the first movie got me into the books when I was 14; So I think I could be biased on them. While the books obviously has more info, some(I use this lightly) of the info wasn't necessary for the movie.

The only complaints I have on the movie is not enough fighting or maybe tidbits of interesting info like in the books, but other wise the movies has been fantastic.
Best example is Order of the Phoenix where I believe there was more fighting then what was shown in the movie, but that shouldn't take away how awesome the movie was.

No book to movie adaptation will be perfect or spot on. This is fact; and depends on who's directing and filming etc.

LOTR(Lord of The Rings) was different and it matched the quality on movie as in books.

Just to talk about the League of extraordinary gentlemen. I thought the movie was quite good, I don't expect movies from books or comics to be the same quality, so then I just separate them using a simple rating system based off does it have enough action or entertainment to keep me interested. And they both did, and for me I found the movie quite awesome. Now thats not to say the books or comics of it, was bad, no I found that just as great in detail, but for a movie it has to hold up to its purpose, entertaining and action. And it did that for me. I have no personal gripe against the movie. But in comparisons, if you must do it, the book was better. But again, as I said before I don't expect those adaptations to be 100% well to capture what the book did.

Thats what I had to do with the recent Comics to movies, Spiderman, X-Men, Iron Man, Batman, Superman....etc. Most of those movies didn't live up anywhere near the greatness of the comics. But I enjoyed the Movie for what it was though.

As for Shutter and The Ring, neither of them scared me at all, so from that stand point it didn't do a good job. But I must say though that for the movies they're alot better then the Grudge, then again, Im talking about the one that was made in the North America. The originals I heard was pretty awesome, I will try to check it out if I can. But im not going to get my hopes up.</sub>