|
'Evening,
folks,
So the
Oscars are now over. No Country for Old Men walked
away with its deserved boatload of awards, and Daniel Day-Lewis
got an award for his portrayal of a vile, milkshake-hungry
oilman in There Will Be Blood. Most people I know considered
those two movies the front-runners for all the awards (and
most people I know were right). Additionally, both Country
and Blood are fairly liberal adaptations of books,
and both are excellent. This puts grumpy curmudgeons (like
me) a bit on edge. If they keep making good movies out of
books, I'm going to have to rethink my elitist, anti-adaptation
mindset.
 |
Javier
Bardem in his Oscar-winning role in No Country for
Old Men.
Photo property of Touchstone Pictures |
A while
ago, my friend Jessica and I went to see the film adaptation
of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. We had both
read and immensely enjoyed the book, and we were excited to
see the adventures of Lyra and Iorek writ large on the silver
screen. While I think we both enjoyed the movie, it was an
enjoyment in the same way your parents loved that drawing
you did when you were four of what you claimed was a house.
Sure it sucked, and any house that looked like that would
be so structurally unsound that it would assuredly kill any
who entered, but they loved the source of the drawing so much
that they appreciated it, anyway. Are you following?
To call
the film a raping of the book would be insensitive and overly
harsh, but I gave up the backspace button for Lent so it's
too late now. Sadly, it suffers from the common problems of
many film adaptations. To make most books fit into the confines
of a two-hour film, the narrative needs to be liberally hacked
away. As an open letter to Hollywood, I propose this: We wouldn't
mind if a movie were three hours long. If it's a book we love,
and you need to make the movie a bit longer to do it right,
we'll wait. We already paid $11 to get in, anyway; the least
you can do is live up to the source material.
Recently,
in our LiveJournal
community, I commented that I was disheartened that a
personal favorite of mine, Danny Wallace's Yes Man,
is going to be made into a film starring Jim Carrey. Surely
they'd turn the light-hearted, romantic, uplifting, adventurous
tale into some slapstick nonsense. Surely! I was chastised
for my reactionary attitude. Jim Carrey is no longer Ace Ventura
or the Mask, I was told. Eternal Sunshine was brought
up. Man on the Moon was brought up. My fears were momentarily
assuaged. Then it turned out the director's previous work
included, most prominently, The Breakup, TV series
The Cashmere Mafia, and—perhaps his most heart-breaking
work—seminal cheerleader flick Bring It On. People
magazine had a photo from the set, with Jim Carrey's character
serenading a man off of a ledge to prevent a suicide—a
scene that most assuredly did not happen in the book. Slapstick
actors and mediocre-at-best directors are rewriting the story.
Why do bad things happen to good books?
 I'm
sure you could rattle off a couple books you love that the
film industry butchered. What about A Series of Unfortunate
Events? I Am Legend? Less Than Zero? Did
you know Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions was
made into a movie? Stephen King is butchered fairly often.
And God help you if you're a comic book fan. Alan Moore is
shit upon fairly regularly. Did you guys see League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen? No? Thank God. That movie was
eye-cancer of the highest caliber. Thankfully, these movies
fade from the public consciousness pretty quickly, and the
general population is spared their evils.
But then
I remember No Country for Old Men: a film adaptation
of a book that takes intense liberties from the source. And
I adore it. And several other fantastic adaptations
come to mind, often playing fast and loose with the book from
which they come. The key difference is that they're generally
adapted by film geniuses, and not Johnny In-Studio-Screenwriter
(which, I believe, is a Portuguese last name). Without book
adaptations, we wouldn't have A Clockwork Orange, The
Silence of the Lambs, American Psycho, The Princess
Bride, Fight Club, L.A. Confidential, One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Trainspotting, and
Adaptation (fact: best screenplay ever).
I guess
all I'm saying is that if you intend to adapt something great
that people already love, make it good. All the Alan Rickmans
(Rickmen?) and Sam Rockwells in the world can't save something
like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There are
few things as artistically nefarious and lazy as taking something
that people know and love (so you don't have to create your
own story), and then doing it the disservice of a slipshod
job. Please, Hollywood, if you're going to adapt our cherished
stories for the screen, give them the work, vision, and love
they deserve.
At any
rate, thanks for coming back to spend some time with us. This
month, we have the usual cornucopia of book reviews with a
heavy dose of movie/TV/adaptation-related reviews and commentary.
<3,
Kyle
(March,
2008)
|
