"the movie version"

[newsboyhat]

Disclaimer: I really can't stand purists; the following opinions contain biases against them.

I've concluded that the people who rage and rage about this-or-that not being in the books, that this is inaccurate, that this is trash, and that no movie version will ever live up to the novel... are, well, full of crap.

The people who say this don't know

Comments

[lnbw]

I often complain about movie adaptations because I think it's rare for an adaptation to capture the spirit of the book. It's certainly not required that they do so, even for it to be a good film, but if I like a book and the movie doesn't have the same spirit, why would I like it? And, there's a certain degree of understandable selfishness: I don't care if these are two different art forms, all I care about is that someone made something I love into something that doesn't move me. I get it.

Whether, of course, an adaptation preserves the spirit of the book depends on what you think the spirit is. To me, the Lord of the Rings movies are (mostly) successful at this, and so are the Harry Potter movies, though in the latter case I don't think they stand alone very well. (I'm not really qualified to say, though, since I don't need them to!) But I hated Stardust, which a lot of people loved, because to me it was a completely different beast from the book, with a bunch of similarities on the surface. I think it's that "similar-but-not-the-same" problem that makes many people hate adaptations.

But I'm not so much a purist; there are a lot of adaptations I enjoy. I like the two versions of The Princess Bride about equally (though in different ways). Example of a movie adaptation I liked better than the book: Big Fish.

[lnbw]

Oh, and Howl's Moving Castle is another good example: I don't think it preserves (what I think of as) the spirit of the book, but I do think it's probably a perfectly good movie. I just can't separate it from the ghost of the book in my mind, so I don't watch it.