Hey, Steph, congratulations on getting BSG's 200th post. And your birthday, too. I mean, not congratulations, but happy birthday.
I'm going to take this in a little bit of a different direction. As many of you know, the only books I read are poetry books (and those pretty much never get made into movies unless they are by Homer or whoever the hell came up with Beowulf) and comic books (which pretty much always get made into movies that suck with the exceptions of Batman Begins, the original Superman, Spider-man 2, X-Men 2, Hellboy, Constantine, and Sin City).
But I want to take this opportunity to explain something about me, books, and movies. You see, everybody is always telling me I need to read the Harry Potter books. I always tell them that I don't need to, because they're making them all into movies. Same with Lord of the Rings. Why would I invest hundreds of pages of my potentially poetry/comic book reading time in a novel if they're just going to make it into a movie that I can watch in two hours? I know this rationale is flimsy, especially coming from somebody who is in graduate school for English. But if I'm going to read fiction (which I rarely do, and when I do it is not in novel form because I have ADD), then I am going to read fiction with literary merit. There. I said it. Sorry. I'm a big jerk. This isn't just because of personal preference though (since my personal preference is to watch a movie or read poems), but just academic necessity. In six years when I am done with school I'll need to apply for jobs and demonstrate that I have a pretty deep knowledge of so-called literature, and I doubt they'll ask me questions about hobbits or Hogwarts in my interviews.
Ok, you guys got me. I'm just lazy is the real reason I don't read novels.
To close this out, I want to mention that my favorite book, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, has already been turned into a shitty movie. Which goes along with what people say about movies adapted from books. However, I do think that there are examples where movies take on a life of their own and surpass the books they're based on (or at least do something completely different but equally great). So here's my brief list.
Every Kubrick Movie
Blade Runner
Munich
JFK
Out of Sight (a million times better than the shitty book it's based on)
Solaris
Now I'm tired. What am I missing as far as movies that surpass the books they're based on?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
I would just like to point out that The Lord of the Rings trilogy *does* have literary merit, and the books brim with lyrical prose and poems (which I usually skim, 'cause I don't dig poetry) - all sorts of stuff which didn't make it into the script for the action movies based on the books. (Who wants to see their action hero stop and recite some lame poem over a flower? But it *does* work in the books.)
I can't say the same about the Harry Potter books though, as I've only read the first one the third (I think - it was in the library at the school in Russia where I worked last year and I was running out of English language reading material.) While I found both moderately entertaining, I didn't find anything worthy of being termed "literary merit"
Also, WHY do you like Out of Sight?????
The Godfather series took on a life of its own after the book, which is delightfully trashy.
Jackie Brown and Get Shorty are at least as good as, if not better than, the original books.
Making Apocalypse Now out of Heart of Darkness was an inspired decision.
The film of M*A*S*H is MUCH better than the book.
The film version of Born on the Fourth of July packs a much bigger punch.
Stephen King's novellas "The Body" and "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" were adapted exceptionally well (Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption), as was his serial The Green Mile. (Yeah, I know how you feel about that one, Glenn)
The Bridges of Madison County film was much more bearable than the book, as was Eastwood's Absolute Power from a couple of years later. I haven't read Rope Burns, but Million Dollar Baby was VERY special.
That's what I could come up with off the top of my head.
You can't dismiss LOTR and Harry Potter as lacking "literary merit" without reading them first. It's pretentious, and ignorant. If you can find the time to watch a season of 24, I'm sure you can get through a Harry Potter book or 2. They're written for 10 year olds, after all.
The BBC miniseries of Hitchhiker's was actually great camp! (I haven't seen the recent movie)
I think I like your direction of the topic better than my own. Its more accessible to people.
This is a great short movie. I'd substitute the players for Cylons, Capricans, and Congressmen though.
http://www.davidrussell.org/2007/07/03/battle-at-kruger-video/
Watch until the end. The rescue attempt is something I wish we as people could do no matter our differences, but we fight amongst ourselves. These players don't have to deal with political, religious, or racial issues--only those of survival.
well, glenn, i'm a fellow adamantly non-harry potter person, and i think we get more flak than i'd expect for just not liking a book series. i understand that millions of people like the series, but that doesn't mean i have to. i don't remember ever picking on the kids who didn't read narnia or little house on the prairie books.
and lucky 13 - you are falling for your own "ignorant" gripe there, buddy - if someone "can't" do something, then the option for being "pretentious and ignorant" really isn't there. if you're gonna knock on the blog, it would be cool if you would at least make a coherent argument with some valid points! how many books for 10 year olds are chock-full of literary merit anyway? i'd give the english grad some credit for knowing what that is.
Nice to meet you, katkrazylady. With all due respect, you should know that I give Glenn plenty of credit. I'm his friend, and a fan of his writing. I tell him what I think, and I expect the same from him, whether I'm shooting my mouth off about Walt Whitman, or refusing to admit that I've lost a rhyme battle. It's not my intention to "knock on the blog," either--BSG is one of the only blogs I read even semi-regularly.
I stand by what I said, though. Glenn, like the rest of us, obviously has to make educated guesses about which books he will or won't read. But judging a book's "literary merit" is not as simple as forming a more superficial opinion based on movies and media hype. J.K. Rowling and Tolkien (more so) are serious, respectable writers. They may not be up there with Joyce or Dostoevsky, but the popular appeal of their books is largely due to their imaginative generosity and their handling of enduring human themes. Both deserve to be read before they are damned outright, especially by an English scholar.
It's pretentious to affect an air of being "in-the-know" about something when one is not, especially when one is unequivocally and publicly uttering the worst possible disrespect to an artist or craftsman. It is ignorant to celebrate, or at least justify, the desire to know less about something, rather than more. I don't think this is specious reasoning, and I don't think it's unfair.
(Sorry to talk about you in the third person in your own comments section, Glenn.)
Thanks for sticking up for me, Linda, but I guess I was being a bit pretentious to say the books are unliterary without reading them. But the movies are enough for me, so I'm still not going to read them (sorry).
And L13 doesn't really think I'm ignorant. Though we have known each other for 23 years, so maybe he's finally realized that I am pretty dumb after all.
Besides, watching a season of 24 is a necessary brainless break from all the reading I have to do for school. Even though the HP and LOTR books might not be considered to be literary by "academics" (and me I guess), it still takes more effort to read them than to veg out and watch Jack Bauer punch terrorists.
Kate, I love the BBC series, but the recent movie was just awful. Well, not really "awful," but just not as funny as it should have been. So don't go see it.
I don't think invoking the authority of nameless "academics" really helps your case, old chum.
There are people who have made entire academic careers out of Tolkien scholarship, and LOTR itself is part of a venerable English literary tradition that includes great works like Beowulf, The Faerie Queene, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, etc. These works might be easy targets for the snide ridicule and ennui of the deconstructivist rock star type of "academic" that has been filling up more and more tenured chairs since the late sixties (the kind of prof who can say, with a straight face, that the novel came into being when the epic fucked the romance), but I think if you took a poll you'd find a healthy number of serious scholars who'd take a bullet for old J.R.R.
You can have Rowling--she's young and rich enough to fight her own battles--but as far as Tolkien goes, I don't think you've got the whole picture. If you want some insight into his work without having to sit through 1000 pages of hobbits and whatnot, you should check out a couple of his excellent essays. "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" and "On Fairy Tales" are as "academic" as they come, and they're under 40 pages each.
I'm no fantasy geek, but I'll throw down for the old man any day. His stories and his scholarship are world class. The movies have almost nothing to do with it.
Post a Comment