Movies Vs. Books

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?

Yes, Uhura. Everybody could probably guess that one.

I don't really know if I can say a whole lot about this topic and have it stay interesting. Obviously, I'm a big fat Star Trek fan. Maybe you don't know that about me, but it's true. So ever since I was a kid I have had a crush on Uhura. When I was 9 and Star Trek 5 came out, she had this scene in which she did a fan dance while supposedly naked. I really thought that was totally hot, even though in retrospect Nichelle Nichols was probably like 60 or something. Plus those Original Series miniskirts? Yowza!


[She can open my hailing frequencies anytime]

Anyway, that's boring for everybody. I have a few poet crushes. For instance, Jane Hirshfield is a big poet crush of mine. Mostly it has to do with how much I love her work, but she's pretty cute for a 54 year old hippie. If I wasn't lazy, I would link a picture. But you guys can do a google search probably. (Ok, I'm not that lazy. I did this on an edit).


[Kind of cute, right?]

And she's probably my favorite living poet. I just got done reading Sarah Fox's book "Because Why," and it was pretty terrific, and she also looks cute. So maybe if her second book comes out and is great then I will develop a full blown poet-crush on her, too. Well, I just looked up Sarah Fox to find a picture to link, and it turns out she's not really that cute in any picture other than her book photo.


[Cute book photo]

Poets are really fickle about their book photos. Carolyn Forche, who is a great poet, is using a twenty-five year old photo for her jackets. Ridiculous. Also, once in poetry workshop class with another older poet I mentioned that Louise Gluck looks pretty hot for a woman her age, and the professor got all indignant and said "That's called airbrushing, hon." Oh, I have a crush on Sylvia Plath, but she's dead. Oh, if we could have been a pair! I'd like to think that I wouldn't have driven her to put her head in an oven like ole Teddy, but then if she had been happy she wouldn't have written all those great angry poems. So it's good that Ted Hughes drove her into being a suicidal wreck. Nobody's favorite book by her is The Colossus, after all.

I've already mentioned my comic book habit on this blog, but reading comics during the Rob Liefeld heyday of the 1990s I was exposed to images of many women with meter long breasts. (I'm really not joking. That guy can't draw at all, but we all though he was great for some stupid reason.) Anyway, comics were in bad shape in the 1990s, so I guess I didn't really get a specific crush on any particular comic book woman. They were all written in pretty much the same way, and the drawings were virtually indistinguishable. Although I really liked Domino, because she carried cool guns. The mind of a 13 year old is pretty shallow.

Anyway, as far as real people that I have baseless love and hate for (poets are actually fictional characters), I guess I really hate Jack White. Well, I know everybody probably hates me now, which is fine, but I determined I hated Jack White long before I'd even heard a White Stripes album. Everybody kept talking about what a genius he was, and every time I heard him interviewed he seemed like a gigantic douchebag. And so I decided I wouldn't like any White Stripes album I would ever hear. Which worked out ok, since the only album I've ever heard by them, Elephant, really did suck. Also, the White Stripes segment in Coffee and Cigarettes was fucking terrible.

Man crushes? I guess Captain Kirk. Maybe Clive Owen. Oh, man, what if they got Clive Owen to play Captain Kirk in the new Star Trek movie? That would probably blow my wad. I mean mind! I meant mind, not wad!

I guess I might as well face it

I'm addicted to comic books. That doesn't really fit the song I guess. I'm not really sure how to differentiate between an addiction and a hobby. In my monthly budget I actually set aside $100 for comics, and I enjoy reading them every week. Without fail, I pick them up on Thursday, the day after they come out, in order to avoid the Wednesday crowd. The comic book store people all know my name and talk nerd talk when I come in. I give them at least $1200 a year in business. But I don't really think that makes me an addict. On a side note, the books I mainly buy are big superhero books (Batman, Spider-man, Daredevil, etc). But being in a writing program, every time I say I buy comics people always say something like "Oh, Maus is good. Have you read 'Ballistic Cunt?' It's a graphic novel inspired by feminist readings of Foucault." (Idea copyright Glenn Shaheen, everybody, so hands off). Then I always have to explain that superhero books are not really as dumb as they think, or as dumb as they were in the early 90s, but it's pretty much like telling a creative writing grad student that you really love Stephen King. For those of you who don't know, creative writing grad students are really pretentious. It's probably a good idea not to socialize with them or admit to other people that you even know any. I usually tell people I'm getting my MFA in botany, or the science of socks, or something.

As far as other things go, I've been watching Star Trek lately, but I'm slowly just trying to work my way through the episodes, so that's not an addiction. Once a long time ago I smoked cigarettes for a year just because I hated those "Truth" adds they used to have on TV that implied smoking was worse than Hitler. Remember that one? Let me see if I can find it.



Hey, Youtube is great! Anyway, I guess watching it now it doesn't really imply that smoking is worse than Hitler, but it's still a pretty offensive ad by implying they're similar. And at the time I thought it would be poetic justice for me to start smoking when Truth wanted me to not smoke, since the ads were making me feel bad anyway. I showed them! Well, except I never told Truth about it, and they probably didn't care, and I quit after a year.

Wikipedia is pretty much an addiction. There are nights when I will be exhausted and I will just stay up for hours past when I am tired following a hypertext trail through wikipedia articles. Though on the bright side I think I could totally kick everybody's ass in Jeopardy! now.

Also I'm a huge porn addict. It was actually me who found this blog by looking for Britney Spear's vagnia. Sorry guys! I'll try to type more clearly next time I use google to search for naked celebrities, like Paris Hilton naked in jail, or Lindsay Lohan fully nude, or Hilary Duff topless, or Ryan Seacrest elephantitis , or Brad Pitt skin pendulum.

That last paragraph was just written to get us some more hits.