Hi Girls! So it's been forever, and I'm really sorry I've been behind on the reading. Unfortunately, many of the titles we picked just are not readily available over here in HK....I will have lots of reading to catch up on!
In reading some of the old posts about films and books- Never Let Me Go being turned into a movie, The Last Lecture going from video to book, etc. I was thinking about my favorite book-to-film adaptations. I'm usually in "the book is better than the movie" camp. But there are a few I think that do a great job in respects of 1) staying true to the story 2) enhancing visually the written descriptions and actions 3) being entertaining 4) I still love the book, and the movie.
What film adaptations do you girls like best? The least? Why?
Of the books we've read together, which one would you like to see turned into a film? What actors and actresses would you cast?
Jenn's Favorites:
1. The Hours: novel by Michael Cunningham. Yes, I read this for NYU Freshman Colloquium. But when I heard that they were making it into a movie, I was really skeptical they could pull it off. But they did, and somehow I think the film works as well as the book.
2. Babe: novel by Dick King-Smith OK, I know it's a children's book and film, but I read the book when I was young, and the movie is just delightful. They didn't ruin it, and that's a big thing for a little girl : )
3. The Color Purple: novel by Alice Walker I remember I read this book in one day, while I was sick in Vietnam with the Tisch scholars, who were out and about enjoying Halong Bay. It kept me company and took my mind off my stomach pains. I also really like the movie.
4. Persepolis: graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi I think the animation in the film is beautiful, and maybe because Marjane had a hand in both the book and the film, I think the movie stays true to the emotional content and touching humor in the graphic novel.
Of the books we've read, I'd like to see The Blind Assasin turned into a film. It would be a rather difficult piece to adapt, but I'd love to see what it would look like visually. Actresses: maybe Michelle Williams as Iris? As for Laura...hmmm
Showing posts with label book adaptation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book adaptation. Show all posts
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Friday, March 13, 2009
Book to Film Adaptation
I’m a fan of the novelist Salman Rushdie, who wrote the wonderfully mystical Midnight’s Children. Last month, he wrote an essay for the British newspaper, the Guardian, about the difficulty of adapting novels for the big screen.
Mr. Rushdie analyzes a few of this year’s Oscar nominated films, focusing particularly on Slumdog Millionaire. He disliked that movie and most of the others and argues why it is often so hard to make good films from books. I found the article interesting and thought I’d share. Think it’d be great to have a book-to -film round for our book club at some point. I envision it’d foster a lot of great discussion.
Here’s the beginning of the essay. Click the link below to read the rest.
Adaptation, the process by which one thing develops into another thing, by which one shape or form changes into a different form, is a commonplace artistic activity. Books are turned into plays and films all the time, plays are turned into movies and also sometimes into musicals, movies are turned into Broadway shows and even, by the ugly method known as "novelisation", into books as well. We live in a world of such transformations and metamorphoses. Good movies - Lolita, The Pink Panther - are remade as bad movies; bad movies - The Incredible Hulk, Deep Throat - are remade as even worse movies; British TV comedy series are turned into American TV comedy series, so that The Office becomes a different The Office, and Ricky Gervais turns into Steve Carell, just as, long ago, the British working-class racist Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part turned into the American blue-collar bigot Archie Bunker in All In the Family. British reality programmes are adapted to suit American audiences as well; Pop Idol becomes American Idol when it crosses the Atlantic, Strictly Come Dancing becomes Dancing With the Stars - a programme which, it may interest you to know, invited me to appear on it last season, an invitation I declined.
Songs by great artists are covered by lesser artists; on inauguration day this year, Beyoncé performed her version of Etta James's classic "At Last" to the considerable irritation of Etta James herself (but then, James seemed even more irritated by the election of Barack Obama, so perhaps she was just in a bad mood). All of these are examples of the myriad variations of adaptation, an insatiable process which can sometimes seem voracious, world-swallowing, as if we now live in a culture that endlessly cannibalises itself, so that, eventually, it will have eaten itself up completely. Anyone can make a list of the many catastrophic adaptations they have seen - my personal favourites being David Lean's ridiculous film of A Passage to India, in which Alec Guinness as a Hindu wise man dangles his feet blasphemously in the waters of a sacred water tank; and the Merchant Ivory emasculation of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, in which Ishiguro's guilty-as-hell British Nazi aristocrat is portrayed as a lovable, misguided, deceived old bugger more deserving of our sympathy than our scorn.
But adaptation can be a creative as well as a destructive force. Rod Stewart singing "Downtown Train" is almost the equal of Tom Waits, and Joe Cocker singing "With a Little Help from My Friends" achieves the rare feat of singing a Beatles song better than the Beatles did, which is less impressive when you remember that the original singer was Ringo Starr. I'm currently teaching a course that highlights some of the instances in which fine books have been adapted into fine films - Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence mutated into Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence; Giuseppe di Lampedusa's portrait of Sicily in 1860, The Leopard, turned into Luchino Visconti's greatest film; Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood became a wonderful John Huston movie; and, in his film of Great Expectations, Lean produced a classic that can stand alongside the Dickens novel without any sense of inferiority, a film that allows this film-goer, at least, to forgive him for the later blunders of A Passage to India. Read the rest.
Mr. Rushdie analyzes a few of this year’s Oscar nominated films, focusing particularly on Slumdog Millionaire. He disliked that movie and most of the others and argues why it is often so hard to make good films from books. I found the article interesting and thought I’d share. Think it’d be great to have a book-to -film round for our book club at some point. I envision it’d foster a lot of great discussion.
Here’s the beginning of the essay. Click the link below to read the rest.
Adaptation, the process by which one thing develops into another thing, by which one shape or form changes into a different form, is a commonplace artistic activity. Books are turned into plays and films all the time, plays are turned into movies and also sometimes into musicals, movies are turned into Broadway shows and even, by the ugly method known as "novelisation", into books as well. We live in a world of such transformations and metamorphoses. Good movies - Lolita, The Pink Panther - are remade as bad movies; bad movies - The Incredible Hulk, Deep Throat - are remade as even worse movies; British TV comedy series are turned into American TV comedy series, so that The Office becomes a different The Office, and Ricky Gervais turns into Steve Carell, just as, long ago, the British working-class racist Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part turned into the American blue-collar bigot Archie Bunker in All In the Family. British reality programmes are adapted to suit American audiences as well; Pop Idol becomes American Idol when it crosses the Atlantic, Strictly Come Dancing becomes Dancing With the Stars - a programme which, it may interest you to know, invited me to appear on it last season, an invitation I declined.
Songs by great artists are covered by lesser artists; on inauguration day this year, Beyoncé performed her version of Etta James's classic "At Last" to the considerable irritation of Etta James herself (but then, James seemed even more irritated by the election of Barack Obama, so perhaps she was just in a bad mood). All of these are examples of the myriad variations of adaptation, an insatiable process which can sometimes seem voracious, world-swallowing, as if we now live in a culture that endlessly cannibalises itself, so that, eventually, it will have eaten itself up completely. Anyone can make a list of the many catastrophic adaptations they have seen - my personal favourites being David Lean's ridiculous film of A Passage to India, in which Alec Guinness as a Hindu wise man dangles his feet blasphemously in the waters of a sacred water tank; and the Merchant Ivory emasculation of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, in which Ishiguro's guilty-as-hell British Nazi aristocrat is portrayed as a lovable, misguided, deceived old bugger more deserving of our sympathy than our scorn.
But adaptation can be a creative as well as a destructive force. Rod Stewart singing "Downtown Train" is almost the equal of Tom Waits, and Joe Cocker singing "With a Little Help from My Friends" achieves the rare feat of singing a Beatles song better than the Beatles did, which is less impressive when you remember that the original singer was Ringo Starr. I'm currently teaching a course that highlights some of the instances in which fine books have been adapted into fine films - Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence mutated into Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence; Giuseppe di Lampedusa's portrait of Sicily in 1860, The Leopard, turned into Luchino Visconti's greatest film; Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood became a wonderful John Huston movie; and, in his film of Great Expectations, Lean produced a classic that can stand alongside the Dickens novel without any sense of inferiority, a film that allows this film-goer, at least, to forgive him for the later blunders of A Passage to India. Read the rest.
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