Please welcome guest blogger, and fellow Village Books bookseller, Dave Wheeler, with his take on movies made from books. And, while you're at it, check Dave's blog.
We’ve all said it: “No, but I saw the movie.” I say it about No Country
for Old Men and frown at anyone who says it about The Lord of the Rings. There always seems to be a wealth of movie adaptations flooding theaters across the nation. Look for Watchmen, Twilight, Choke, and The Secret Life of Bees, and those are just out this fall. I could give you a whole list of books I enjoyed better than their movie counterpart and vice versa, but we’d be here all day. And don’t even get me started on book-about-the-movie adaptations, either.
On some level, it bothers me that both media pervade each other so much, but it seems that if it weren’t for literature, cinema would mostly be sequels to Oceans 11 and Saw, and if it weren’t for movie rights, books (as a career) might be a little less lucrative. There’s nothing more exciting for an author to get bids on movie rights to his or her book—I’d imagine, although I do not know this for a fact since nobody’s breaking down my door to make a movie about anything I’ve written (ha ha ha).
In the end, I cannot read every book--try as I might. So I think I should approach literary cinema with a better attitude. I should maybe replace vocabulary like “inaccurate,” “cop-out,” and “hack,” in my reviews of movies with a more sentimental understanding that what I have just seen is an interpretation to supplement its audience’s experience with the story. I need to remember that I actually do like movie adaptations: Stand By Me, my favorite movie of all time, is an adaptation of the Stephen King novella The Body, which I still have not read. It's the same thing (and will probably continue to be the same thing) about anything based on a John Grisham book. And there are books I’ve read that I have no desire to see the movie for, like Bee Season and Running With Scissors. So when I buy my ticket to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince come July, I’ll try to celebrate the story along with director David Yates instead of acting like J.K. Rowling’s self-righteous pit bull. Because the story, in all its manifestations, is really the most important part.
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