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Wednesday, September 10, 2008
How does a good book turn into a good movie?
Tuesday’s popular post about the reported changes made to the film of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sparked a lot of comments, with some people lamenting the various cuts the films have made over the years.
And that makes me wonder - just what, exactly, makes a good movie adaptation?
Some people apparently believe a movie needs to follow the book to the letter. These are the kind of people that would be fine sitting through a five-hour movie. Problem is, they aren’t most people.
I remain surprised at how little some people seem to understand that what works well on the page doesn’t necessarily translate to film. People who groan and cry about every little moment that’s missing from the movie are missing the point. Movies are movies and books are books, and rarely do those two trains meet.
Take the Potter films, for instance. I really liked the first two when I first saw them, but when I read the books and went back to those films later, they actually seemed less magical. They followed the books SO closely that they developed hardly any life of their own. Consequently, they’re the movies I revisit least often now.
So when screenwriter Steve Kloves loosened up a bit and started getting more liberal with cuts when he scripted Prisoner of Azkaban, that’s when the film series truly took off. Azkaban is my favorite of the Potter films by a comfortable margin, largely because it forged its own identity and was more unique and intriguing that way.
A lot of fans complained about this cut or that, particularly the deletion of the background of the Marauder’s Map. But that wasn’t essential to the story the movie was trying to tell. Had they included all of Rowling’s details, the movie would have spent half an hour or more in the Shrieking Shack. Fine for the die-hards, maybe, strained rear ends for the rest of us.
As Rowling herself says on her official site, when asked about that particular cut: “I was fine with it. It is simply impossible to incorporate every one of my storylines into a film that has to be kept under four hours long. Obviously films have restrictions novels do not have, constraints of time and budget; I can create dazzling effects relying on nothing but the interaction of my own and my readers’ imaginations - hence my preference for the page over the screen.”
For me, a movie shouldn’t be an audiobook with pictures added. That’s boring and predictable. If that was all that was required, WB would be fine filming Jim Dale doing his readings and then supplying a clip here and there. No, a movie has to be true to the SPIRIT of the story. Radical changes can work as long as the main thrust isn’t lost. If the final scenes of Half-Blood Prince really are cut, that would be a loss.
So I ask you: What makes a good film adaptation? Or a bad one? Give me examples of movie adaptations that did justice to the books, and some that desecrated them. I’ll start.
Good adaptations; Misery, The Lord of the Rings, The Grapes of Wrath, The Polar Express, A Clockwork Orange
Bad adaptations: Bonfire of the Vanities, The Cat in the Hat, Bonfire of the Vanities, The Cat in the Hat, Bonfire of the Vanities, The Cat in the Hat
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