Agreed; they turned the Whos into horrible grasping consumers - they are charming, joyous little innocents in the book.
For the most part, I loved Elia Kazan’s East of Eden. In almost all ways it was a splendid film with some great acting and direction. And I can’t imagine anyone else but James Dean playing Cal!
But – and this is why I mention it – there’s no denying the novel was very literally butchered: Kazan cut out 2/3 of the novel (though he almost certainly had no realistic alternative). I felt almost physically assaulted by the shocking absence of Lee, the moral center of East of Eden! And I would have liked to have seen Samuel Hamilton, my favorite character of the novel, which I love enormously.
The TV miniseries starring the Bottoms brothers wasn’t terrible, but if I recall it wasn’t particularly good, either. Maybe I just missed James Dean.
I think it’s a damn sight better than Legend, which I thought to be truly wretched.
Moderator interjects:
Please remember that, in Cafe Society, you may insult the artists/entertainers or work all you want. You may question their motives or challenge their abilities. But … when it comes to other posters, you may do NONE of those things. You may NOT insult other posters, you may NOT question their motives, you may NOT challenge their abilities.
Judging art/entertainment (aside from a few technical issues) is almost always a matter of taste, and often personal situation. And all are equally valid.
Note that you may certainly challenge another’s interpretation. But NOT the other person.
ACCEPTABLE: I disagree entirely with what you said.
NOT ACCEPTABLE (INSULT): You’re an idiot.
NOT ACCEPTABLE (QUESTIONING MOTIVES): You think your opinion is so much better than mine.
NOT ACCEPTABLE (CHALLENGING ABILITIES): You obviously haven’t read antyhing written after 1930.
We all clear on this?
East of Eden. Oh, god. Oh, god. That Anne Rice softcore bondage book that got turned into a wacky movie starring Rosie O’Donnell. What was it?
You’re simply splitting hairs, but if it makes you feel better, I will change my reply to “We’re simply stating that we are some of the many whose opinions are different from yours on the movie Starship Trooper.”
There is an animated version of Animal Farm out there. I’ve never seen it, as I was put off by the tagline on the box “Fun for the whole family.” I mean, it could be the greatest book to movie translation ever, but I had to assume that the creators missed the entire point of the book with copy like that.
That sounds like a great spin-off thread. “Worst (or most misleading) copy you’ve ever read.”
The movie was worse than the book? The mind boggles. How is that even possible?
Add me to those who think Return to Oz got a bad rap. Everyone compared it to the Judy Garland film and complained it was too dark, but the darkness is what made it compelling.
Did you see the 1980 version which was slavishly faithful to the book but utterly soulless?
Good casting in the 1980 version- Bud Cort as Bernard Marx; Great casting in the more recent version- Leonard Nimoy as Mustapha Mond.
I obviously am with Lissener on the Starship Troopers issue–at least halfway (I don’t think it was an ambitious, flawed satire drawn from a tripish book).
I do think that, even though an adaptation of a book never destroys a book, it legitimately feels that way to the book’s fans sometimes. When you read and love a story, you take it into yourself. You imagine yourself in the narrative, you empathize with the characters, you remember them almost as if they were real people. It becomes part of your mental landscape.
When you go to see the movie, then, you’re expecting to go back to that mental landscape. And if the movie changes it around drastically, it can be a very jarring experience. As an analogy, it’s as if you returned to one of your favorite restaurants to find that, where the restaurant once stood, there’s now a Pizza Hut.
Yes, in reality the book’s still on the shelf–but the book on the shelf is just woodpulp and ink. The book’s value was in providing that story in your head. And the movie can change that story, can metaphorically slaughter it.
Daniel
Re Starship Troopers as satire: That was just something added on an excuse after the reviews came out. It is clearly not intended to be satire, and the extent of any satire content begins and ends with the costume design.
Anyone who thinks it’s satire needs to read “A Modest Proposal” to understand the meaning of the term.
As an adaptation of Heinlein’s work, ST is the pits, and I hate it with the fury of a thousand suns, but I have to disagree with you here.
ST was clearly not meant to be taen seriously, and never was. It’s played too broadly, the similarity of uniforms to Nazi gear too blatantly obvious, the propaganda too faqrfetched, and the tactics of the military leaders too obviously insane (Pitting expensively trained and armed soldiers by the hundreds against soldier-class corn insects that number in the thousands? Give me a break. Then doing it over and over, to no obvious purpose?) for this to be taken at all seriously. ed Neumeier, who’d worked with Verhoeven on roboCop, made his satiric intent more obvious there, I think, but it’s hard to misds it in ST as well.
Still, maybe a lot of folks did, thinking this a legitimate action flick without a trace of a grin. That’s sad. Of course, I think what they did to Heinlein’s work a great deal sadder - ant because of any fanboy tendencies I might have about the holiness of an author’s words. These guys clearly didn’t understand or care about the novel or its history, which itself is pretty significant.
For me, I got the satire pretty quickly while watching it, but it felt as if the director didn’t always remember that it was satirical. It may have been that he was just being very subtle with his satire; at any rate, I did not find it to be as effective a satire as it could have been if it had maintained a bit less enthusiasm for the blockbusterosity.
Daniel
Well, the thing you have to remember is that Paul Verhoevan hates his audiences. So he’ll always distance himself from the material in some way. So he’ll play semistraight making an action movie or thriller, then remember that people who like action movies and thrillers are idiots, so he’ll have to punish them. But there’s no point making a satire of an action movie unless at some level you like and care about action movies. So what Verhoevan really hates is himself.
Interesting guy.
I guess you won’t be too happy to know that the adaptation of one of the best modern vampire stories, I Am Legend, will be adapted by…The Hackmaster!
Cite (Warning: it’s from another forum)
They’re moving the action from LA to New York and no more Vampires (huh?!?!?!)
There’s a lot of truth to this. As I’ve said more than once, one of the things that I find problematic about Verhoeven is his misanthropy. I think there’s more subtlety to his satire, however, than simply being about action fans being idiots; I think he generally has a more general target in mind. Although the audience, specifically, is often in his crosshairs. In Hollow Man, for instance, one of the nastier themes is the abdication of moral responsibility afforded by the anonymous voyeurism of a darkened movie theater. (A thematic parallel with another great movie of that year, Dancer in the Dark.) Having spent his childhood in Nazi occupied Amsterdam, it’s not altogether surprising that in a Verhoeven movie moral lassitude and active evil are held as equal lapses. The conflation of the two is where his misanthropy lies: he blames the occupied for night fighting hard enough as much as he blames the occupiers.
Verhoeven’s motto might be, judging from his movies, “All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” His movies are usually indictments of that passive failure of morality, rather than–which would be more straightforward–a denouncement of explicitly evil acts.
“Night fighting”? “*Night *fighting”?
Sheesh.
**Not **fighting.
Very good point. I can see that vague contempt for the material in all his films.
This may be the central reason I don’t like Verhoeven. I tend to prefer a director who has at the very least respect for his source material, if not active appreciation.
Does anyone remember the PBS produced “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank”? This is an adaptation of one of my favourite short stories by John Varley, and as far as I can see is the only other movie based on Varley’s work.
It stars Raul Julia, it stinks, and has an IMDB rating of 2.3. It is not that they didn’t try to follow the story - it is that the budget is too cheap and that it was shot on video tape in the early 80’s which gives the movie a lurid day glow look.
It seems that most of the butchered stories have been science fiction.