[QUOTE=Lemur866]
When did that happen? She didn’t accept God’s existance on faith. She didn’t accept God’s existance at all.
[/QUOTE]
It occurred in the (Senate?) chamber when she told her fiercest critic “you’ll have to take it on faith” with that beatific smile on her face. The message was further reinforced when she walked outside to the throngs of adoring fans waving “We believe you Ellie” signs or whatever.
I was pretty pissed off by Kubrick’s The Shining. While it was an interesting movie, it was far afield from Stephen King’s book. But, many years later, when they made a TV miniseries which was much more faithful to the book, I didn’t like that, either. I guess the perfect cinematic version of The Shining is still inside my head.
[QUOTE=pinkfreud]
I was pretty pissed off by Kubrick’s The Shining. While it was an interesting movie, it was far afield from Stephen King’s book. But, many years later, when they made a TV miniseries which was much more faithful to the book, I didn’t like that, either. I guess the perfect cinematic version of The Shining is still inside my head.
[/QUOTE]
YES. The ending of the movie sucked eggs. The rest of the movie was meh.
[QUOTE=Big_Norse]
According to Demi Moore at the time of the films release, more people will see her movie than read the original book so a few liberties won’t be noticed. I’ve never been able to stomach her since.
[/QUOTE]
Although she was very welcoming to Tituba, a character not in Hawthorne’s book, who had obviously escaped from The Crucible and sought asylum in Moore’s film.
Vanity Fair. Pay close attention, Mira Nair: Becky Sharp is not a plucky, dauntless victim of class oppression. Becky Sharp is a heartless, soulless, greedy, striving, opportunistic bitch. That is the whole point of Becky Sharp. Have you never read any Thackeray at all?!
Batman and Robin: Pay close attention, Schumacher: Robin is not the Twentysomething Wonder. Robin is not the Teenage Wonder. Robin is the Boy Wonder. When he first joins Batman, he should be no older than twelve. Just as he was in the comic book. Any older and you do not have a credible ward/protege/pupil/sidekick/catamite.
[QUOTE=Mikemike2]
Thanks for the reply. I agree with you about the book, but don’t see your point with the movie. The scientist character is in the akward position at the end of the movie of not having objective proof of her trip (the government is investigating possible fraud) and having to ask people to take her word for it (ie take her version on faith). She acknowledges this is an akward position, but there is no mention of her then accepting God’s existance. The objective proof of her trip (although kinda weak) is then found. The mass crowd buys her story on faith, but I don’t think this changed the scientist’s (I keep wanting to call her Claire :dubious: ) view of always looking for evidence.
Carl Sagan was a consultant to the movie version until his death.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, but in the book
[spoiler]the aliens specifically tell Eleanor how to look for scientific/mathematical proof of God’s existence because they had found them, specifically in mathematics.
Eleanor takes her lumps in Congress but never backs down, the hubbub finally subsiding. However, she programs her work computer to look for these mathematical clues, the book ending when one of them is found.
She never asked anybody to take her on faith: she actually shut up because she couldn’t prove what had happened. She even told Palmer Joss that she was waiting for proof (the computer running its calculation) before she went public with the whole story of what happened on the trip.[/spoiler]
[QUOTE=Skald the Rhymer]
I don’t think your comments about the classic literary characters being, ah, re-interpreted for LExG is to the point, Moore’s graphic novel was not purporting be an adaptation to a different medium of the stories of Quartermain, Pollyanna,et al.
[/QUOTE]
I think it’s exactly on point. He took these characters - beloved literary characters, some from children’s media - and changed them, sometimes completely subverting them.
But, nobody has any problem separating Moore’s versions of the character from the originals.
Yet, these same people can’t separate the movie from Moore’s work. Which just doesn’t make any sense to me.
I didn’t read LoEG expecting it to be ‘the further adventures of Mina Harker/Allan Quatermain/Captain Nemo/Henry Jekyll/Hawley Griffin’, and I wouldn’t go into LXG expecting it to be LoEG, any more than I went into Superman the movie or Superman the animated series expecting it to be the comics. (Hell, I don’t read Superman comics from the 30s or the 70s expecting it to be the same Superman from the 80s, or from the 2000s.) It’s as incomprehensible to me that anyone else would do so as it is that they’d go into LoEG thinking it was a direct sequel or translation of Moore’s source material.
Yes, the movie is, like you and Miller say ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’, not some random item appropriating the characters a hundred years from now. This doesn’t change that it’s NOT the original work, and I can’t understand how anyone would have thought it would be - or even try to be.
Aside from the point I made above, and the one I make below, for LoEG in particular, a direct translation would be unmarketable and, honestly, damn near unwatchable. A lot of it was fairly hard to read to begin with (although, to be fair, the worst of it was in the second volume) - putting it in a live action movie would have made it unbearable.
[QUOTE=Miller]
The movie version of the comic, on the other hand, was trying to serve exactly the same end as the comic: taking established literary characters from the 19th century and putting a modern, “edgy” spin on them. If you’re aiming for exactly the same effect as the comic, wouldn’t it make sense to actually follow the comic?
[/QUOTE]
Not in my opinion - because what the heck’s the point in making it, if you’re just going to do the original? Being the original is what the original is for.
Oh, and I’ve said all I can on the matter. I follow your points, I just can’t really understand the mindset, and if I hope I’ve managed to put across my mindset to the same extent.
[QUOTE=Tengu]
Oh, and I’ve said all I can on the matter. I follow your points, I just can’t really understand the mindset, and if I hope I’ve managed to put across my mindset to the same extent.
[/QUOTE]
Damn it, Tengu, how can we entertain the lurkers with a flame war if we’re both going to be reasonable? :mad:
Your sister wears army boots.
You know, in the end, my biggest objection to “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” isn’t the liberties it took with the source material; many good movies make changes from the books. My biggest objection is that the movie really, really sucked. A lot.
[QUOTE=JohnT]
It occurred in the (Senate?) chamber when she told her fiercest critic “you’ll have to take it on faith” with that beatific smile on her face. The message was further reinforced when she walked outside to the throngs of adoring fans waving “We believe you Ellie” signs or whatever.
[/QUOTE]
I really think you’re misremembering the movie. It probably doesn’t matter at this point, but I’ll spoiler this anyway:Ellie didn’t smile once during the hearing; she was highly conflicted and distraught, because she had no good answer and no proof, but she was desperate to have her story be believed. I’m not going to pretend to recall the actual lines spoken, but I do recall that the only time “faith” was mentioned was one of the panel members asking Ellie if they were to simply take her testimony on faith. I believe she eventually says “Yes,” but it’s very clearly a hard and upsetting thing for her to do. She never accepts God at any point.
As for I, Robot, I think it was a mistake to use the book’s name, because everyone assumes it’s an adaptation. The movie was inspired by Aasimov’s work, but it’s not a retelling. It takes the core idea of the Three Laws of Robotics and tells a new story with it.
[QUOTE=Skald the Rhymer]
. . . 3. I, Robot. Substitute “classic and widely read” for “little known” aboveand you’ve captured my problem with this movie. Add to that the inexplicable decision to show Will Smith rather than Bridget Moynahan naked, and it’s clear that there was a lot of weed on the office when this movie was greenlighted. . . .[/SIZE]
[/QUOTE]
No, that was the only wise decision. 
If a made-for-TV-movie is allowed (this is probably part of the problem), Oprah Winfrey (who I like usually) needs her ass whupped for what she did to “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” The book was only slightly below the surface deep, but if she had only stuck to the story and characters as created, she would have had something worthwhile.
What she actually put out? I don’t know what that was.
[QUOTE=Tengu]
I think it’s exactly on point. He took these characters - beloved literary characters, some from children’s media - and changed them, sometimes completely subverting them.
But, nobody has any problem separating Moore’s versions of the character from the originals.
Yet, these same people can’t separate the movie from Moore’s work. Which just doesn’t make any sense to me.
[/QUOTE]
You’ve put your finger on precisely the problem. The entire point of Moore’s comic was the subversion of these classic characters. That’s what makes them interesting. The movie, on the other hand, was not trying to subvert Moore’s comic. It was trying to do exactly the same subversion of these classic literary characters that Moore did in his comic. But it did them (from all accounts, I’ve not actually seen the movie) very, very poorly.
Now, no one (at least, no one with half a brain) expects a perfectly faithful movie adaption. However, if you’re going to change something, it ought to be because the change works better in the context of your new medium, or because you intend the change to act as commentary on the source material. From everything I’ve read, there was no particular reason to make many of the changes made in the movie: the comic plot would have worked just as well, there, and usually quite a bit better. And the movie wasn’t trying to act as a commentary on the comic, it was trying to be an adaptation. So, most fans of the movie didn’t like these changes, because they added nothing to the plot, didn’t cast the characters in a more interesting light, and were often less interesting or imaginative than what was done in the original.
Ultimatly, though, FisherQueen puts her finger on the problem. People will accept a lot of changes in an adaptation if the adaptation is any good. But it’s much easier to figure out why something sucks in a movie if you have a good treatment of the same material by which to compare it. Movies like League or Starship Troopers suffer not just from being substandard fare in and of themselves, but also from having a blueprint at hand on how to handle that material well, and ignoring it. If you’re building a house, and you screw up and it falls down, that’s bad. If you had a guy standing right next to you saying, “Don’t do that, it’ll fall down if you do it like that,” makes it not just bad, but stupid, to boot.
[QUOTE=Skald the Rhymer]
Damn it, Tengu, how can we entertain the lurkers with a flame war if we’re both going to be reasonable? :mad:
Your sister wears army boots.
[/QUOTE]
Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries!
Simon Birch, based on John Irving’s great novel A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Took away everything that made it a John Irving novel, and left big parts in that only existed to foreshadow the ending – which was changed.
Oh, and the director opined that all references to Vietnam had to be eliiminated because people don’t really relate to all that “history” stuff anymore.
I would kick that little bastard square in the nuts if I met him at a cocktail party, and I don’t usually go in for that sort of thing – I’m Canadian.
The book Six Days of the Condor became Three Days of the Condor, for Heavens’ sake. Basically the film people were announcing, “Hey, we’re cutting about half the text here, so if you enjoyed this book, don’t expect to see it in this film.” If they had said that, they would have been right.
The Dirty Dozen kept the name but so changed the story. Rather than put up a spoiler box, let us just say, there are major differences regarding who lives and who dies.
I am reading Crow Killer which was the basis for Jerimiah Johnson, the Robert Redford vehicle where his character was kind of a fronteer Boy Scout. In the book, definitely no Boy Scout.
Science Fiction and Spy Thrillers seem to get changed the most. I’ve already mentioned some SF. Here are a few spy flicks that don’t match the books at all:
The Osterman Weekend
Ice Station Zebra
Fourth Protocol (and other Frederick Forsyth novels, but not Day of the Jackal)
Most James Bond novels
And I think The Firm looks like what happens when you let studio lawyers rewrite a book.
OK, I may have the painful winner.
The book was Burglers Can’t Be Choosers by Lawrence Block about used bookstore owner/not so-retired burgler Bernard Rodenbahr. Who finds a crime (which expands to murder), gets into all kinds of trouble and solves the crime. He and his lesbian best friend Carolyn are a delightful pairing. Well, the film became Burgler and the character became Bernice, played by Whoopie Goldberg. That was a painful casting, with Goldberg mugging for the camera when she should have been acting, but they changed the lesbian dog groomer too. She became “Carl” plaiyd by Bobcat Galthwait. Anyone who had read the original novel, was just amazed at how badly a film could maul a novel. It was a dreadful abortion.
I know I said I wasn’t going to post more, but Miller’s brought up a different point that I think is worth addressing.
[QUOTE=Miller]
Now, no one (at least, no one with half a brain) expects a perfectly faithful movie adaption. However, if you’re going to change something, it ought to be because the change works better in the context of your new medium, or because you intend the change to act as commentary on the source material.
[/QUOTE]
Or, because you just don’t want to redo the original, because, again, what’s the point?
I can understand the aversion to ‘change just because’, but I simply can’t UNDERSTAND it, if you follow.
I’m not sure if the following better serves to illustrate my point, or how I developed my mindset, but I guess it’s useful either way.
Between the comics, the movies, and Superfriends, by the time I was 10, I’d encountered 3 different, mostly irreconcilable versions of Superman (actually 4, as I’d been passingly introduced to the Earth-2 version). But I had no trouble accepting all of these variant takes on him.
The same for Batman, Wonder Woman, and Spider-Man (although with different selections of TV series in these cases, rather than a movie).
Or, the Wizard of Oz, I’d seen the MGM version, The Return To Oz, and two different TV series - one quite faithful to the books, one a parody.
Now, all of the changes to these characters can be taken as ‘so as to work better in different media’ (although Spider-Man’s non-comics appearances were both in TV cartoons that I was familiar with at that point, so that’s not really a strong argument, IMO), but in either case, this has pretty much informed my opinion on such things long ago.
[QUOTE=Tengu]
Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries!
[/QUOTE]
[Andy Weir]
My mother was a SAINT! She turned the tide of battle!
[/andy weir]