I couldn’t disagree more.
Forget the “expanded canon” The Gorn were initially painted as EVIIL invaders (and you have to admit, sneak-attacking a colony, even if it’s there without realizing they were squatting is a Dick Move). At the end Kirk realizes they mighht have a point. There’s no real characterization.
The Gunpowder schtick was old when they did it on TV, and Kirk was damned lucky his quickly-thrown-together stuff worked.
Carson didn’t win by luck. Both he and the Outsider tried various things to get at the other – making a spear, making a catapult, maqking fire bombs. Carson tried and tested lots of hypotheses to try to figure out how the alien Arena setup worked, logically deducing the “physics” of the situation. He won because he figured out how the setup worked, and used it to his advantage. He didn’t just climb up to the top of a hill and fall into the correct solution.
And, yes, it was a story about one side vs. the other, with one side demonstrated to be pretty irrevocably bad. It wasn’t just tearing the limbs off multlegged lizards. The Ousiders had been systematically wiping out earth bases (not a single mistaken attack on one). Carson’s attempt to communicate with the Outsider showed that it had no intention of relenting or cooperating. And he had the word of the Overmind (or whatever you want to call it) that there was no foreseeable peace between them.
But just because it’s a case of Good vs. Evil doesn’t make it trivial or one-dimensional.
Okay, it’s obvious we have a fundamental difference of opinion here and not just an unclear understanding of each other’s position. So de gustibus non est disputandum and all that.
The movie had its problems, too. Bond borrowed a bar of gold, set up a golf game with Goldfinger, caught him cheating and turned the tables, all so he could get close enough to Goldfinger’s Rolls Royce to plant a homing transmitter on it. The receiver is in his tricked-out Aston Martin. With all this cutting-edge technology and spycraft, Bond follows Goldfinger to…
…a factory with “Auric Enterprises” written on it in huge letters. I could have found that with a rental car and a phone book.
I “read” Moby Dick in school as required reading in English class and it was quite a slog to get through. I remember an entire chapter being about a rope on the ship. (Later, though, in thinking about the novel, it might have made more sense if I understood the Biblical origin of the names, like Ahab or Ishmael.) And in another English class, we read Billy Budd, in which the title character is described so lovingly that we concluded Melville was gay, although the teacher denied it.
And as a kid, I read lots on my own. I tried to read one classic novel in unabridged form. I think it was Robinson Crusoe, but the unabridged version was so long and so dull. We also had to read some Dickens novels in school and it seemed obvious that he was being paid by the word. (Much of his stuff was serialized and he was paid by the word.)
I just got done watching a YouTube video where a guy runs the LOTR trilogy over three evenings for his parents, brother, and SIL none of whom had seen it before. All of them kept whining about how boring it was.
I highly doubt they’d read the books, either, or – I’m being judgmental here – much of anything else.
I have strong opinions about books turned into movies, and generally find the movies wanting. In the case of Fight Club, I have read the book (my wife owns it) and seen the movie a few times, and to me it’s completely unquestionable: the movie is vastly superior to the book. My wife feels differently about this; the book stuck with her and I barely remember any of the details at this point.
Anyway! it feels like movies sort of gloss over much detail and remove the rest, leaving a highly-varnished treatment of the book’s main tropes. In this case, the movie actually added detail and clarification. This is partially because the movie itself was good (in my opinion, of course) and partially because the book was incredibly sparse.
Movies inherently must remove lots of detail, except in so far as that detail is describing something visual. A novel’s worth of nonvisual detail would take a six-hour movie to translate it faithfully, but a whole chapter of visual description can be condensed into a minute of cinematography.
Two picks for movies much superior to the books they were based on.
Bridge On The River Kwai took a fairly good story and made it into a much more compelling, classic movie.
Gorky Park worked because it tightened up a rambling, overly long book.
I couldn’t disagree more. Apart from the anti-Semitic reference (which is a brief, tiny plot element), the novel by John Buchan is a compelling mystery and great fun, while I thought the movie made unnecessary, detrimental plot changes and dragged by comparison.
He was a fine corrupt mayor in Stranger Things, and was an entertaining guest star on *Psych *for a few episodes.
I wonder if “The Wolf of Wall Street” (movie) is better than the book. I’ve heard lots of people talk about the movie, but I can’t recall having heard anyone EVER say they’d read the book, which doesn’t bode well for the book being any good.
I know you are just being funny, but that movie is quite an epic production, famous cast, sets, it should be seen just for that even if you don’t agree with the subject matter. Every one who was anybody in Hollywood, at the time, was in that movie.
Hence the Blazing Saddles quote “I’ve killed more people than Cecil B. DeMille.”
I did read Moby-Dick (with the hyphen is the correct rendering) for pleasure a couple of years ago and very much enjoyed it. However, I do think if I’d had to read it as a punk high-schooler, I would not have liked it so much. By the time I got around to it, I was more mature, better educated and had already gotten into many of the classics.
I loved the book and absolutely hated the movie. Worst of all, the film dropped the entire subplot with Melony. It was almost like an entirely different story.
In the movie, you have to imagine Garp’s book from the montage with the gloves and the falling piano, and Garp’s description. “…when he takes the gloves off, he finally touches his family, but he dies.”* “If that’s what it’s about, I like it!”
In the book, Irving actually includes an excerpt. All it shows is that Irving isn’t as good a writer as Garp. For things like that, it’s best to leave magical writing to the reader’s imagination.
PLus, I love the cyclical nature of the film, the constant repetition of themes as if the movie were the score of a play. None of that is in the book.
But the book does have a large section on how every character died. Kind of a bummer ending, dude. More to the point, you could do that with every novel ever written. It doesn’t really add anything, or tell you anything insightful. It’s not all that clever.
I could not agree with you more, especially your last paragraph. That was the first movie/book title that came to my mind.
Aside from the Captain Shakespeare bit (WTF???) I tend to agree with you. I loved the book as well but rereading it after the movie reminded me of the truly depressing ending of the book.
A Little Mermaid. As Disneyfied as the whole thing was, the original tale by Hans Christian Andersen is really depressing. Hell, everything by Anderson is depressing (The Fir Tree, The Little Match Girl…). The man was CRUEL.
Tell me about it. I suspect he wasn’t writing stories so much as Important Lessons in Life. I think the most highly Disneyfied treatment on record has to be Frozen. After I went and read HCA’s seed, The Ice Queen, I concurred. About all that was taken from it by Disney was that it’s cold, and the names of two of the palace staff, Gerda and Kai. Had much more of the original had been used, I’m picturing angry parents stalking out of the theater with bawling kids in tow.