Fluffy, on 2014-October-13, 06:04, said:
The fact that you have a model of the one you fist saw making oyu able to predict what is going to happen probably has something to do with it. Reading a book and then seeing a movie is gotta get you annoyed, that is, unless you read the book so long ago that you only remember the main story.
This is highly variable for me. I read the three novels beginning with
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and then I saw the saw rhe Swedish films (with sub-titles of course). I liked the books a lot and I liked the films a lot. Becky (my wife) felt that the films were so good that she had no interest in seeing the American film that was due out later but I saw it on tv (and I think Becky did also) and I thought that it was a fine job.
With John Grisham, I think that without exception I prefer the movies to the books. I'm not a fast reader, Grisham's stories are not all that deep, and blasting through in two hours while drinking some wine is just about right.
In a different direction, I mentioned elsewhere that I recently read and liked, much more than I expected to,
Gone Girl. I was thinking that it would be interesting to see how the movie handled what was largely a novel of interior psychology. From reading reviews of the film, I gather they decided to replace the inner trauma by a lot of screaming and blood. I have not yet seen it and probably won't. I suppose it isn't fair to criticize a movie I haven't seen, simply by the reviews, but I think I will let this one go by.
A few nights ago I watched
Girl, Interrupted. I am pretty sure that I read the book, a memoir about an eighteen year old girl's confinement in a mental ward, when it came out twenty years or so ago. Winona Rider, the interrupted girl, gave a very moving performance and Angelina Jolie won an Academy Award for best supporting (!) actress. Well deserved, imo. But there is some Hollywood type stuff that seemed implausible and was not part of the memoir. It didn't ruin it, at least not totally, but restraint is a useful quality, rare in Hollywood.
A very early version, for me, of the book/film issue was
The Third Man. I can remember when the movie came out (I was 10) but somehow I never saw it then. I gather that Graham Greene wrote the screenplay and the novel more or less simultaneously. Anyway, I read the novel, one of the first "adult novels" I had ever read. I was both fascinated and confused by the chase in the sewers of Vienna, I had no idea such a thing was possible. I guess I figured that you had to be a rat to be able to run around in sewers. But it has become one of my favorite films.
As to remakes, I like the
Freaky Friday remake more than I liked the original, but then I just like Jamie Lee Curtis in practically anything. On the other hand, no one should even try (many have) to remake
Miracle on 34th Street.
Saturday we go to see the musical version of
Little Women, put on by the local high school. Maybe there will be a future Elizabeth Taylor in it.
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