Do You Ever Get Sick Of "The Book Is Better Than The Movie" bit?

I think the sets could have used a slight goopy glaze. Like a donut.

Can we goop this up for now?

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Thanks. I’ll never be able to look at a glazed donut again without thinking of a phallic like alien bursting from the chest of John Hurt

It's OK, we're all mad here.

That’s very reassuring - you’re probably right.

Speaking of goop and adaptations, can we all give a big shoutout to Stuart Gordon, who among his many adaptations of Lovecraft, read FROM BEYOND and thought “what if this went on past the ending of this short story into a land of BDSM, forehead penises, and most importantly, GOOP.”

This is another example of the book not being better.

Ladies and gents, I do declare we are BACK ON TRACK!

From Beyond does prove a Lovecraftian adaptation that isn't embarrassing is possible.


I am currently reading a book that, I'm not sure if it was ever adapted, but is impossible to imagine could ever do justice. James Agee's "Let Us Know Praise Famous Men" is so dense in its prose, and attention to the detail of this man's experience in the South, I feel all the sublety would be drained from it if it were put on screen. So far the actual action is fairly standard, but it really sparkles because of the inner conflict the author is having in using these people to create a piece of fiction. It's astonishing and would likely lead to a very mediocre book.


Also, I've never dared go near the Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell mini series because it is the rare example of a story that I think I really need all of the subplots to be considered on screen. And there are just so many of them, I haven't bothered with the adaptation (which was apparently shit anyways)

I didn't hate the adaptation of Jonathan Strange--thanks to some performances I enjoyed and the guys who run the clinic where the wife goes being adorable--but the whole time you can feel the way that the subplots are being truncated or skipped over and it never really finds a way to flow through a complex story in a short amount of time.

The mini-series is good.

I admire Gordon's willingness to take the material and dive right into that goopy donut hole.

Jonathan Strange holds a kind of special place for me in that it is one of the rare books where (as much as I love the way it is written, basically a really good approximation of Victorian era details and rhythms in its prose) the twists and turns and revelations of the story were just as important to me. People often talk about seeing a 'movie' when they read, and while this was very much what would happen to me when I read as a child and early adolescent, something changed as I became older. Writing became more and more about the actual words on the page. I think around this time I began to become aware that I have some kind of synesthesia with the written language (at least that's as close as I can approximate it) and words (not the story they were telling) became the primary element. They are enough. They are my obsession (well, along with movies and music)



But Jonathan Strange brought that movie in the head thing back. It hadn't happened for over a decade before, and it hasn't happened in the decade plus since. And so I hesitate to see what they ended up doing with it (even though I think I've probably by now forgotten at least a dozen of the subplots that I once loved so much). One of these days though I'm sure I'll give it a go.

I think that a great adaptation was probably never in the works. The novel is complex in both plot and in presentation of the plot (as with the pages-long footnotes).

I went into the miniseries with relatively low expectations and I mostly enjoyed it. I liked seeing certain sequences that were done pretty well, and I just ignored the stuff that wasn't.

Not having been spoiled by the book, I found the mini-series to be quite charming. Not aware of the missing sub-plots, I didn't have the sense that anything was missing. I only read into a few chapters of the book after the mini, but found it to be what I hoped it would be -- I just didn't have the time at the time to really focus on it.

to be honest I often hear that and here my opinion to stop 50-50, really some of the books are much more interesting to describe the plot, but most of the movies are much stronger than the books

Nice and nuanced.



Oh damn, you're banned?

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That doesn't mean they had go with that aesthetic, though, and that's a seperate issue from the effect it has on the final product anyway, especially when compared to the look of the original film.

You escaped the scene of the crime and now you come back reassert your anachronistic libel against the film after the thread is now back on topic? Those corridors must've really pissed you off.

I think it's silly to compare the book and the movie. After all, these are completely different things.

Books and movies have different strengths and should be judged relative to the standards of their own medium rather than against each other.