Normally, renting the movie version of a great book sits somewhere near the top of my Blockbuster Pet Peeve list.
Coming in and picking up a crappy rip off of Othello or Hamlet or Romeo & Juliet makes no sense to me. I mean, Shakespeare's work is so incredible on the page and open to such great personal interpretation that watching Josh Harnett as a high school Iago is absolutely ridiculous to me. Some of my All-Time Favourite Movies are based on books and as much as I like the movies, the books are still better.
But there are exceptions to ever rule. For instance, even I would much rather watch Ellen Burstyn in a film adaptation of the classic Margaret Laurence novel The Stone Angel.
Pete Luvisa subjected me to reading this book in Grade 10 English class and I've held a grudge against him ever since. Well, he was also my football coach for the one year I played and dogged me worse than anyone for the entire season, so that probably has something to do with it too.
If we're being honest - and we're always honest here - if the movie was around when I was reading the book, I wouldn't have hesitated to toss it in the VCR and faked my way through the differences. Yes, I said VCR. We didn't have DVD when I was in Grade 10.
This book actually shapes up quite well as a movie, as some often do. It's a visual book, from what I remember, rich in descriptions and emotion, which, when done correctly, works much better on the screen than it does on the page.
Stone Angel aside, I still advocate reading the book. It's almost always better - like the original over the remake and the first one over all the sequels.
Besides, I decided I'm going to start off by writing my book and I don't want you just sitting around waiting for the movie to come out...
Continue reading ...
Posts
