Frazz by Jef Mallett for December 02, 2013

Nowadays the “Movie Version” can have VERY Little to do with the Book it’s supposedly based on.

Exhibit A – Will Smith’s – “I, Robot”

The Movie doesn’t have ANYTHING to do with ANY of the Stories in a Short Story Collection that has sold MILLIONS of Copies since the 1950’s, and YET somehow they expected nobody to notice this!

If it IS something else, they should CALL IT something else. I wanted to go out to the Box Office and get my money back for “False Advertising.”

Leo, I agree….Although I Robot is the extreme in not being like the book, movies of books are almost always disappointing….But even if they follow a good book faithfully, like Striptease, by Carl Hiaasen, you still get a dull movie…(Except for that Demi Moore striptease part…)….Part of it is the viewer doesn’t know whats going on in the heads of the characters, like the book could illustrate, so motivation is sometimes less clear and meaningful….Sometimes I think most movies from books should have narrators….The Princess Bride Model….

There are a few exceptions: “Grapes of Wrath” – both film and book are classics, and the film is fairly close to the book. Although the “Dr.Zhivago” movie couldn’t possibly capture the scope of the book, it gives a good sense of it.

In the case of classic children’s novels (particularly Mary Poppins, Doctor Doolittle, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), I’ve noticed that the movie (the1967 DD) is often better than the book. My theory about why this is is that the book only has to entertain the parent who reads it for about 15 minutes, while the movie has to entertain the parent who takes the kids for 2-2.5 hours.

I say, let him do it and discover that it wasn’t really the easy way out, because the movie will be SO different that his teacher will know right away he tried to cheat and giive him an F.

I have seen movies that equaled the book even in a separate but equal sort of way, but The African Queen was the only movie I have seen that was better than the book, and I am a Forester fan in the Hornblower saga.

swr: At least Kipling respected grammar – and since they permitted authors to read galley proofs back in those days, spelling as well.

The only movie I’ve ever seen that was made from a book that was exactly like the book was Ursula Le Guin’s “Lathe of Heaven”. It’s definitely not a “nowadays” thing; in the early 70s I watched (part of) a made-for-TV movie that was supposedly “Tom Sawyer”. It was a freaking MUSICAL, which was bad enough, but they turned the whitewashing scene into a musical number with a bunch of KIDS (including Tom!) singing about the satisfaction to be derived from working and doing a job well. That was when I bailed.

I remember once, either 7th or 8th grade, when I needed a book report. I made it on a comic book story of Red Ryder and his sidekick, Little Beaver. Made up a title and author and followed the storyline. As I recall, I got an A on that report. No teacher is going to spend all of their free time reading 30 book reports.