FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for April 18, 2011

I agree with Darkeforce. It was a fabulous production that I intend to watch many more times. It missed a few things from the original plot, but it was a much truer rendition of the novel than most of Hollywood’s efforts. The worst one I can think of is Frankenstein (1931). It was a great movie that I enjoy seeing over and over again but it was not Mary W. Shelley’s story by a long shot.

I saw the movies too long after I’d read to books, to remember what was different. I enjoyed both the books and the movies wholeheartedly. Same goes for Narnia.

Thank God I read Dracula before ever being exposed to any celluloid renditions. Not that I haven’t enjoyed the interpretations from both sides of the Atlantic.

Read a book, then see the movie.

Great! The director envisioned it just like me. Great! I never envisioned it like the director. Crap! Was the screenplay written from Cliff Notes?

Same for me Ray.

There is just no way to please everyone as well as no way to ever get the full text into move form. All you can hope for is that the essence shines through.

In both LOTR and, to a slightly lesser extent, Narnia succeeded in this and are quite enjoyable as long as you don’t try to nit pick every last detail.

Chiming in again …

Also the LOTR movies, much like Avatar, ushered in a new era of cinematography with new ways of filming and a new measure of what can be done with set design.

I am looking forward to The Hobbit which is now being shot at an amazing 60 frames per second (standard is 24) and should welcome in another breakthrough in cinematography. That and I am reply looking forward to seeing how they pull off the battle of five armies.

A movie will never be able to wholly capture what a book does, they are different mediums, and should be treated differently. As Darkforce mentioned, the main goal of an adaptation is to capture the essence of the book, not to replicate the book to its last letter.

I’m slowly beginning to realize people need to judge movies AS MOVIES, and not as how they hold up to their book counterparts. Its not fair to either of them.

Meh. I was okay with the first film. The changes that were made - while I may not have agreed with all of them - were obviously chosen from a studio standpoint to make the film more appealing without completely destroying the spirit of the work.

Then Faramir being nearly as bad as Boromir until the end (the whole point of even having his character was to prove that not all men of his line were like Boromir), the Ents refusing to give help (where the point was to prove that Sauron was such a threat that even those who don’t get along together need to band together and help) and removing Saruman entirely from the last film (it’s one of the major iconic scenes in the book and there’s a lot of other things that could have been shortened instead)… not only did the changes hurt the actual spirit of the film, the first two resulted in making certain scenes longer, when most of the changes that I was okay with were done to keep the film length down.

I think the Disney version of the Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe was the most faithful book to film adaptation I’ve seen so far.

Check out this Blog:

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2009/07/13/127-where-the-wild-things-are/

For an interesting take on this topic

Lewreader, I think you have it backward. If you see the movie first, then you are never disappointed in the screen adaptation. You can enjoy the film for what it is, then read the book to fill in the gaps.

Legends of the Guardians:The Owls of Ga’hoole did deviate from the books somewhat.

But how they deviated, and what they added and removed, actually made for a more enjoyable movie than if they copied from the Guardians of Ga’hoole series.

Some of the deletions were necessary but they forced a couple of things. “Shortcut to Mushrooms” - it made no sense in the movie whatsoever.

Then they portray Arwen as the elf who finds them in the wild – and do nothing with this “new” side of her character.

And it added nothing at all to have Farimir drag Frodo and company back to Gondor instead of parting where they did in the book.

Then the siege of Minas Tirith led by an orc? when the book specifically said it wasn’t. So what was the Lord of the Nazgul doing on the battlefield? Was he just a second fiddle?

And from what I know of medieval warfare, trebuches were seige weapons used against fortifications. Catapults were smaller weapons used as anti-personnel devices. They got it backwards.

Other than that, the landscape was as I imagined as were the characters except Sam who should have been speaking in a nearly incomprhensible Scotish accent.

It was a good movie with a couple of “forced” situations that made no sense unless you read the book and then you cringed at how poorly they were done. It’s an even better book.

So Jason and Marcus were hoping to spend a year in New Zealand? (Or three years if they were in all three movies.) I suppose Paige would have liked that…

I have never read the Lord of the Rings books but I saw the movies. What I remember is that they were way TOO LONG. Most movies only follow the books very loosely.

They were the best movies ever made! I could sing their praises for hours and hours – but I won’t because no one will read this anyway.

I soooo wish that I could have been in the movie. That would have been awesome!