Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies

Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies

by Fullofkittens 03/12/2003, 12:49pm PST

Bill Dungsroman wrote:

Although most of the parts of the book that dealt with Tom Hanks' character when he was older and in the retirement home (he had to deal with a nasty guy like that one guard) were not in the film, the parts from when they worked the Green Mile were the most faithful adaptations to the screen from a book this side of a Harry Potter film (I assume). I mean, much of the dialogue was verbatim (like when the big guy feeds the mouse for the first time), and Creexul's favorite part occurs in the film exactly like it is described in the book. You should read it.

BDR

I'm currently in a crazily pretentious book phase where I'm trying to read these famous countercultural books (Naked Lunch, Tropic of Cancer), and truthfully, I would love to read a book where a chapter ends without describing a character's fucked-up nonsensical actions without ever actually telling me who this guy is. That seems to be the thread in all these banned books: characters come out of left field and do wacky shit and then disappear forever, leaving me saying, "Now, who was that guy fucking the corpse's ass? Did I miss him from before?"

The Harry Potter movies are weird in their faithfulness to the text: they're so close to the literal words of the books that I think they stary pretty far from the books' intentions. The books are funny, silly, and action-packed. The movies are action-packed. They get all the events in but miss the tone completely. I'm trying to think of any movie that sticks to the text and gets the tone right. It doesn't really seem possible. The Stand, I suppose, but that was a 10 hour mini-series. Books are just too long to be ported to film effectively without some major cuts. Not that you can't make a kickass movie from a book, you certainly can. Well, not you, personally.