The Written Word vs The Visual World

[waitingman]

Middle Earth...

Actually, it's the Tasman Glacier lake, with Aoraki, New Zealand's highest peak, just out of shot to the left... If you've seen the Lord of the Rings & Hobbit movies, you've seen these mountains

Long-Suffering Partner & I were discussing book-to-screen adaptations over brunch today, having just watched the 3rd season of American Gods, which was cancelled at the end of that season only getting through ¾ of the book itself, but stuffing in a whole lot of subplots that weren't in the original text, for minor characters & then not finishing them either... Despite the presence of the mighty (& perfectly cast!) Ian McShane as Mr Wednesday, we label the series another failure, in a line of failures, to adapt Neil Gaiman's books to visual media - which is why L-SP isn't too excited about the upcoming adaptation of his Sandman comics 'graphic novellas'... & neither am I, really

Which made us think about other novels that didn't translate to the screen... I loved the original LOTR trilogy, but just couldn't warm to the Hobbit films in the same way, despite them being made by largely the same team. Ironically, the magic just doesn't seem to be there... for me, at least

Catch 22, while a good film on its own - both of them, actually, didn't capture the cynical absurdity of the novel. The Hunger Games films lacked the sense of bleak desperation that drove their protagonist(s). And Twilight doesn't count - the books are shit, so it follows that the films are as well...

On the other hand, the film of The Name Of The Rose was, in my not-so-humble opinion, infinitely preferable to the stonking plodder of a novel it came from

Et Toi??

Comments

[paserbyp]

I found rear examples when adaptions was perfect. I don’t know why, but the same happens with musical video, because you don’t want to show musician playing instrument like in concert and in this case song became something different… You know it better than me…

[waitingman]

The best music videos are often the ones where the band, or artist, get to make the visuals they want for the song... though there aren't many of those that are automatically 'good'

This song by REM is probably the best 'lyrics to video' adaptation I've seen. It was directed by Michael Stipe, which probably helps!

[paserbyp]

Simply masterpiece!

Another example of great music video: https://youtu.be/VjEq-r2agqc