"Now a Major Motion Picture"

Dear followers and random stumblers-by,

I'm afraid I've been away from the blog world for a while! Now that I've had a month to get my new "you're-not-a-student-anymore" life all sorted our, I hope to be frequenting the blogspot crooks and crannies more often.

Tonight's post is not so much inspired as straight up developed by the lovely Miss Ashley, who suggested I write a post on novels turned movies.

Interestingly enough,  3 of my english courses at UBC, 2 of them from my last semester, dealt with that hot-topic.  I wrote a paper on Disney's adaptation of Perrault's Cinderella for my Children's Lit course, and in both my Victorian and Dystopian lit classes, we often had the opportunity to watch film versions of the texts we were studying and respond to them.  Both classes came to the similar conclusion that good adaptations are a rare gem.

First person narratives turned films specifically rarely-if ever- work out.  When you have a story written in the "I did this, I did that" style, screenwriters often jump to the horrendous overdubbed narration option.  It works in Grey's Anatomy.  I hate it almost everywhere else.

This issue is even more of a complication for screenwriters when a novel has multiple narrators.  One of the examples from my Victorian Lit class is Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone.  As a class, we all though the BBC film version of this "first detective novel" did it a huge disservice in having to erase the several narrative voices included in the text.

A more recent and topical example is Kathryn Stockett's The Help.  My mom and I agreed to read novel before seeing the movie, and I'm quite glad that I remained true to this pact.  The Help has 3 narrators, Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter, but the movie only uses Aibileen's voiceover as a narration.  My only real complaint of the movie is that this decision causes the audience to lose a lot of the Stockett's characterization of Skeeter and Minny that is so well deveoped in the novel.  The biggest contrast I noticed, and one that nagged at me throughout the late night showing of the film that I saw with my cousins, was a discrepancy in Minny's character.  You know that Avenue Q song, "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist"? Well, in Stockett's novel, the uppity white women of Jacksonville, Mississippi aren't the only ones with racist tendencies.  Its done in a very subtle and well-executed way, but still apparent in the text version of this story, Minny is presented as being similarly prejudiced towards the white people who have prejudices against her.  That complex layer to the novel made a much stronger statement than the movie's "white people are mean" one. (Sorry).

That said- the movie is still very good! I almost think I would have enjoyed it more however, if I hadn't read the book first.  And lets be clear, the book was still better.  As tends to be the rule.

                                        

To go general again, as much as first person narratives are difficult to transfer over into film, limited omniscient p.o.v's (where the reader is privy to one character's thoughts, but one one) can be equally challenging.  How do you show a character's thoughts in a movie without doing the silly voiceover thing? With difficulty.  Some movies though, have managed to do it.  Harry Potter.  Case in point.

I just finished reading, for the first time.  Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. What a fabulous read! If any of you haven't read it yet- do it.  It is SOOOOO much better than the movie! It goes into so much detail, and wow, it was just great.  The 2005 Keira Knightly version of the novel is a nice "filler", in that it does a lovely job of showing off the English countryside and fancy dress, and it makes me love Mr. Darcy a bit more than just words on a page can do.

 (or actually watch him walk across the field.)

In the end though, I have to conclude that the best movies are made from objectively-written novels.

Lord of the Rings baby.  LOTR.