RTW: Book vs. Video

Road Trip Wednesday is a "Blog Carnival," where YA Highway's contributors and followers post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on their blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.

This week's topic: What movie have you seen that actually (gasp!) improved on the book?

Some interesting picks for this one in the road trip--some I agree with, and others made me say, "Whaaat?" That's what I love about these road trips!

My pick is Girl with a Pearl Earring; the book by Tracy Chevalier in 2001, and the film came out in 2004.

For the most part I enjoyed the novel and the very specific time and place it portrayed, but the writing was fairly passive and left parts of the story to fall flat. In truth, by the time the movie came out I'd forgotten about the book.

And then I started hearing about a new Colin Firth movie--and I didn't really need to hear more than that before buying a ticket! But this movie turned out to be so much more than Colinporn. I use that term for all Colin Firth movies, but what's so impressive about this film is that the onscreen sexual tension between Vermeer (Firth) and Griet (Johansson) is absolutely sizzling.

Some of that is due to their stellar acting abilities, of course, but also the film maker's choices, including the choice not to include any explicitly sexual scenes. The hottest scene in the entire film is about hair, for pity's sake! But I distinctly remember holding my breath through that scene, and having it whoosh out of me when the story moved on.

The other place where the movie outshines the book is visually. Tracy Chevalier did a great job trying to describe colors and shadows, and other aspects of creating a painting. But those scenes in the film do an even better job conveying the sense of wonder and hyperfocus I get while I'm painting, or looking at a truly great piece of art.

In the special features on the disc I have, they talked about how many of the movie's scenes are deliberate re-creations, almost tableaus, of the Dutch Master style of painting. The lighting, the colors and hues, the quiet, homey moments captured instead of pageantry. So well done!

Okay, now I need to go watch it again!
  
Feel free to put a link to your post in the comments if you played along with Road Trip Wednesday. Don't forget to go to the YA Highway post and read all the answers!

FIDO: ever faithful

Zombies seem to be everywhere these days, so my husband rolled his eyes when I put in the disc for FIDO, another zombie movie. But we both ended up liking this one. Zombies give me the heebie-jeebies, but I can tolerate them better with a dose of humor.

FIDO delivers on the wry humor (I almost said "tongue-in-cheek" but that takes on a different tone when you're talking zombies)--like Pleasantville meets Shaun of the Dead (another must-see that I've blogged about), which sounds like an odd mix but actually works. I was surprised when I looked back and saw that it got an R rating for "zombie related violence." I've seen gorier movies with a PG-13 rating.

Here's the trailer:

Secret of Kells

Saw a lovely little animated film the other day, Secret of Kells. It's beautifully made and well worth seeing.

But what made it particularly interesting is that we were just discussing The Hero's Journey in our crit group. There is a book called The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler, and he uses Joseph Campbell's ideas of the hero's journey as a way to plot a story.

Secret of Kells hit on all those points, so it was timely to have them reinforced. Vogler's model has since been used for many films, especially Disney films, and another good example is The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

Trailer for Secret of Kells below, and here's a link to the poem Pangur Ban

Fiction Frenzy

Whenever I'm deep in rewrites, I'm unable to read fiction and actually enjoy it. It's hard to turn off that picking-it-apart section of my mind.

Lately I'm catching up on some novels I've been wanting to read, like The Dust of 100 Dogs by A.S. King, City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jaqueline Kelly, and Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld.

Coincidentally, Netflix sent us the disc of the 2009 movie version of City of Ember over the weekend. Jeanne DuPrau was also at the SCBWI Regional conference a few weeks ago and spoke about her development of the Ember books, particularly what she had decided to cut and what she kept from earlier drafts.

So it was interesting to see what the film did with the books, but some of the changes the studio/scriptwriters made puzzled me (spoilers ahead). DuPrau does mention insects since one of the characters is fascinated by them, but for the movie all the creatures were super-sized. There's even a voracious, giant mole---cool special effects, but it seemed a cheap way to add tension. And the characters' onscreen passage through watery tunnels looked like a ride at Universal Studios, which it could be for all I know.

Looking back at the pages of the story, the tension building is quieter than a giant mole chasing you, but the stakes for the characters are consistently raised throughout. It kept me interested, and as a writer I could recognize the craft behind it. So in my view, it was successful the way it was.

I guess maybe I need to learn to turn off the picking-it-apart section of my brain for movies, too!