Adaptations – Tyson Adams

Book vs Movie: The Snowman – What’s the Difference?

Let’s explore a Scandinavian crime fiction classic, with Lost in Adaptation.

Video: The Snowman – Lost in Adaptation

Many years ago, when I was on something of a crime fiction bender, I stumbled across Jo Nesbo. People were raving about his take on the Scandinavian crime genre and how interesting it was.

Part of this raving was that he was touring Australia promoting the film Headhunters (an interesting thriller movie) and exhibited a charming and charismatic demeanour as he humbly gave credit to his novel’s English translator. Yes, that’s right, despite his fluency in English and the majority of his book sales being to the English-speaking book market, he lets someone else translate them.

So I picked up a few Harry Hole novels and read one.

Nesbo himself referred to the series as being inspired by Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, which I think is a fair comparison. But, the difference is that Connelly tends toward the dry real-world investigation influenced by his time as a crime reporter, whereas Nesbo tends toward the excitant – as much as a police procedural can do so.

Why did you read only one of the novels you bought?

That’s a very good assumed question from the assumed audience.

There are a few reasons. The first was that sometime after reading my first Nesbo novel I’d grown tired of the crime genre. As Dominic Noble mentions in the video, there are often numerous contrived red herrings in these sorts of books that start to become tedious rather than exciting and interesting. Often the main character is unlikeable or would be the person everyone at a party avoids due to their predilection for telling stories about linoleum texture styles through time.

The second reason was that, outside of a few exceptions, crime novels are part of the normalisation of the exceptional with a side serve of copaganda. When you start looking at crime data and policing and the giant chasm between that reality and the perceptions of crime and police, it becomes hard to enjoy this type of escapist fiction.

The third reason is something Dominic Noble alludes to in the video. The books aren’t exactly good. With a bit of distance from the genre now, I find myself less enamoured with authors like Nesbo, and thus have no real desire to read more of his stuff.

And on this point, I’m reminded of something Lauren Beukes said about being on a panel with Jo Nesbo. He was describing going to her home country of South Africa and how he got kitted out in body armour, had an armed guard to go places, etc, etc, and she commented how it was nice exaggeration that makes for a good story, but doesn’t really work if you give it any thought or know something about it.*

* I may be putting words in Beukes’ mouth here as this is a remembered comment from at least a decade ago.

Video: The Art of Editing and The Snowman by Dan Olsen aka Folding Ideas

Blog Topic, Fun Articles, Reading, Video

Book vs movie: Pet Cemetary – What’s the Difference?

It was inevitable that someone in Hollywood would try to reanimate the corpse of yet another classic film. So with the upcoming release of the remake of Pet Cemetary, what better time for CineFix to discuss the original book and movie in What’s the Difference?

Pet Cemetary is one of the many books lingering on my shelf in the TBR pile. While I have decided that this year will involve a concerted effort to make a dent in said pile*, it is unlikely I’ll get to read this novel anytime soon. If I’m completely honest, I want to read The Stand first.

What about the movie, I hear you ask. Back when I was a young lad – walking the obligatory 10 miles (whatever a mile is in real measurements) to school through 10 feet of snow (why would there be feet in snow?) after working 10 hours at the coal mine – Stephen King novels and movies were all the rage. Whether it was Needful Things, Carrie, Misery, Lawnmower Man, IT, or Children of the Corn, there always seemed to be someone bringing a Stephen King VHS** to watch. And after my hard lesson learnt with IT, I tried to avoid the obviously scary films – hence I have seen Lawnmower Man and most of Needful Things, but not Children of the Corn.

At this point, I probably sound like a wimp. It is odd that I generally don’t find horror novels that bad, and even movies with horror elements are fine. But movies whose goal is to creep you out or gross you out (think Saw franchise or Hostel) just aren’t for me, particularly the latter. It’s a little hard to be entertained by that sort of thing.

Yes, yes, more excuses as to why I haven’t read or watched something. Don’t worry, plenty of horror in my TBR pile. Stay tuned.

*I’ve managed to read one from the pile and added two more to it this month. That counts as progress, right?

**VHS, that’s right. I am truly that old.

Blog Topic, Reading, Video

Book vs Movie: The Lost World – What’s the Difference?

This month’s What’s the Difference from Cinefix compares the book sequel written because the movie adaptation was successful and the director wanted more source material to ignore. Jurassic Park: The Lost World.

Honestly, I can never keep it straight in my head which parts of the novels ended up in which movie. As mentioned in the video, the opening scene of The Lost World was actually from the first book. There are other examples, like the “birdcage” scene in one of the other movies was in the first book… I think.

One thing is for certain: Spielberg knows how to make a film. He knows how to build tension, he knows how to establish sights, sounds, and characters so that sequences hang together, and he knows not to have a talking dinosaur in an aeroplane.

nwrb8yd — Yes, this is an actual scene from Jurrasic Park 3. Take a moment.

But The Lost World is an example of one the worst reasons you write or film a sequel: because the first one was successful. I don’t know exactly what Spielberg’s motivations were for the sequel – maybe he was under contract, maybe he needed a new wing on his house – but the film was dull. It was trying to recapture the lightning bottled in the first film. The same can be said of the book. Crichton didn’t originally want to write a sequel and was only convinced by Spielberg saying ~~he’d give him lots of money~~ that he would be keen to direct a movie adaptation of the sequel if one were written.

I’m on record as not being much of a fan of Michael Crichton’s books. He has a tendency to write solid thrillers that act as vehicles for anti-science rants by a raisonneur or mouthpiece. There is nothing wrong with doing this, per se, but science is awesome, so make sure your criticism is on point. Or don’t, depending on whether you want to impress me or someone who thinks chakras are a thing.

Needless to say, I was a fan of the first film, less so the book. The sequels… Put it this way, I haven’t bothered watching the new ones starring Chris Pratt yet.

Blog Topic, Fun Articles, Video

Book vs Movie: When the Book Is Better

PBS Digital Studios have a new video series It’s Lit! which is part of The Great American Read, an eight-part series that explores and celebrates the power of reading. Featuring one of the premiere video essayists in Lindsay Ellis, this series should be brilliant.

The first video briefly discusses a topic I’ve frequently discussed here, what makes a good adaptation and why the book is so often regarded as better.

Lindsay has very concisely summarised why movies so often don’t make for good or faithful adaptations of the source material. But she also touches on why they can sometimes improve the book, or make an adaptation that uses the source material in an interesting way to tell a different story.

If you aren’t already subscribed to Lindsay or PBS Digital Studios, you may want to do so now.

Reading, Video

Book vs Movie: Harry Potter part 3 – What’s the Difference?

This month CineFix finishes their series covering the Harry Potter movie adaptations. This instalment discusses the differences between the Half-Blood Prince and The Deadly Hallows books, and their associated movies in What’s the Difference?

It has to be said that the movie adaptations made some odd choices of material to drop, and this created problems as the series went on. If the movies were meant to be independent of the books then you would have a hard time following some of the minor plot points or McGuffins. The mirror shard and Snape as the Half-Blood Prince reveal are just two examples. I actually thought the wand lore and Deathly Hallows were poorly handled in the movies, but it has been some time since I saw the movies, so I could be misremembering.

One thing that really annoyed me about the adaptation of the Half-Blood Prince was the Burrows attack. Not only did that make the Burrows a non-safe house ahead of schedule for the series, as discussed in the video, but it served no purpose to the plot of the movie. It was obvious why the movie makers did this: they needed some action for pacing. Because tension and suspense are so 1950’s. Considering the attack wasn’t in the book and there were action set-pieces they were ignoring or about to get to, it stuck out like a sore thumb in a proctologist’s office.

The other thing worth mentioning is the omission or marginalising of the minor characters from the books. Tonks is an obvious one, especially given the tragedy that befalls she and Lupin, and thus her son. But ensemble casts are hard to manage in a movie, so trimming is always going to happen. But one of the unforgivable marginalisations is discussed in the video: Neville Longbottom. Since he was the second possible “chosen one”, he really deserved better in the movies, especially later in the series. The other character that gets a short shrift is Luna Lovegood. I liked the implication in the books that Harry and friends felt guilty for not realising that Luna regarded them as close friends. And don’t get me started on SPEW and Dobby.

With this series on the Harry Potter adaptations done, I think it is time to raise a chief criticism of the Harry Potter movies. I actually think the books would have been better suited by a TV series adaptation. Of course, they started doing the adaptations before that was the cool thing to do with potentially big franchises. So while it is easy to forget that once upon a time not every fantasy author was clamouring for an HBO series based on their books, that time did exist. Of course, several billion dollars in movie earnings probably disagrees with me.