whither thou goest

[slumber]

jsa;hjfksa I need to stop being a lazy bum and get myself a new layout like I've been promising myself I would, as paid account runs out soon and I hate to say it, but I am rather sick of all the pink. :|

But the internet! Is really really great--for PORN!

I love how I can take a random comment on the internets ("..the Ruth to my Idgie...", and I don't even remember which thread I picked this off from), Google it, find an interesting film I've never heard of before (not even back in the FAP threads related solely for discussion of this sort, where I'd learned to download Wilde and Velvet Goldmine), download it off bittorrent in a few days, and end up spending the middle of the night bawling over a movie I'd missed in the early nineties.

Made me wonder though, about movies made based on books and all those things, and how we all have this meta-discussion about what's canon and not based on what we get from either source, but.

How do you take differing facts from books and movies? And do facts that don't appear in, say, the movie, but are present in the book mean that they are likewise real in the movie too? I mean, I get a lot of discussion about how "It isn't in the movie but it's in the book" as supposed argument for factual things, but shouldn't they be taken separately from each other?

I've always taken both book and movie as one big universe of reality, I think, but recently I've begun wondering if perhaps that shouldn't be the case, that I should leave book and movie each alone. I mean--Wicked the musical, for instance, is vastly different from Wicked the novel, and if I had to combine them in one universe I'd be sorely annoyed, so I had to enjoy them separately, right? Is this perhaps why we can get so pissy about, say, Harry Potter movies?

Haha, I don't know, I should probably go to bed now. :|

But thoughts?

Comments

[irian.livejournal.com]

I tend to view the movies as separate entities from the source material, because it's simply not possible to completely translate the images from a book into film. There are some scenes that are drawn out in a book that are given only a few seconds onscreen because they aren't necessary to the "flow" of the film, for example. Or some scenes in a book will only be implied via the dialog in a movie rather than filmed as a separate scene.

Of course, that would bring us to the debate of how faithful to the original material film scripts need to be. Because at the end of the day, a film script is only one (or maybe two) person's *interpretation* of the original book (in the same way that each reader has his own interpretation/uderstanding of what he reads), and he might insert new scenes or delete some scenes at his discretion because he *feels* that the film needs it.

So I guess your question on "It isn't in the movie but it's in the book" would depend on how closely the movie script follows the book. If it's a relatively faithful adaptation, then I guess the statement would be applicable. But for a case like Wicked, which is only loosely based on the book in that it uses the same characters and situations, but doesn't bother to delve deeply into their personalities and motivations the way the book does, then the result would of course have a completely different impact. Wicked the book was meant to make the reader *think*. I doubt that the musical can achieve the same effect because it's more plot-driven than character driven, having deleted those insights into the characters' worldview that the book so brilliantly delivered.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!