Movies must always change, even if slightly, from the books they are based on. There is usually no way that everything imparted in a book can be placed in a 2-hour (more or less) movie.

On the other hand, there are movies that completely destroy the entire meaning and feeling of a book. I caught Fox's Green Grass of Wyoming a couple of weeks ago and was just as disappointed when I saw it the first time in the 1970s. Everything that made Mary O'Hara's sequel to My Friend Flicka and Thunderhead so absorbing and appealing—Ken McLaughlin's journey from boyhood to manhood, Carey Marsh's efforts to break with her domineering grandmother, Nell's experiences as a late-in-life mother of a little girl—all are gone from the film.

And now they have taken Susan Cooper's quintessential British fantasy The Dark is Rising about a young British boy who must confront ancient evil into a CGI-fest of monsters with yet another sullen teenage American hero from a dysfunctional family. (Heaven deliver me from another dysfunctional family! Have all the movie producers in Hollywood had rotten childhoods?)

Here's an examination of the destruction in A Blog of Authors.

Labels: books, movies

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:55:00 AM

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