[ the opp ]

I suppose it's sort of weird to do a comment post on someone else's comment post, which this sort of is, but I'm going to do this anyway. Dylan's book vs movie post inspired a lot of discussion (three comments plus Kathryn's OPP post) and so naturally, as an avid reader/watcher of books/movies, I wanted to get in on the discussion myself. I really enjoy both mediums. I read constantly and pretty consistently watch one or more movies a week, so I've been exposed to a lot of each and I think I'm going to have to go with popular opinion (here, at least) and say that when confronted with "the book" and "the movie" I would ultimately choose "the book." A well-directed movie can ooze with style, but a book definitely presents us, normally, with more plot details and your little mental movie of it as you read is whatever "style" you want it to be (and keeping in mind what a poorly-directed movie can be like...why risk it?). I'm not discounting book-of-the-movie treatments entirely, as there have been ones I've liked, but I'd rather have, generally, the book. (Notable among the book-movies I've actually liked being David Lynch's Dune adaptation because most critics hated it for the same reason I love it: because it's, well, David Lynch. You know: incomprehensible, visually weird, and having the ability to make you feel strangely uncomfortable, that sort of thing. It works surprisingly well applied to the Dune universe, though I'm in the minority thinking that.) While "the movie of the book" is most common we also see novelisations sometimes. I haven't really been exposed to any movie novelisations but they presumably expand the content a bit (though probably against the writer's or director's wishes). But occasionally we see something truly horrible (and hilariously illogical): the book of the movie of the book. "These," according to TVTropes (which will ruin your life) "are almost always execrable, vastly shorter than the original book, or both." (Here's their whole page on The Film of the Book, as they call it, which is where that passage came from.) Another uncommon form of film adaptation is "the movie of the movie." Now normally, this would just be called a remake, but sometimes they cross that line, whether it's major additions and subtractions to the plot or the fact that the later movie is only sort of based on the earlier one. These more radical adaptations are slightly more common than you'd imagine (the first Star Wars movie is apparently an adaptation of sorts of a Japanese samurai movie from the '50s...seriously) but still not seen often. The movie I watched last week (on Friday, as I usually do, so it's still pretty fresh in my mind right now), Twelve Monkeys, is one of those. It's based on a French movie called La Jetée ("The Pier"). I haven't seen the original, as it's probably not available here, but Twelve Monkeys is much too different to be considered a straight adaptation. This is partly because of the nature of the source material (La Jetée is under half an hour, black and white, and made up almost entirely of still images; Twelve Monkeys moves, is in colour, and is over two hours long) and partly because the director, Terry Gilliam, is pretty "different" himself (he was the animator for Monty Python and co-directed M.P. and the Holy Grail). Would I choose the original over Twelve Monkeys? I don't know, but I'd still check it out. The movie of the movie is the only type of adaptation that I'm really ambivalent about. OK, so rather than risk going on another massive tangent, I'm going to render my verdict now: books > book movies. I suppose this was pretty long-winded for such a brief conclusion but oh well.