Book to Movie: How to and How NOT to..

One source for movie scripts has always been the world of books. You've seen it yourself. This movie is "based on the book by," that one is "inspired by the book ..." and so on down the line. And as with everything else, there is a right way to do a movie based on the book, and a wrong way. I think we've all been there at some point. We find out they're making a movie based on a book we've readd and enjoyed and hope they do it justice. Sometimes they do. Sometimes.....yeah. Here are two recent movies based on books, one of which got it horribly wrong, and the other put it pretty close to the target.

First the failure.

Last April, The Soloist, a movie baseed on the book of the same name by Los Angeles Times reporter Steve Lopez, made it's way into theaters. It's the story of the author and his burgeoning relationship with Natahaniel Ayers, a resident of the city's Skid Row who it turns out is a virtuoso on the violin, but his gifts ar eimpeded by his long struggle with schizophrenia. Sounds easy enough to pull off, right? If only they would have succeeded. The first bad sign this movie fell victim to was a switch in release date, from late 2008 to April 2009, about a week before all the summer roster of movies starts to come out.

What did the movie get right. The names of the two major characters and that was about it. Other than that, it seemed to me as though they played fast and loose with things, adding an unncessary religious facet to a musician Nathaniel meets when he gets to the LA Philahormonic as one example of this. Next, was the work of the movie's director, Joe Wright (Atonement). It seemed as though, he was trying to make a very artsy film, talking what I called the "Terrence Malick approach to Cinema --(if you've sat through The Thin Red Line, this will make perfect sense) the character the scene should focus on, the sky, a tree, some lights, and on to something else. All this together combined for a movie that I felt was so bad, I did something I've only ever done once before--I walked out of the theater, waiting for the people I went to see the movie with in the lobby.

Did this sour me on seeing a movie based on a book? To some extent, yes. But then I saw one that more or less got things right.

The Blind Side is based on the book of the same name by author Michael Lewis. It takes a look at the background and life of former life of former Ole Miss offensive lineman Michael Oher, focusing on the period of time after he was befriended by the Tuohy family.

To be honest, when I first saw a preview for this movie, I thought I saw the major flaw I found with this movie, in two pieces. The first of these was the casting of Sandra Bullock as the matriarch of the Tuohy family, Leighanne, and its part of what I perceived as the "Disneyification" of the story, in that everything in Oher's life, professional year included, was wrapped up in a happy little bow. I couldn't been further from the truth. The filmmakers had actaully created a flick where the only real issue I had with the film was that Tuohy child Collins is the same year in school in real life as Oher, not the year younger she is depicted as in the film. The movie also won points with me for introducing the concept of the "blind side" the same way the book did, by talking about the play in 1985 where Joe Theissman had his career ended after his leg was broken by Lawrence Taylor who came from the QB's blind side. Knowing the grisly nature of the injury, I covered my eyes till the film itself started.

There are so few errors in this film that I actually have to reach for one, which isn't really an error. Houston Nutt is depicted as the coach of the Arkansas football team who comes to recruit Oher. Nutt WAS at the time, but was Oher's coach at Ole Miss during the latter's academic and athletic career there. Not really an error, but I just felt like being knit picky.

Two films. Two books. Two completely different executions. One good. One bad.


They just happened to be focusing very heeavily on the positive ending in the marketing campaign. In other words, the film got everything right.

Beautiful Disasters

After taking a short break from the blog to watch the Olympics (or more specifically, the car accident that is curling, and the men's ice hockey), and be told that one of the people that reads my blogs sees it as being written in the style of an Anthony Bourdain (which upon reflection, I take as a major compliment), I'm back to cover a topic I feel as though I know a little about--beautiful disasters.

What do I mean by the term "beautiful disaster" you may ask? By my definition, it is something that, while being something of high quality, is deeply flawed on some level. For the most part, I've applied this term to a few cd's in my cd collection. For those of you don't know what a cd is, you might be using one as a coaster, or remember them as the thing you used to play your music on before you got the iPod nano that shoots video. And to answer your next question, I still buy cd's, I just load them onto my iPod and play them in my car.

Anyway, here are a few cd's and at least one movie I view as "beautiful disasters."

• Pearl Jam's No Code--first, please contain your shock that I have criticized something Eddie Vedder related. Second, don't get me wrong, I like this album. Notice I didn't say I love it. Because I don't. This album and I strictly platonic. It is from the late 90's, during the period where the band almost broke up, and the drummer at the time, Jack Irons, left before the album's supporting tour for his own personal issues. Let's just say all the tension in the band is evident. OK, there's that, but nothing says "let's break the tension" more than making an experimental album, and arguably the group's most experimental one, borrowing Middle Eastern percussion, being one example of the experimentalism. What all this together is a decent album crippled by one's own artistic grandiosity. In other words, a beautiful disaster.
• U2's Pop--this album may have been doomed from the start. It was part of the experimentation U2 went through during the 90's. Sadly, third time was not the charm. Having drummer Larry Mullen out of the mix with back issues didn't help either. Add to that, the three remaining members putting together songs they felt had to be completely rework upon Mullen's return. Oh, and then, getting an album that, in hindsight, really wasn't done, to the record company to meet a deadline. Throw them all together and what do you get--an album that I think is decent at best, but critically yields mixed reviews and commercial was a dud. How much of a "beautiful disaster" is this record? U2 has talked about, on several occasions, going back into the studio, and reworking the album, so that it is the way they actually wanted it. In other words, they want to actually complete it.
  
• U2's No Line on the Horizon--I must admit, I didn't think of this as one till I started writing and took a look at the cd shelf to see if I could find more examples. It has all the hallmarks. Start with Rick Rubin as your producer, but then shelve your ideas and go back to your "old reliables" producing wise in the forms of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Move forward to the editing and mastering process, during which you almost scrap the whole album idea and release it as two EP's. Thankfully, the band came to their senses and assembled the best tracks into an album. Sadly, some of what they assembled wasn't all that great. Like a quarter of the album. What do you get (and stop me if you've heard this before, a critically mixed album that fails to deliver commercially). Unlike the other two cd's, this album has yet to grow on me as being good, although with that said, it's about a year old.
  
• Pearl Harbor--this is a good movies. No, I didn't not run spell check, or hae a grammatical hiccup in the previous sentence. This movie is actually two very good movies. Sadly, director Michael Bay, in his infinite wisdom, shoved them both together, and a yielded a beautiful disaster. There is a good romantic drama in this movie, but unfortunately, it's stuck rapped around a great war movie. The glue holding the whole
  thing together is cheesiness. Absolute cheessiness.
  
• Watchmen--this movie gets added to this list for one simple reason--Zack Snyder filmed a movie out of a comic book series that many thought was unfilmable. What he creates is something that, while good, is a very divisive force. You either like it or you hate it for reasons such as the cartoony at times violent, the interspersed cheesy moments, and the changing of the ending from the comic. Personally, I am more of a fan of the Director's Cut of this movie. It fits a little better to the comic book.
  
• Kingdom of Heaven--this movie gets this designation based on one reason--the version seen in theaters is a victim of poor edits which lead to horrible transitions. Then again, these things happen when after showing the movie to test audiences, it's decided you have to cut out about 50 minutes of the film. Thankfully, director Ridley Scott also released his Director's Cut (read this as Original Version) of the film on DVD. What this yields is a brilliant film, which is sadly trapped in the shadow of it's beautifully disastrous theatrical counterpart.

Music and movies are works of art, some of them are things of beauty, some disastrous failures. As you can see, there are a group of works that manage to straddle that line.