People Need to Adapt to Film Adaptions

Imagine for a moment, this:

College-student working in the publishing industry starts to read through the daily blog chatter and finds it to be nothing but talk about the award season and the book to movie adaptations people are either hailing or railing against. The student finds himself bored to the point of small tears building up in his eyes as they fight the urge to sleep on the job.

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Because the macbook they're typing on doesn't allow you to hit a ton of buttons at once, the action of their head coming to rest on the keyboard creates a scant two words of gibberish as they slowly drift into the peaceful slumber that each blog post slowly, inexorably lead their mind and body toward.

Unfortunately, we publish a lot more fiction than non-fiction here at Scarletta and that's not how my short story got to end in real life. Instead I get to fight through the grogginess that all of this seasons film adaption talk fills me with, and spend a little bit of time on a soapbox. Here we go.

Let me start by saying I love a lot of books, I love a lot of movies, and I even love a lot of movies based on books. That being said, I despise the culture that surrounds film adaptions of books. The culture that spends the first half of its time imagining castings and how certain scenes will play out and over-hyping itself only to turn around and spend the rest of its existence bemoaning every decision the director or casting agents made that doesn't beautifully match the way you imagined the story to look in your head. There are times that you just have to accept that the real world cannot always live up to your imagination. While movies aren't real the actors, directors, and studios involved with their production very much are.

Its not that you're not allowed to have some basic expectations, you should have those of every movie you see. I just feel that perhaps you shouldn't let the source material be your rubric because it's not fair to compare two different mediums like that, and I'm still an innocent child who believes in fairness and right vs wrong.

In all seriousness though, I just wish that people would use a better method of determining how excited for something they are than how much they liked the source material. I'm excited for a few book to film adaptions this year, and of the three I'm most anticipating I only really liked one of the original books. For me it's all about cast, director, and screenplay writer because at the end of the day, it's a movie whether you like it or not.

And so Josh or Desiree don't hate me for this post, allow me to list my three most anticipated book to movie films of 2014 while trying to avoid spoiling everything good in life:

Serena

A newly-wed couples builds a timber empire and a lot of people die along the way. I felt like the original text was a little dry at times, but with Susanne Brier at the helm, and another Jennifer Lawrence/Bradley Cooper team-up, I can't help but be excited. 

A Long Way Down

It's New Years Eve and four people meet on the same rooftop with the intention of jumping off and ending it all. Only problem is they all wanted to end it all alone. Told from first-person perspective, the book was definitely an interesting read, if not a great one. However, with Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad fame and my favorite Bond actor Pierce Brosnan participating I'm feeling that slightly giddy anticipation that I usually reserve for sequels of films I actually liked.

The Monuments Men

A small group comprised of art historians, museum curators, and other people who value culture come together during WWII and risk their lives saving pieces of art from destruction at the hands of the Nazi regime. I love the original text, and I'm as excited as I've ever been about a film adaption to see George Clooney, Matt Damon, John Goodman and Bill Murray throw witty banter around for a couple hours. I fear that my excitement may lead to disappointment, but I promise that I will not blog about it if that proves to be true.