Ender's Game Movie coming your way

They are making an Ender's Game movie.  It's coming out in my birth month, making this about the 5th year in a row that I will get a very interesting birthday treat.  The filmmakers in one article I read assured the readers that the creators are going to be sure the movie faithfully contains all the brutality readers have come to love the book for.  I must admit that this really took me aback because I don't love Ender's Game for the brutality.  Maybe this is because I am a Girl, but I doubt it.  Anyone who's in it for the brutality would get bored by all the other things I love about it like the characters and the bright flashes of humor and beauty and the moral quandries.  The brutality was horrific and startling and pretty much soul-crushing because of the way the story was told and the knowledge we had that Ender didn't.

Obviously this movie is not going to contain all of Ender's Game. They're very up-front about the fact that very little of the content comes from the book.  You would need a full TV series-length work to try to produce the book.  (One of the reasons I always wanted it to be made into an anime series.)  And the movie is also going to contain aspects of Ender's Shadow.  Somehow.  This seems like a bad idea to me because if you're going to hack out people's favorite scenes and truncate the timelines for one movie, trying to cram in another book's worth of character development will be difficult.  (Which is why I wish they'd done the Lord of the Rings thing and filmed two movies at the same time, but they are not made of money, and they have to realize that the chances of the fanboys hating on this until it dies young and in debt are pretty much guaranteed.)  I'm interested to see what kind of hybrid monster this becomes.

I am setting my expectations on Tank.  If my expectations are low enough, I can usually enjoy almost anything.  But the CGI in the promo poster makes me think I may need a new sublevel for low expectations . . .  I set my expectations low, but I pray that they make something powerful and coherent, dark and bitter but ultimately not devoid of hope.

What are your thoughts about the movie?  And what made you like the book?

See the movie, then read the book

My awful book memory (I read for pleasure and then almost immediately forget almost everything) usually makes it okay for me a see a movie if it's been a couple years since I read the book, but I found myself kicked out of the Harry Potter movies sometimes wondering, "Did this happen in the book?" or "Did this happen differently in the book?"  Recently, I've decided not to read a book immediately if I know a movie is coming out.  I'll see the movie and then later read the book; that way I'm more likely to enjoy both.

For the Hunger Games, I was waiting for the whole series to come out, and then they announced the movie, so I put off reading it, and it seems like a good decision on my part in some ways.  I was able to see the movie as its own, real story, and I thought it did a good job of being coherent if abbreviated and making me want to go read the book to fill in the details.

It also made me kind of sick because I can't handle graphic violence, so I may just switch to the books.  That way I won't have to wait as long to find out what happens in the end, too.  On the other hand, there was some amazing acting in the movies, and if I read the books, I'll find scenes I really want to see in a movie and be disappointed . . .

Tough choices.  If the Hunger Games is on your horizon, how are you handling this?

The joy of movie adaptations

Sometimes I wonder why Hollywood even bothers to adapt books into movies.  They must make a profit off of it, or they wouldn't keep doing it, but it seems to generate ungodly amounts of ill will among the target audience. 

Anyone who has read a decent-length novel knows that fitting everything from the book into a visual format would take the kind of time that usually requires a miniseries or a full length series (with multiple seasons).  As a result, they should know that if the adaptation is only going to get 2 hours of screen time, a majority of the details of the book are going to be missing, yet most readers of the book take these missing details very personally and throw a huge fit every time and seem incapable of judging the film on its own merits, coherence, and success.  Their ardent and vocal disappointment at not seeing the entire contents of the book transferred comprehensively to the screen is sort of understandable but also a little immature and maybe kind of silly. 

Understandable because everybody has a favorite scene they wanted to see and because the things that make the book successful are usually related to internal access and extended character development impossible to do on-screen in a couple hours.

Silly because, well, if you set your expectations way too high, it's your own fault when reality doesn't live up to them.  I generally find it more pleasant to have very low expectations and be pleasantly surprised most of the time.

How have you fared with movie adaptations of  books you haven't read and those you have?  Any winners?

War Horse - bring your tissues but not your horse-lovers

In 2009 while I was in Wales and it was snowing outside, I picked up a magazine with a review of the stage play based on Michael Morpurgo's War Horse.  The puppets were weird and immense and amazing, and I really wanted to see the play.  That not being an option, I wanted to read the book.  The kind folks I was staying with reassured me that Morpurgo was really famous (Children's Laureate of England!), so I'd be able to find his books anywhere, even in America. 

When I returned to America, I found this not to be the case.  Not wanting to import books at stupid cost, I resigned myself to keeping an eye on used book stores with no luck. Until . . .

One day in 2011 when I was exercising, I saw that someone was making it into a movie.  My first thought was, "I'll bet the book is available in book stores now!"  My thought after reading the book was, "How on earth can they make this story into a movie for the same audience as the book?  It's impossible.  You can't be as selective with your details and still be honest in a visual medium as you can in a written one."

I was right.  War Horse bills itself as "an epic adventure for audiences of all ages."  I'm going to say no, not really.  The book is for the 8-12-year-old set.  It's short and sad and touching.  It isn't dumb, but it's written for its intended audience.  The stage play, well, I haven't seen it, but it changed some things and had some amazing puppets, which convinced lots of people that adults could enjoy it, too. 

The movie is rated PG-13 for a reason.  It's a war movie that doesn't mess around.  It's hardly Saving Private Ryan, but just because there's very little blood/gore doesn't mean the violence isn't there.  I actually tip my hat to the film's creators because they kept things restrained while not deadening the overwhelming impacts war makes on all those it touches.  It just made me cry instead of throw up.

However, this isn't a movie to take your 8-year-old horse loving niece to see.  And I wonder if your 11-year-old son will get anything out of it.  I mean that; I do wonder.  I wouldn't want to be the parent trying to explain war in all its horror to the kid I brought to see the movie, but it's a really important set of conversations that needs to be had, and maybe this movie will set up some of those conversations.

I'm not sure I would have been able to follow it well at all before about age 16.  As an adult, I thought it was brilliant to have the people from different countries played by native speakers with authentic accents.  I knew immediately that I was in France or dealing with Germans or British because of how they talked, and everything I knew about the war and those countries in the war contributed to my understanding of the events of the movie.  I wonder if I would have understood all that was going on if I didn't get that background.  I would have understood the bits about cowardice and desertion when I was 12 but not nearly so well as I did after I read A Very Long Engagement (a brutal WWI book I could never watch the movie of) at age 20-something.

Maybe I'm being unfair to young people.  Maybe they do learn more history younger these days.  Or maybe they pick up on the essentials of the story without being even vaguely aware of the sociopolitical situation.  I mean, most adults probably don't know as much about WWI as I do, and they still seem to like the movie.   (Except for the ones who are so cynical they can't like anything even vaguely nice or melodramatic.  I wonder if the cynics would have liked the less [melo]dramatic book ending, but I would guess they don't like anything with a happy ending, even one so hard-fought as this.)

I'll admit that I didn't really engage with the horse at all.  At all.  Again, I tip my hat to the film's creators because they could have played that aspect up and tried to anthropomorphize the poor beastie and play it from his interior point of view (which works in books way better than movies) and made this movie something dumb, but they didn't.  The result is that I cared about the people.  I was okay with the horse as narrative device on which to hang the stories of various people who had things taken away by the damn war.  Like all half-way decent war movies, this was an anti-war movie because it reminds people of what a huge, hideous, damaging thing a war is.  I hope the younger people (and all the people) who see this so-called "all ages" film come away with that knowledge pounded into them.

One thing that irked me: there were some outstanding performances by German actors in this movie (Hinnerk Schönemann [had a great grammar joke no one in the audience found funny except me], David Kross, and Leonhard Carow [I think these three are the ones I was most impressed with aside from the ones already named and biographied on the page]).  On their behalf, I register complaint that they weren't on the official movie's cast page.  I had to go flailing about on IMDB for the names, and I'm not even sure they're the right names.  Why the snub?  Can it really be that we still discriminate against Germans so many years after the World Wars ended?  I know there was a lot of anti-German sentiment in America after this war (the movie Sweet Land introduced me to that fact), and World War II's atrocities only added to the burden of the German people, but now we are at peace.  These actors did good work.  Shouldn't they get credit for it?  Or are we still too bitter about what their great grandparents did to our great grandparents?  Or is there some other reason they didn't get the credit they deserved?

War Horse wasn't perfect, but it was an interesting and moving film, and I'm glad I saw it in the theater (hooray cheap matinees and gift cards).  Your thoughts?

My Name Is . . .

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I was looking up the movie version of The Chosen, based on the book by Chaim Potok (a book that allowed me to forgive John Knowles for A Separate Peace).  I liked this cover with its baseball scene showing that the opening of the movie would probably match the book.  It reminded me of this old post, and I found myself wondering if anyone made a movie of my favorite Potok book: My Name Is Asher Lev.

It seems no such movie exists, and I find that I am glad.  I might love it as a miniseries or even a really good stage play, but I don't think I could love a movie version of Asher Lev. I'm not entirely sure why.

Anyway, in my search, I discovered a link to a thought-provoking essay about Potok, Asher, and art that I thought I'd pass on to you since art is probably important to you. 

One of my favorite quotes:

"Where their concept of holiness is too narrow to include the world of art, Kahn’s concept of art is too narrow to include the world of holiness."

Sounds regrettably about right . . .  It's most likely something all Christ followers who are makers of art wrestle with.  Why is that?
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HPDH2: bb

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2.

Wow. 

Would have been even better if the scene where Harry is with Dumbledore in white place hadn't had a lawnmower going right outside the theater door.  Don't add your own soundtrack, indeed.

Me and the retirees all sitting in the theater, watching Harry Potter.  Maybe I should accept AARP's offer to join . . .  Or that single seniors dating email I keep getting for some reason.

Why did we choose 19 years for the epilogue?  I was kind of hoping to see Remus and Tonks' kid, but that would have been impossible with 19 years . . .

Oh, Snape.  You were amazing to the end.  And where did they find that little boy with the dead eyes to play you?  Holy cow!

The battle scenes were edited and put together perfectly.  Expansive enough to make you cry but not too drawn out.

So this was kind of amazing, even if I was a bit lost after all those months in between.  There were only a handful of scenes where I had to shake my head and say, "Why did we keep that bit?"  It was definitely not faithful to the letter of the book, but I think it was pretty faithful to the spirit of the book.  I'm lucky I don't really have to decide because it's been years since I read the book, so it's pretty hazy, which is just fine because it left me more time to admire this concluding movie.  Bravo!

I'm looking forward to a marathon some day.  Easier with the movies than the books these days . . .

Did you see it?  Your thoughts?