Cool episode. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Silver Bullet (I really like Stephen King), and hearing that it’s not utterly terrible makes me want to revisit it.
The discussion in the latter half about the faithfulness of book/movie adaptations was particularly interesting. Unfortunately, I can’t come down universally on one side or the other — I didn’t like the Hunger Games because it was too faithful to the book. Watching the movie, I was disappointed by how familiar everything was, and I don’t think I’m the only one who has had this complaint. By the end of the movie, I felt like I had gained almost nothing from watching the movie.
As for I Am Legend, I think that the movie should have been stripped of its title. Aside from the primary plot points (here’s a guy who is alone in a city), it’s really different from Matheson’s original book — not just in plot but in theme and mood.
Then there are the vague inbetweeners that change certain aspects. Watchmen, for example, benefited by changing the ending (I know those’r fightin’ werds); Lord of the Rings benefited from excising a lot of the tangential storylines. Moneyball, Where the Wild Things Are, and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs are both stories that are dramatically different from their book-counterparts, but they work by keeping the same themes and tone in common with their source material.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say. That everyone is a winner?
Also, I laughed heartily at Al Gore’s “Somwhere, a whale’s in trouble!”
Cool episode. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Silver Bullet (I really like Stephen King), and hearing that it’s not utterly terrible makes me want to revisit it.
The discussion in the latter half about the faithfulness of book/movie adaptations was particularly interesting. Unfortunately, I can’t come down universally on one side or the other — I didn’t like the Hunger Games because it was too faithful to the book. Watching the movie, I was disappointed by how familiar everything was, and I don’t think I’m the only one who has had this complaint. By the end of the movie, I felt like I had gained almost nothing from watching the movie.
As for I Am Legend, I think that the movie should have been stripped of its title. Aside from the primary plot points (here’s a guy who is alone in a city), it’s really different from Matheson’s original book — not just in plot but in theme and mood.
Then there are the vague inbetweeners that change certain aspects. Watchmen, for example, benefited by changing the ending (I know those’r fightin’ werds); Lord of the Rings benefited from excising a lot of the tangential storylines. Moneyball, Where the Wild Things Are, and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs are both stories that are dramatically different from their book-counterparts, but they work by keeping the same themes and tone in common with their source material.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say. That everyone is a winner?
Also, I laughed heartily at Al Gore’s “Somwhere, a whale’s in trouble!”