David Edelstein on the Harry Potter series:
"...we needed these adaptations, even the unsatisfying ones. Good as J. K. Rowling is, she’s no prose stylist. The movies put interesting faces to names and fabulous designs to humdrum descriptions. The last novel’s clunky climactic wand-off, lacking emotional grandeur, begs to be bettered by the magic of movies."
Posts
9 comments:
As somebody said about the Game of Thrones series: Filmmakers can act as the editors some writers need.
A corollary: Some books get better if read after seeing a good adaptation. My wife, usually as indifferent to widescreen fantasy as most people, loves the Martin books. An odd feeling, seeing her toting around my yellowing paperbacks instead of suggesting that I give them to the library.
OTOH, the prolog of "Game" in my free Kindle sample seemed way long and overly detailed, in part because I'd recently watched a much brisker and more efficient version of the same sequence. Tended to re-enforce my Life's Too Short bias against endless fantasy novels.
OTOOH, the one episode of "Justified" that was based on a novel I'd read was, at only one hour, much too short for the conversational digressions and rants that are a large part of thre fun of reading Leonard, who is as much a humorist as a thriller writer.
...like a sprawling and panoramic 19th-century novel turned out in fantasy motley, more Balzac and Dickens than Tolkien....
Says, correctly, The New York Times... Be a shame to miss it because you didn't like the first couple of pages. (650,000 copies in print of the new volume... Five of the ten books on the Amazon UK bestseller list are in the series.)
I know. I'm steeling myself. Too many people whose opinions I respect like it. The comment was about one possible effect of seeing things first rather than reading them.
There ar disagrremnts among critics: Some feel it's their job to review a film as a film and avoid the adapted books.
BTW, there is a way to delete comments so that later readers will never catch on that you posted something you thought better of.
Of course, for all you know, it was Clive James rethinking his comment...
The critical disagreement mirrors, according to an interview with Romola Garai that I heard on the radio, a difference in directorial attitudes. Some directors ask actors in an adaptation not to read the book for fear of bringing unwanted impressions into the performance.
There are some films that are better than the books upon which they are based, "How to Train Your Dragon" for example. But this is because the stories have better -- and more character driven -- narratives than the originals.
AGoT is a wonderful television show, but it pales in comparison to the novels. It falls in at about the same level of quality as Martin's Westeros shorter fiction like "The Hedge Knight."
Martin's first novel in the series was tight, but like Rowling the later issues have become more bloated as the authorial intimidation over editorial authority has grown. Still, I don't think it could use much editing.
But when one has read the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, most things seem like short stories.
BTW, I very much disagree with Edelstein regarding Rowling as a prose stylist. Anyone who creates Diagon Alley, and plays with words the way she does, is indeed a prose stylist. Is she a pulse pounding pulp stylist? No, but she is quite a wordsmith.
Post a Comment