I think said reaction to Austen is driven more by adaptations as a simulacrum for the books, leading to a type of Austen Fandom that is somewhat disconnected from the actual books.
Agree entirely. It's the movies that make the stories romantic. Austen's works are satirical.
I do find it interesting that Emma is the novel that seems to get the most big screen adaptations, especially if we include retellings such as Clueless. I find it odd that there hasn't been a big adaptation of Northanger Abbey, which seems like it would be an excellent fit with modern tastes.
Dostoyevsky isn't actually meant to be dour: much of it is a black comedy. Dostoyevsky characters don't do mad things because they're spiritual; they do they're because they're comic.
(The problem here is that humour is hard to translate - one too many words can labour the punchline. Also we tend to think that if someone's serious they can't be funny and if they're funny they can't be serious.)
Wait, you think Raskolnikov killing Alyona Ivanovna is supposed to be comedy?
It's supposed to be several things at once. And no, comedy isn't the predominant note - although if you're not struck by the fact that our aspiring Napoleon can't even murder an old lady without making a mess of it you're probably taking Alyosha too much at face value.
Marmeladov is definitely in part comic. (I gather his surname is just as ridiculous in Russian - Marmaladeson - as it is in English.) As in Dickens and Shakespeare and Cervantes even comic characters are serious.
But part of the value of older books is that they are written by people living in a different context to ours, as Lewis said.
When we are talking about the novel in the era of the mass market, they are frequently playing a different role/in conversation with other literature in a different way than a book of a later (or earlier) age. I'm not sure what lesson to draw from that, other than perhaps being willing to revisit work that has fallen out of favour.
I think Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy is an improvement on the books, and yes I read the books before the films came out
I strongly disagree. I found the Jackson films to be a dreadful interpretation of the books. They got Gollum spot on, but the rest was far from how the books described. The books had Samwise as the most faithful, loyal friend, but the films portrayed him as Frodo's creepy stalker. Also, the Elves weren't remotely elf-like.
Though I wonder if there are any "great" works of literature that are beyond being given a faithful adaptation in visual media.
Nabokov was a victim of CSA [child sexual abuse] himself...
What's your source for this?
It is attested to in Brian Boyd's biography of Nabokov.
Thanks. The material about "Uncle Ruka" is about halfway down in the article, and is a direct quote from Nabokov's memoirs.
I remain unconvinced that Nabokov intended Lolita as serious commentary on the legal and psychological issues it explores, apart from the basic assumption that Humbert is a bad person. But any further discussion of this would get epiphanic pretty quickly.
Is it just me, or do Shipmates find contemporary sexed-up adaptations of 19th century novels highly irritating?
If I was going to find sexed-up TV "highly irritating", I'd be throwing rocks at the TV every time some show or other showed attractive young women in corsets laced over naked skin: a choice clearly designed to titillate the viewer and irritate whoever had to do the laundry. And that would be all the time...
Nabokov was a victim of CSA [child sexual abuse] himself...
What's your source for this?
It is attested to in Brian Boyd's biography of Nabokov.
Thanks. The material about "Uncle Ruka" is about halfway down in the article, and is a direct quote from Nabokov's memoirs.
I remain unconvinced that Nabokov intended Lolita as serious commentary on the legal and psychological issues it explores, apart from the basic assumption that Humbert is a bad person. But any further discussion of this would get epiphanic pretty quickly.
I didn't suggest that it was intended that way. I didn't mean for that to be implied in my comments.
Also sometimes an adaptation is better than the book - I think Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy is an improvement on the books
That's what I think about Kubrick's version of Clockwork Orange versus Burgess' original novel. I think Burgess kinda cheats by proclaiming that coercive processes to eliminate violent crimes can be worse than the crimes themselves, while using a made-up language to dullen the reader's visceral perception of those crimes.
@Sipech there are naturally limitations involved in transferring the written word to the screen, particularly when dealing with fantastical elements. Visual elements matter more - the elves weren't shown as being their in-book heights for the same reason that X-Men films don't generally portray Wolverine as 5'2. I also don't see where Samwise was a creepy stalker - could you give some examples?
I think it might be worth you and @NicoleMR remembering that Peter Jackson is also a sincere fan of Tolkien's written work - the LOTR films were clearly labours of love and not just cynical money-makers.
I do think that people generally have no idea how difficult filmmaking is.
Is it just me, or do Shipmates find contemporary sexed-up adaptations of 19th century novels highly irritating?
If I was going to find sexed-up TV "highly irritating", I'd be throwing rocks at the TV every time some show or other showed attractive young women in corsets laced over naked skin: a choice clearly designed to titillate the viewer and irritate whoever had to do the laundry. And that would be all the time...
The changes he made that are the worst have nothing to do with those difficulties. Making Denethor into a disgusting pig who refused to send for help, and having Faramir capture Frodo and Sam were decisions he made. Very bad decisions.
I feel like if you are going to insult other people's creative work - particularly if it's in a field you yourself are not an expert in - you should at least have the ability to spell those insults correctly.
Nabokov was a victim of CSA [child sexual abuse] himself...
What's your source for this?
It is attested to in Brian Boyd's biography of Nabokov.
Thanks. The material about "Uncle Ruka" is about halfway down in the article, and is a direct quote from Nabokov's memoirs.
I remain unconvinced that Nabokov intended Lolita as serious commentary on the legal and psychological issues it explores, apart from the basic assumption that Humbert is a bad person. But any further discussion of this would get epiphanic pretty quickly.
I didn't suggest that it was intended that way. I didn't mean for that to be implied in my comments.
Okay, thanks. Possibly my misreading, based on other commentary I've seen by people who try to refute the obscenity charge by swinging to the other extreme and claiming some grand moral purpose on Nabokov's part.
Actually there's an interesting tie here if we can avoid getting angry with each other - as many films take their stories, plot devices and so on from books, many books take their thoughts from prior philosophical traditions.
That's what is meant by saying this is all part of the same conversation.
Pomona, my reply to you would be hellish, so I will simply say it's obvious you had no substantial rebuttal to my point and therefore resulted to personal insult.
Pomona, my reply to you would be hellish, so I will simply say it's obvious you had no substantial rebuttal to my point and therefore resulted to personal insult.
@Pomona's post read the same way to me. Really unnecessary.
Lewis said (I think in Experiment in Criticism) that if there's even one person who reads a book and then re-reads it over and over, that that book cannot be completely bad.
Although Lewis was I believe blissfully ignorant of Ayn Rand.
Is it just me, or do Shipmates find contemporary sexed-up adaptations of 19th century novels highly irritating?
If I was going to find sexed-up TV "highly irritating", I'd be throwing rocks at the TV every time some show or other showed attractive young women in corsets laced over naked skin: a choice clearly designed to titillate the viewer and irritate whoever had to do the laundry. And that would be all the time...
What TV shows are you watching??
Well, @Gamma Gamaliel didn't originally specify TV, @Leorning Cniht did in their reply, I'm guessing maybe as a default because a lot of cinematic talent has migrated over to TV in the last coupla decades or so.
Personally, when I read @Gamma Gamaliel's comment, I thought of the late 1990s version of The Crucible, which opened with some of the young women in Tituba's cult dancing around naked. I suppose trading a chicken in exchange for getting a guy to love you might push someone into such fits of ecstasy, but I'd wager the main point was for the studio to meet its TNA quota for the season.
Lewis said (I think in Experiment in Criticism) that if there's even one person who reads a book and then re-reads it over and over, that that book cannot be completely bad.
Although Lewis was I believe blissfully ignorant of Ayn Rand.
Given what I understand to he Lewis' moral and religious outlook, I wonder what he would think about people who re-read pornography.
If I had to guess, I would say that Lewis was probably a priori excluding certain types of writing from his concept of "books". Like people who say "I think all human life is sacred, but I still support capital punishment, because those murderers on death-row aren't human, they're animals!"
Adapting the written word for the screen is a very difficult job so I do have some sympathy for writers - also often a lot of bad decisions are made by Higher Ups rather than writers themselves. Also sometimes an adaptation is better than the book - I think Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy is an improvement on the books, and yes I read the books before the films came out I also strongly prefer Dickens on screen to Dickens in written form - I feel that Dickens suffered from being alive before screenwriting was a viable career (and writing for stage is Quite Different).
Maybe. The only Dickens adaptation I've ever found especially Dickensian was the Who Murdered Jacob Marley special the BBC did (about ten years ago) with characters from lots of the novels and prequels to Great Expectations and Bleak House - where the scriptwriters and actors were having melodramatic fun rather than doing an Important Cultural Monument. It's hard for a human actor to be as larger than life as Dickens' characters are.
My feeling about Jackson is that while his LotR trilogy is an impressive piece of filmmaking he makes it more generically high fantasy than the books (and also more racist at least as regards the orcs). Often where Tolkien does something less obvious, Jackson does the obvious thing instead. There's a blog I read by a historian of Rome which has an analysis of the battle scenes in Tolkien: he concludes that while a lot of changes are necessary for filming some just betray the fact that, while Tolkien knew about warfare from reading medieval texts and from personal experience, Jackson only knows about war from other modern media.
I don't think anyone is saying that fillm or TV adaptations are easy and I don’t mind 'based on' provided it's clear that they're taking liberties with the original.
It's not just the 'sexing-up' but the often heavy-handed treatments of themes hinted at in the originals. So, for instance, whilst Wells certainly draws parallels with imperialism and colonialism with the Martian invasion in War Of The Worlds this was laid on with a dirty great big trowel in a recent BBC adaptation.
The narrator was also killed leaving his feisty wife as one of the survivors. Sure, it's good to see female characters given agency but at the expense of changing the plot?
Then there was the daft new ending given to A Room With A View with Lucy going back to Italy after being widowed in the Great War to get off with the Italian pony-and-trap driver ...
On film versions, has anyone (other than me) seen the 1987 film of Little Dorrit?
It is six hours, usually shown as two three hour films. It is virtually the only film I have seen that makes the past look and feel as though it was somewhere where ordinary people actually lived. Usually period works seem to be too twee with costumes and dancers too perfect, too over-whelmingly grubby and sordid, as though nobody in the past even tried to wash, too much inhabited by people who are just modern people dressed up in period clothes, or just produced as a vehicle for the directors's enthusiasms, message or ideas of 'relevance', irrespective of what the writer actually thought he or she was writing about.
I wonder if people who liked to listen to Plato were equally annoyed with the way Aristotle recreated Greek philosophy.
Well, Aristotle explicitly criticized Plato on a number of issues(most famously the Forms), so it's not like he was claiming to present a new version of the material, the way eg. a film based on a novel claims(or is at least interpreted by many as claiming) to be presenting a new version of the story.
...whilst Wells certainly draws parallels with imperialism and colonialism with the Martian invasion in War Of The Worlds this was laid on with a dirty great big trowel in a recent BBC adaptation.
In Spielberg's adaptation of the same novel, one of the protagonist's kids mentions in passing that she's writing a school paper on French colonialism in Algeria, and that's about it for explicit parallels. I take it the BBC's version goes considerably beyond that?
I'm not against that link being made and unlike the Spielberg version it was set in the 1900s in the UK, as per Wells's novel, which makes the link more appropriate as Britain was then at the height of its imperial power.
If Spielberg had wanted to make a similar point there'd have been a reference to US rather than European imperialism.
As it was it was all about a conventional US family battling against the odds with resourcefulness and resolve. I seem to remember a black GI being portrayed in an heroic light but by and large it was Mr and Mrs WASP and their squeaky-clean kids versus the Martians.
So my criticism of the Spielberg version would be its lack of social comment.
With the BBC adaptation it was the opposite and very unsubtle.
It was the way it was laid on so thickly and the way they messed with the ending that bothered me.
TV or film adaptations of books are just that. And Andrew Daves' BBC 1995 six part adaptation of Pride and Prejudice was in my opinion a very good one. Speaking as someone who was more or less word perfect on the text of the book well before 1995. I'm a very long term admirer of Jane Austen.
Any adaptation is pretty certain to upset some lovers of the original books.
If Spielberg had wanted to make a similar point there'd have been a reference to US rather than European imperialism.
As it was it was all about a conventional US family battling against the odds with resourcefulness and resolve. I seem to remember a black GI being portrayed in an heroic light but by and large it was Mr and Mrs WASP and their squeaky-clean kids versus the Martians.
It also seemed to be taking broad aim at the survivalist movement, with the family taking refuge for a time with the gun-nut character played by Tim Robbins, who eventually comes to be a threat to the children's safety.
And Morgan Freeman's closing narration repeated HG Wells' vaguely social-darwinistic criticism of imperialism.
...it was set in the 1900s in the UK, as per Wells's novel, which makes the link more appropriate as Britain was then at the height of its imperial power.
__________
With the BBC adaptation it was the opposite and very unsubtle.
It was the way it was laid on so thickly and the way they messed with the ending that bothered me.
Doing stuff like that with the original source material always kinda strikes me as like explaining a punch line in humour. Yes, HG Wells was very much intending a metaphor with contemporaneous imperialism, and thus, by the rules of metaphor, he didn't include many, if any, extended references to imperialism in the text.
In the summer of '91, I saw a rather twee production of Animal Farm, put on by a troupe from some former Warsaw Pact country(Czech or Russia, I think). The guiding ideology of the post-revolution farm was introduced as follows...
ANIMAL 1: Communism!
ANIMAL 2: No! Animalism!
Repeated a coupla times whenever someone was about to say "Animalism", as if the animals in Orwell's universe were aware of Communism.
The troupe were performing in my city during the August Coup, and were coasting on a bit of sympathy stemming from that event. In addition to doing lame-assed audience participation stunts, at the end they stood on stage long past the point it was obvious that no one wanted to give them a standing ovation, until they finally got one.
Any adaptation is pretty certain to upset some lovers of the original books.
Maybe. On the other hand, it should be possible to say that some features of adaptations are improvements, some changes are good because it's a different medium, some changes are just different, and some aspects are worse.
On this thread, people are giving specific instances and reasons where they think Jackson makes changes for the worse, and the response is largely, oh you just don't like any adaptations.
Pomona, my reply to you would be hellish, so I will simply say it's obvious you had no substantial rebuttal to my point and therefore resulted to personal insult.
1) pointing out that you had misspelled something is not a personal insult
2) YOU had resorted to personal insult of Peter Jackson in your initial comment! What kind of substantial rebuttal to someone else's creative endeavour did you provide?
Given what I understand to he Lewis' moral and religious outlook, I wonder what he would think about people who re-read pornography.
If I had to guess, I would say that Lewis was probably a priori excluding certain types of writing from his concept of "books". Like people who say "I think all human life is sacred, but I still support capital punishment, because those murderers on death-row aren't human, they're animals!"
I don't remember him saying anything specific on the issue. Based on what I do remember him saying on other matters I think he would say that moral judgement on what a book is trying to do is different from judgement as to whether the book succeeds in doing it.
Pomona, my reply to you would be hellish, so I will simply say it's obvious you had no substantial rebuttal to my point and therefore resulted to personal insult.
@Pomona's post read the same way to me. Really unnecessary.
But how is it a personal insult to point out that if you are going to insult someone (as @NicoleMR did - calling someone else's work a "desacration[sic]" is clearly an insult and quite a personal one) you should at least do it correctly?
Is it just me, or do Shipmates find contemporary sexed-up adaptations of 19th century novels highly irritating?
If I was going to find sexed-up TV "highly irritating", I'd be throwing rocks at the TV every time some show or other showed attractive young women in corsets laced over naked skin: a choice clearly designed to titillate the viewer and irritate whoever had to do the laundry. And that would be all the time...
What TV shows are you watching??
Well, @Gamma Gamaliel didn't originally specify TV, @Leorning Cniht did in their reply, I'm guessing maybe as a default because a lot of cinematic talent has migrated over to TV in the last coupla decades or so.
Personally, when I read @Gamma Gamaliel's comment, I thought of the late 1990s version of The Crucible, which opened with some of the young women in Tituba's cult dancing around naked. I suppose trading a chicken in exchange for getting a guy to love you might push someone into such fits of ecstasy, but I'd wager the main point was for the studio to meet its TNA quota for the season.
I'm confused as to what you are talking about, sorry. I was merely asking why @Leorning Cniht was watching so many shows where a woman is wearing a corset over bare skin.
Any adaptation is pretty certain to upset some lovers of the original books.
Maybe. On the other hand, it should be possible to say that some features of adaptations are improvements, some changes are good because it's a different medium, some changes are just different, and some aspects are worse.
On this thread, people are giving specific instances and reasons where they think Jackson makes changes for the worse, and the response is largely, oh you just don't like any adaptations.
Nobody is saying why something done in a film adaptation is bad, simply that they have decided that it is bad and that's that. Also terms like "desecration" suggest deliberate and purposeful destruction - that is a personal insult, not actual critique.
Any adaptation is pretty certain to upset some lovers of the original books.
Maybe. On the other hand, it should be possible to say that some features of adaptations are improvements, some changes are good because it's a different medium, some changes are just different, and some aspects are worse.
On this thread, people are giving specific instances and reasons where they think Jackson makes changes for the worse, and the response is largely, oh you just don't like any adaptations.
Nobody is saying why something done in a film adaptation is bad, simply that they have decided that it is bad and that's that. Also terms like "desecration" suggest deliberate and purposeful destruction - that is a personal insult, not actual critique.
I think @Sipech did indicate why they found the changes bad, in that they changed some of the characters fairly fundamentally, and thus the character dynamic of described in the books.
I feel like if you are going to insult other people's creative work - particularly if it's in a field you yourself are not an expert in - you should at least have the ability to spell those insults correctly.
But how is it a personal insult to point out that if you are going to insult someone (as @NicoleMR did - calling someone else's work a "desacration[sic]" is clearly an insult and quite a personal one) you should at least do it correctly?
@Pomona , there is a difference between a "personal insult" aimed at a public figure such as Peter Jackson, and a "personal insult" aimed at a fellow Shipmate.
There is no place for personal insults towards Shipmates in Purgatory.
Pomona, my reply to you would be hellish, so I will simply say it's obvious you had no substantial rebuttal to my point and therefore resulted to personal insult.
@Pomona's post read the same way to me. Really unnecessary.
But how is it a personal insult to point out that if you are going to insult someone (as @NicoleMR did - calling someone else's work a "desacration[sic]" is clearly an insult and quite a personal one) you should at least do it correctly?
It's subtle, but I think you can probably work it out for yourself. I don't feel like derailing the thread.
Is it just me, or do Shipmates find contemporary sexed-up adaptations of 19th century novels highly irritating?
If I was going to find sexed-up TV "highly irritating", I'd be throwing rocks at the TV every time some show or other showed attractive young women in corsets laced over naked skin: a choice clearly designed to titillate the viewer and irritate whoever had to do the laundry. And that would be all the time...
What TV shows are you watching??
Well, @Gamma Gamaliel didn't originally specify TV, @Leorning Cniht did in their reply, I'm guessing maybe as a default because a lot of cinematic talent has migrated over to TV in the last coupla decades or so.
Personally, when I read @Gamma Gamaliel's comment, I thought of the late 1990s version of The Crucible, which opened with some of the young women in Tituba's cult dancing around naked. I suppose trading a chicken in exchange for getting a guy to love you might push someone into such fits of ecstasy, but I'd wager the main point was for the studio to meet its TNA quota for the season.
I'm confused as to what you are talking about, sorry. I was merely asking why @Leorning Cniht was watching so many shows where a woman is wearing a corset over bare skin.
Sorry. I thought someone had wondered why @Leorning Cniht was discussing TV, rather than movies, but I can't see that exchange now, and am not inclined to go looking for it.
The second paragraph was just riffing on the previous theme of unneccessary nudity in movies or TV, with one of the examples that always pops into my mind. I have no moral objections to the tendency, just the same aesthetic one that I have to elements being inserted into a narrative where they don't really belong.
The most faithful adaptation of a book to a film of which I am aware is "The Old Man and the Sea" by Hemingway, starring Spencer Tracy in the film. As a teenager, I once sat and watched the movie with the book in my hand, and I found no discrepancies.
On this thread, people are giving specific instances and reasons where they think Jackson makes changes for the worse, and the response is largely, oh you just don't like any adaptations.
Nobody is saying why something done in a film adaptation is bad, simply that they have decided that it is bad and that's that. Also terms like "desecration" suggest deliberate and purposeful destruction - that is a personal insult, not actual critique.
I don't agree with your summary of the thread; we've had what seem to me to be specific criticisms, or at least criticisms that could be made more specific if the poster were asked to do so.
Sipech mentioned the film's depiction of Sam. (I don't think I agree with them on that), and the depiction of the elves (while I agree that the elves aren't as they are in the books, I would concede that it would be impossible to do book-faithful elves with human actors in the film); Sipech also praised the film's Gollum (and he was quite right too).
NicoleMR mentioned the film's depiction of Denethor - I agree: the film's depiction of Denethor is much coarser and far less nuanced, and therefore loses all the tragedy of the character;
and of Faramir - I also agree. YMMV, but the conflict added to Frodo doesn't add anything, and it is part of a general tendency to blacken secondary characters to make Aragorn, Gandalf, and Frodo especially look better by comparison - see also Theoden at Helm's Deep.
I said the film makes the book look more like generic high fantasy - I concede that's a bit vague but I can elaborate if required;
and that Jackson's depiction of the orcs is more racist and problematic than the original book (Jackson only uses black actors for orcs IIRC, which as far as I can tell is not actually reflective of the book).
I don't agree that desecration is a personal insult - criticising a work of art is not the same as criticising the author; and that is especially true of films, which are a collaborative effort and therefore criticism of them is not criticism of anyone in particular.
(and fwiw I don't agree that "desecration" suggests deliberate destruction - there's an early scene in Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas where the protagonist accidentally desecrates a Hindu holy tree, and similarly there's a story in Ovid where Cadmus and his wife are turned into snakes for unintentionally desecrating a shrine.)
@Dafyd LOTR is not divine or holy, it's still just a work of fiction. Comic book fans have our favourite comics changed dramatically for the big screen all the time (and being a visual medium, adapting comics for the screen is in many ways easier), but I wouldn't use such a term unless dealing with something actually involving religious desecration - for example, erasing a minority religious background of a character. To me "desecration" has a Hebrew Bible connotation of destroying a town or a tribe's land fully and deliberately in obedience to God; given the membership of the Ship, I felt like this was an obvious connotation. But I apologise for seeing a personal insult in a term that was not intended.
@NicoleMR@Ruth I was sincerely not intending to personally insult anyone. I'm sorry for unintentionally causing insult. I interpreted the term "desecration" in a more personally insulting way than was intended, for which I apologise.
Comments
I do find it interesting that Emma is the novel that seems to get the most big screen adaptations, especially if we include retellings such as Clueless. I find it odd that there hasn't been a big adaptation of Northanger Abbey, which seems like it would be an excellent fit with modern tastes.
Marmeladov is definitely in part comic. (I gather his surname is just as ridiculous in Russian - Marmaladeson - as it is in English.) As in Dickens and Shakespeare and Cervantes even comic characters are serious.
When we are talking about the novel in the era of the mass market, they are frequently playing a different role/in conversation with other literature in a different way than a book of a later (or earlier) age. I'm not sure what lesson to draw from that, other than perhaps being willing to revisit work that has fallen out of favour.
Though I wonder if there are any "great" works of literature that are beyond being given a faithful adaptation in visual media.
Thanks. The material about "Uncle Ruka" is about halfway down in the article, and is a direct quote from Nabokov's memoirs.
I remain unconvinced that Nabokov intended Lolita as serious commentary on the legal and psychological issues it explores, apart from the basic assumption that Humbert is a bad person. But any further discussion of this would get epiphanic pretty quickly.
If I was going to find sexed-up TV "highly irritating", I'd be throwing rocks at the TV every time some show or other showed attractive young women in corsets laced over naked skin: a choice clearly designed to titillate the viewer and irritate whoever had to do the laundry. And that would be all the time...
I didn't suggest that it was intended that way. I didn't mean for that to be implied in my comments.
That's what I think about Kubrick's version of Clockwork Orange versus Burgess' original novel. I think Burgess kinda cheats by proclaiming that coercive processes to eliminate violent crimes can be worse than the crimes themselves, while using a made-up language to dullen the reader's visceral perception of those crimes.
I think it might be worth you and @NicoleMR remembering that Peter Jackson is also a sincere fan of Tolkien's written work - the LOTR films were clearly labours of love and not just cynical money-makers.
I do think that people generally have no idea how difficult filmmaking is.
What TV shows are you watching??
I feel like if you are going to insult other people's creative work - particularly if it's in a field you yourself are not an expert in - you should at least have the ability to spell those insults correctly.
These things are not in conflict
Okay, thanks. Possibly my misreading, based on other commentary I've seen by people who try to refute the obscenity charge by swinging to the other extreme and claiming some grand moral purpose on Nabokov's part.
That's what is meant by saying this is all part of the same conversation.
@Pomona's post read the same way to me. Really unnecessary.
Well, @Gamma Gamaliel didn't originally specify TV, @Leorning Cniht did in their reply, I'm guessing maybe as a default because a lot of cinematic talent has migrated over to TV in the last coupla decades or so.
Personally, when I read @Gamma Gamaliel's comment, I thought of the late 1990s version of The Crucible, which opened with some of the young women in Tituba's cult dancing around naked. I suppose trading a chicken in exchange for getting a guy to love you might push someone into such fits of ecstasy, but I'd wager the main point was for the studio to meet its TNA quota for the season.
Given what I understand to he Lewis' moral and religious outlook, I wonder what he would think about people who re-read pornography.
If I had to guess, I would say that Lewis was probably a priori excluding certain types of writing from his concept of "books". Like people who say "I think all human life is sacred, but I still support capital punishment, because those murderers on death-row aren't human, they're animals!"
My feeling about Jackson is that while his LotR trilogy is an impressive piece of filmmaking he makes it more generically high fantasy than the books (and also more racist at least as regards the orcs). Often where Tolkien does something less obvious, Jackson does the obvious thing instead. There's a blog I read by a historian of Rome which has an analysis of the battle scenes in Tolkien: he concludes that while a lot of changes are necessary for filming some just betray the fact that, while Tolkien knew about warfare from reading medieval texts and from personal experience, Jackson only knows about war from other modern media.
I don't think anyone is saying that fillm or TV adaptations are easy and I don’t mind 'based on' provided it's clear that they're taking liberties with the original.
It's not just the 'sexing-up' but the often heavy-handed treatments of themes hinted at in the originals. So, for instance, whilst Wells certainly draws parallels with imperialism and colonialism with the Martian invasion in War Of The Worlds this was laid on with a dirty great big trowel in a recent BBC adaptation.
The narrator was also killed leaving his feisty wife as one of the survivors. Sure, it's good to see female characters given agency but at the expense of changing the plot?
Then there was the daft new ending given to A Room With A View with Lucy going back to Italy after being widowed in the Great War to get off with the Italian pony-and-trap driver ...
I could cite other examples equally as egregious.
How could I have forgotten. You are of course entirely correct.
It is six hours, usually shown as two three hour films. It is virtually the only film I have seen that makes the past look and feel as though it was somewhere where ordinary people actually lived. Usually period works seem to be too twee with costumes and dancers too perfect, too over-whelmingly grubby and sordid, as though nobody in the past even tried to wash, too much inhabited by people who are just modern people dressed up in period clothes, or just produced as a vehicle for the directors's enthusiasms, message or ideas of 'relevance', irrespective of what the writer actually thought he or she was writing about.
Well, Aristotle explicitly criticized Plato on a number of issues(most famously the Forms), so it's not like he was claiming to present a new version of the material, the way eg. a film based on a novel claims(or is at least interpreted by many as claiming) to be presenting a new version of the story.
In Spielberg's adaptation of the same novel, one of the protagonist's kids mentions in passing that she's writing a school paper on French colonialism in Algeria, and that's about it for explicit parallels. I take it the BBC's version goes considerably beyond that?
I'm not against that link being made and unlike the Spielberg version it was set in the 1900s in the UK, as per Wells's novel, which makes the link more appropriate as Britain was then at the height of its imperial power.
If Spielberg had wanted to make a similar point there'd have been a reference to US rather than European imperialism.
As it was it was all about a conventional US family battling against the odds with resourcefulness and resolve. I seem to remember a black GI being portrayed in an heroic light but by and large it was Mr and Mrs WASP and their squeaky-clean kids versus the Martians.
So my criticism of the Spielberg version would be its lack of social comment.
With the BBC adaptation it was the opposite and very unsubtle.
It was the way it was laid on so thickly and the way they messed with the ending that bothered me.
Any adaptation is pretty certain to upset some lovers of the original books.
It also seemed to be taking broad aim at the survivalist movement, with the family taking refuge for a time with the gun-nut character played by Tim Robbins, who eventually comes to be a threat to the children's safety.
And Morgan Freeman's closing narration repeated HG Wells' vaguely social-darwinistic criticism of imperialism.
Doing stuff like that with the original source material always kinda strikes me as like explaining a punch line in humour. Yes, HG Wells was very much intending a metaphor with contemporaneous imperialism, and thus, by the rules of metaphor, he didn't include many, if any, extended references to imperialism in the text.
In the summer of '91, I saw a rather twee production of Animal Farm, put on by a troupe from some former Warsaw Pact country(Czech or Russia, I think). The guiding ideology of the post-revolution farm was introduced as follows...
Repeated a coupla times whenever someone was about to say "Animalism", as if the animals in Orwell's universe were aware of Communism.
The troupe were performing in my city during the August Coup, and were coasting on a bit of sympathy stemming from that event. In addition to doing lame-assed audience participation stunts, at the end they stood on stage long past the point it was obvious that no one wanted to give them a standing ovation, until they finally got one.
On this thread, people are giving specific instances and reasons where they think Jackson makes changes for the worse, and the response is largely, oh you just don't like any adaptations.
1) pointing out that you had misspelled something is not a personal insult
2) YOU had resorted to personal insult of Peter Jackson in your initial comment! What kind of substantial rebuttal to someone else's creative endeavour did you provide?
But how is it a personal insult to point out that if you are going to insult someone (as @NicoleMR did - calling someone else's work a "desacration[sic]" is clearly an insult and quite a personal one) you should at least do it correctly?
I'm confused as to what you are talking about, sorry. I was merely asking why @Leorning Cniht was watching so many shows where a woman is wearing a corset over bare skin.
Nobody is saying why something done in a film adaptation is bad, simply that they have decided that it is bad and that's that. Also terms like "desecration" suggest deliberate and purposeful destruction - that is a personal insult, not actual critique.
I think @Sipech did indicate why they found the changes bad, in that they changed some of the characters fairly fundamentally, and thus the character dynamic of described in the books.
@Pomona , there is a difference between a "personal insult" aimed at a public figure such as Peter Jackson, and a "personal insult" aimed at a fellow Shipmate.
There is no place for personal insults towards Shipmates in Purgatory.
North East Quine, Purgatory Host
Hostly hat off
It's subtle, but I think you can probably work it out for yourself. I don't feel like derailing the thread.
Sorry. I thought someone had wondered why @Leorning Cniht was discussing TV, rather than movies, but I can't see that exchange now, and am not inclined to go looking for it.
The second paragraph was just riffing on the previous theme of unneccessary nudity in movies or TV, with one of the examples that always pops into my mind. I have no moral objections to the tendency, just the same aesthetic one that I have to elements being inserted into a narrative where they don't really belong.
I don't agree with your summary of the thread; we've had what seem to me to be specific criticisms, or at least criticisms that could be made more specific if the poster were asked to do so.
Sipech mentioned the film's depiction of Sam. (I don't think I agree with them on that), and the depiction of the elves (while I agree that the elves aren't as they are in the books, I would concede that it would be impossible to do book-faithful elves with human actors in the film); Sipech also praised the film's Gollum (and he was quite right too).
NicoleMR mentioned the film's depiction of Denethor - I agree: the film's depiction of Denethor is much coarser and far less nuanced, and therefore loses all the tragedy of the character;
and of Faramir - I also agree. YMMV, but the conflict added to Frodo doesn't add anything, and it is part of a general tendency to blacken secondary characters to make Aragorn, Gandalf, and Frodo especially look better by comparison - see also Theoden at Helm's Deep.
I said the film makes the book look more like generic high fantasy - I concede that's a bit vague but I can elaborate if required;
and that Jackson's depiction of the orcs is more racist and problematic than the original book (Jackson only uses black actors for orcs IIRC, which as far as I can tell is not actually reflective of the book).
I don't agree that desecration is a personal insult - criticising a work of art is not the same as criticising the author; and that is especially true of films, which are a collaborative effort and therefore criticism of them is not criticism of anyone in particular.
(and fwiw I don't agree that "desecration" suggests deliberate destruction - there's an early scene in Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas where the protagonist accidentally desecrates a Hindu holy tree, and similarly there's a story in Ovid where Cadmus and his wife are turned into snakes for unintentionally desecrating a shrine.)
Indeed.
Mr F saw that and complained that Fanny was depicted as plain, whereas the point is she is pretty (and no bigod nonsense about her).
But it's an issue with period dramas that everything looks so shiny - especially the motor cars.
@NicoleMR @Ruth I was sincerely not intending to personally insult anyone. I'm sorry for unintentionally causing insult. I interpreted the term "desecration" in a more personally insulting way than was intended, for which I apologise.