I'm In Love With A Big Blue Blog, A Big Blue Blog Loves Me...

Will I ever get sick of making stupid puns in the titles of posts?

Only time will tell and the proportion of novelty value in here is still of ultra-bigness!

Anyway, I've been thinking about movie adaptations from books today. A random collection of my thoughts on the matter follows...

I think "the book" is pretty much always guaranteed to be better than "the film". The imagination of the reader includes things to the reader's taste. When a movie is made, the visuals are based on someone's concept of what will appeal to the audience they have in mind. Actually it follows that the audio is too, but personally I'm more aware of visual than audio. Fortunately the interior of my brain is a little different to Quentin Tarantino's...

Unless of course the audience doesn't have much imagination.

There are exceptions of course. If there's a story like "The Little Mermaid" where the original has a nasty ending, I'd much prefer the animated version with all-singing, all-dancing sea creatures and a happy (Dis-Wis) ending.

I think Hans Christen Andersen is a bit...something. I don't really know what to think. A guy writes stories about a girl who isn't happy with who she is and what she's got, and ends up dying a slow painful death after going through a slow painful transformation? Delusions of grandeur, don't get ideas above your station, etc. The animated version changed the entire moral and therefore the whole point of the story. In the end her dreams come true just because she is nice, and probably mostly because she is pretty. I think I need to find the original. Even if its just to check whether the mermaid is portrayed in a sympathetic or unsympathetic light.

I wonder who the first person was who went: "and the moral of the story is..." at the end of a fairy tale. Secretly slipping the ideas into kids heads through the story wasn't enough, they had to start spelling it out for them. Although spelling it out so blatantly may have been counter-productive.

So. What's the moral of my story? Well, like the Little Mermaid and the many directors who have failed to adapt books to the screen, don't get too carried away with big ideas.

Unless of course you've got a blog to put them in...

Actually, scratch that. Crazy ideas and big plans make life more interesting. Oh look! Once again I've neutralised my rant in the final bit! Aint life grand?