Hollywood distances?

[Kzach]

Actually, no, I take that back. The thing that bugs me most recently is the tendency for studios to keep "reimagining" cool stories (such as Robin Hood, Arthur, and so on), with either "gritty", "realistic", or "the truth behind the legend" versions, when the legend/myth is usually far better.

Yeah that mystifies me too. My particular pet peeve is how ninja's have become this wholly artificial construct so that they barely resemble their historical origins and yet their historical origins are so damn cool that there was never any need to create a variant.

 

[Croesus]

...and yet their historical origins are so damn cool that there was never any need to create a variant.

This pretty much sums up how Hollywood handles any good property. The writer/producer/director/whoever decides that the source material would make a great movie, but gee, why don't we just improve it a bit by changing this...and this...and this, until it's no longer the same.

Peter Jackson's LOTR movies grate on me, not because they're bad (they're very good), but because in almost every case where he changed something from the original books, his change wasn't any better. The changes (in general) weren't bad, just completely unnecessary. Drives me nuts.

Sheesh...

 

[Janx]

This pretty much sums up how Hollywood handles any good property. The writer/producer/director/whoever decides that the source material would make a great movie, but gee, why don't we just improve it a bit by changing this...and this...and this, until it's no longer the same.

Peter Jackson's LOTR movies grate on me, not because they're bad (they're very good), but because in almost every case where he changed something from the original books, his change wasn't any better. The changes (in general) weren't bad, just completely unnecessary. Drives me nuts.

Sheesh...

I dunno. The Tom Bombadil section of the book sucked. I applaud its lack in the film. I'm just not sophisticated enough to see its merit.

I think the excuse for deviation from the printed work is whether the scene works as written in a visual format. I reckon there's some truth to that.

True blood season 2 deviated quite a bit from the book (per my wife who's read them all). But the book focussed significantly on Sookie. So the ensemble cast of actors would have been unemployed that season. So the show did a lot of splitting back and forth for Sookie's story and the rest of the town. That was probably a good idea for the show.

Game of Thrones, which I just started has the same 2 first scenes. But the dialog is a little different. And there are other differences in the scenes. I suspect part of it is, since a book is just text, they tend to rely on description and dialog. Whereas film can just show some action to convey the same message. So the divergence begins.