See the Movie or Read the Book First?
The holiday season is coming up fast with its compliment of “prestige” films, those high-budget, critic-favored movies all aimed to become Oscar bait. That’s fine, but since a lot of prestige pictures are based on written works, some readers face an unusual quandary. When a book-based picture comes out, which should you do first: read the book or see the movie? Or, if you love one of these, should you even look at the other? I found out how hard that question was long before I grew up. Somewhere around age 9, I discovered Dodie Smith’s book, The Hundred and One Dalmatians. To say I fell in love with the tale is a gross understatement: I re-read it so often, I could recite whole pages of it from memory. So I should have loved the Disney adaptation, right? Wrong! I couldn’t stand the picture because it altered key parts of the original story and removed the comfortably British narrative voice. I went home swearing at the film industry in general and Disney in particular for trashing a classic. I believed no movie would ever respect a book. Flash forward 25 years or so. I’m still a fan of British lit. … Continue reading See the Movie or Read the Book First?
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