CP English I Extra Credit: Books on the Big Screen

Here is your opportunity to do extra credit this six weeks! It’s the easiest it has ever been! There’s more than one way to get excited about books. Many books are translated to the Big Screen!  Right now, everyone is anxiously waiting for the film version of Andy Weir’s The Martian,   and we all know about the Harry Potter books translated into movies along with The Hunger Games Trilogy, but they aren’t the only ones. Coraline by Neil Gaiman, Rick Riordan’s Lightning Thief, The Help by Kathryn Sockett, and Tolkein’s Ring Trilogy only start a long list of movies that started life as novels.

For extra credit, comment below about what your favorite–or least favorite– film version of a book has been. In your recommendation, tell why you liked it and who else you think might like it– or not like it. Tell why this film version was great or awful. Feel free to join in a conversation and comment on other people’s recommendations as well. Of course, the guidelines here are the same as anywhere: Be considerate and think about your words before submitting them.(All comments do await my moderation–just in case, so you won’t see them instantly.)

The more involved you are, the more credit you get.

“How much extra credit?” you ask.

“Up to 40 points on a major exam,” I reply.

“Holy cow! That’s amazing!” you exclaim.

“I know,” I nod and answer.

So to get you started, here is my recommendation for a movie version of a book I just didn’t think worked:

I read all of the Hunger Games novels. In fact, I first listened to them as audio books and liked them so much that I bought the hard copy of them as well. So, I was excited when I heard that there would be movies. In fact, I did love the first movie. Jennifer Lawrence was a fantastic Katniss, and I loved the visualization of the capital. I thought they chose good scenes from the movie to convey the same main ideas that the book did. I did not enjoy the second movie quite as much, but it still held its own against the novels.

All of this changed with Mockingjay: Part 1. Because I had not absolutely loved the second film, I waited to see this third movie in the series until I could see it for free as part of my Amazon Prime membership. Since I was seeing it for free, I did not hold this movie to quite as high standards as I would a movie I paid big bucks to watch. Still it let me down.

First, the directors chose an all gray palette. Gone was any visual stimulation. They said, “Fire burn brighter in the dark,” but there wasn’t any fire, just dismal gray fog. The movie was visually boring, and this is the theme of the whole movie–at least at far as I was able to stand it. I watched about the first hour, and nothing happened. An exciting novel had been turned into one of the most boring movies I had ever tried to watch. Snooze-O-Rama! One of the worst things is that they cut this book into two parts, and this is proof that it was totally unnecessary. Hollywood greed struck and turned what could have been a suspenseful, tightly-plotted, two hour movie into a treatment for insomnia just to try to make a few more dollars. Needless to say, I’m not planning to see the last installment in the series.

 

OK, now you’ve seen how it’s done…let’s have your views on movies from novels.