All I Know

Encroachment: Books, Movies, and the Imagination

I have a crush on Stephanie Plum.  She’s the hero of Jan Evanovich’s novel series about a Jersey chick trying to be a bounty hunter.  There are eighteen books in the main series now; I’ve read five.  It is light stuff, perfect for the pool or between heavy reads.

So I was really charged up to see that the first in the series was going to be made into a movie, but it was in and out of the theaters faster than I could react.  But it came up on Netflix lately, so I checked it out.

I lasted about 10 minutes.  The characters weren’t anywhere near as good as what I had made up in my mind.

I’ve had the very same reaction on several tries with All the Kings Men, one of my very favorite books.  I can’t get past 10 minutes with that Willie Stark. Mine is so much better.

On the other hand, I didn’t experience this issue with Gettysburg (The Killer Angels), the Stieg Larson The Girl …  series, or Last of the Mohicans, even if it didn’t follow the book very well.  Heck, the Lord of the Rings series actually helped me with visualizing hobbits.

I’m not really sure how to account for the difference in reactions.

The Great Gatsby is also one of my very favorite books, and there we saw a trailer for the new release at the theater the other night.  It looks much much closer to the Gatsby of my imagination than the Robert Redford version.  In that version I didn’t like Gatsby, Tom, or the treatment of the light across the water at all (I though Nick was right on).  So we are looking forward to that.

Here’s a little scorecard of my experiences:

Couldn’t Take the Movie Thought Movie was Okay or better Indifferent
One for the Money
All the King’s Men
We Were Soldiers Once, and Young
Gettysburg
Stieg Larson series
The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Love Story
Garp
The Color Purple
The Caine Mutiny
The Green Mile
The Last of the Mohicans
The Notebook
Julie and Julia
Schindler’s List
The Great Gatsby 1974

What about you??
Only ones where you read the book first count. There are a number of instances where I can’t remember if read the book first or saw the movie first (like The English Patient)

 

 

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