To put aside the obvious, Stardust the movie is not Stardust the book. This is as important as it is tautological aka trivially self-evident, since we the adoring fans of the latter are often prone to forget when sitting down to watch the former. This was immaculately captured in a brief blogging exchange between William Gibson and Cory Doctorow over the subject of the perenially imminent film adapation of Neuromancer. Gibson’s initial consternation, not at the perpetual delay (or in his words, the liminality) but at the presumption that “feature films are the ultimate stage of novelistic creation, thereby relegating the book to the status of dull gray chrysalis,” in turn fueled Doctorow’s observation:

Books, by and large, don’t make very good movies (how many great film adaptations of novels can you think of that were true to the original that were worth seeing? How many total, utter disappointments can you recall?) Yet people who meet novelists inevitably ask, “anything of yours been made into a movie yet?”

(more…)