[spoiler alert: full plot details of both film and comic versions are discussed]

Any film adaptation is automatically a mixed blessing: the chance to see some beloved story translated from a book/comic/radio show/TV show/videogame to the big screen, counterbalanced by the risk that it will get fundamentally ruined in the process. Of these, the trials of moving from books to movies are probably best established—massive plot compression, reduced complexity, characters that don’t “look right,” jettisoning of descriptive language—but comic adaptations are a much newer phenomenon with their own pitfalls. To begin, one might argue that Watchmen is only the second true conversion (what in videogame terms might be called a “total conversion” from mod culture), following Frank Miller’s Sin City, with most other superhero and even explicitly comic book movies often closer to “inspired by” or “featuring characters from” than outright transfers from actual comic runs or specific graphic novels[1]. Even previous efforts to adapt Alan Moore in League Of Extraordinary Gentleman, From Hell, and V for Vendetta, and Watchmen director Zach Snyder’s previous outing with Frank Miller’s 300, diverged quite widely from the source material. By contrast, Sin City was almost a shot-for-shot remake of the Dark Horse series. But even it suffered in the process of combining multiple short story arcs into an attempt to create a coherent longer film, and from the innate limitations of the flat-affect noir patois in which it was composed. Watchmen was conceived first as a 12-part comic run and then collected as a graphic novel, ostensibly providing a more linear narrative to put into a film script. Once the initial jitters that the material would be handled indelicately had passed (Snyder went out of the way to reassure fans), the more apropos question became: does Watchmen even work as a movie? With Snyder’s Watchmen, we have a vastly ambitious attempt to convert what has been called an “unfilmable” work into celluloid. How well viewers think the effort turned out is breaking down along traditional party lines, with mainstream critics bothered by its structure, pulp excesses, and even its slavish devotion to the text (cf. the first two Harry Potter films); and fans thrilled to see familiar scenes brought to life. At the risk of rehashing overchurned ground, I think the movie succeeds and fails precisely by those measures and your ultimate enjoyment will be determined how much you give credence to each. Let’s start with the structure.
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In his third outing as the amnesiac agent Jason Bourne, Matt Damon maintains the low-drag efficiency he established in the first two installments – David Denby in the New Yorker even compares him to a bullet – as he relentlessly backtracks the genesis of his former secret identity to its source. As appropriate for the endcap to an informal trilogy, the knobs are all ratcheted up – chases are notably extended, nominal allies within the CIA themselves are put at risk, and Bourne’s counterespionage chops put to ever greater challenges. Yet somewhere in the process, we lose some of the balance that was previously maintained between cat and mouse, and thus some of the critical tension that came from it. Before we get to that, however, let’s revisit how we got to this point in the story.

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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?”

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Having now seen Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix twice (first with K. and yesterday with KA), I wanted to record some impressions before turning attention fully to the books. Foremost of these was that seeing the movie, each time, really did reinvigorate me for reading the books. This stands in stark contrast with the aftereffects of Goblet of Fire, which had been my favorite of the books and thus made me the most anxious as to how it would fare as a film. Not to dwell too long on its shortcomings, sufficed to say that I could only console myself at how much worse it could have been, and felt the movies’ appeal had returned overall to a pale shadow of the books since the higher regard they had achieved after Cuaron’s Prisoner of Azkaban raised the bar. The difference, then, is that while still no substitute for the books – and more clearly viewed as meant not to be such – the OOTP movie reminded me of what was great about the book while trimming away much of what would not have translated well to screen.

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[warning: spoilers below]

The path to seeing Pixar’s latest, Ratatouille, was a diversion from the usual process for me. (more…)

When I first heard that Neil Gaiman’s Stardust (my favorite work of his, which is a feat) was being produced as a film, and had in fact proceeded past the option limbo where most fantasy and sci-fi scripts go to die (just when is Neuromancer coming out, anyway? 2009 now?), I was desperately hopeful. When I heard some of the attached cast, I became more concerned: Claire Danes as Yvaine is a good match in temperament yet hardly a snow-blonde, but Michelle Pfeiffer? Robert de Niro?! Was this going to be a case of names trumping plot?

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