Have You Read a Good Movie Lately?
One of Hollywood’s greatest treasure troves for good movie stories has always been novels. Hollywood history is full of book blockbusters crossing over to screen blockbusters; Gone With the Wind, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Godfather, all the way up to the present day with films such as The Help, The Life of Pi and all the Harry Potter and Twilight movies. A Hollywood producer knows that if you need a go-to source for a big hit go to the best seller list. Less of a sure thing has been the classics. Movies based on literary classics have a very hit or miss record. For every success like the 1943 adaption of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, which won one Academy Award and was nominated for a total of 9 awards and made a ton of money, there is a miss like the 1958 adaption of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov starring Yul Brynner, Lee J. Cobb and William Shatner (yes Captain Kirk!) which earned a total of $44,000 dollars at the box office. Yet the one thing all these films share is that they are interesting, a curse for some of the films, but a chance for all of us to work our way back to the source materials and read a good movie by reading the original book.
I have noticed that any movie based on a book always starts up a conversation; from “how was the book?”, to how close did the movie plot match the book’s plot, to how well the movie was cast, to which was better, the book or the movie? One thing that results from a discussion of this kind when the book involves a classic is the desire by someone to either go back and re-read the book or someone who wants to finally read that classic that they have meant to read for years and now have a reason to read it. There are two movies out now that certainly would benefit the viewer to go back to the source and read the book. One is Anna Karenina and the other is The Hobbit.
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The Hobbit has the opposite treatment that the usual classic book screen adaption undergoes in that the original book The Hobbit, or There and Back Again was expanded to fit an anticipated film trilogy. The current film is the first of that trilogy. I am personally a big Lord of the Rings fan and was waiting for this film to be released to rush to the theater in my Hobbit feet and ears and watch the extravaganza! I loved the original Lord of the Rings trilogy and have read all four novels from The Hobbit to The Return of the King. I have somehow avoided reading The Silmarillion and some of the other posthumous writings (mainly my wife telling me to grow up and my kids saying something like, Dad, get a life may have had something to do with it). I read the four novels in the order they were written. The movies had the Lord of the Ring trilogy being filmed before the prequel of The Hobbit. That may have had a hand in how the film The Hobbit shares the darker and more serious tone of the Lord of the Ring film trilogy whereas the book were totally different in tone and manner. Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937, ten years before the first Lord of the Rings volume was published. It was intended as young reader’s book. The book is lighter, shorter, and funnier than the three Lord of the Ring books that followed. Tolkien wrote the three Lord of the Ring books for adult readers and just after the dark period of World War II.
I was introduced to the Hobbit like I bet a lot of people my age were, in High School in the late 70’s. Our English teacher was a flower child out of the 60’s and we all thought, whoa, wait a minute here. Hobbits in a shire living in holes in the ground and smoking pipes! Well she was an college student of the sixties, we thought, but bless her hippie heart if she didn’t know what she was doing as the whole class got caught up in hobbit fever. Well most of us did, King Kong Keller wasn’t much amused by any hobbits, but to tell you the truth we never did have much hope that anything would ever touch ole King Kong’s heart.
- Larry M.
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