t's often interesting to compare the movie version of a book to the book itself.  You can see what liberties and changes the movie director made to the source material, where the movie got their cool ideas for things, and which version you prefer.  How you evaluate it will depend largely upon whether you saw the movie or read the book first.  Movies that are made from some obscure or non-best selling book have it easier, since most people won't be judging them by the novel

The hard part is when the book is extremely popular.  There were two examples of that recently, with the Harry Potter movie, and especially the Lord of the Rings movie.  At the time of this writing, only the first movie in each series has been released.  Harry Potter dealt with the issue by making a virtual frame for frame version of the book.  Some scenes were clipped or combined for time issues, but most reviewers said it was too much like the book, and therefore lacked any real spark or imagination.  I have not read the book, so can't comment on that, but I did find the movie a bit stiff.

The LotR movie was a tremendous success, and really had the pressure on since the books are half a century old, and enormously popular/influential.  Harry Potter is popular, but the LotR novels created the frame upon which all modern fantasy has been created.  The LotR film (just the first at the time of this writing) had to make a lot of changes to the books to make them a more compelling story/film, and they were really taking a risk, tampering with such classics.  Peter Jackson and crew did a tremendous job, I think.  More on that below.

Cinderella

The original fairy tale version of Cinderella is very different from what you see in the wholesome Disney movie.  The book is bizarre, horrible, and rather amazing.  Here's a summary. The book version is like most things in the old Grimm's Fairy Tales, just a few pages long (five) and reads almost like an outline for a story.  People presumably fleshed them out more in the verbal telling, since the written versions are a lot of "he did this and he did that and he did this and the end".

The book version of Cinderella is for adults only, for one thing.  Tons of horrific violence and cruelty. No cute singing mice making a dress either, for that matter. (BTW, why did she have to make a dress, when the fairy godmother was capable of transforming rats into horses and such?  She couldn't turn a dirty smock into a ballgown?)

In the book Cinderella has a father.  The evil step-mother and daughters are similar, but the father isn't dead or gone; he's just not real involved in things.  Off running his grain mill or whatever, but he's aware of the torments his daughter is suffering, he just doesn't seem to care.  Whipped. 

An amazing amount of the old fairy tales have a challenge portion in them, where the bad guy or witch or ogre or king orders the hero to perform some humanly-impossible feat.  They are almost always something stupid though, almost trivial.  Like counting grains of rice, or leaves on a tree, or very often picking stuff up.  Half of Grimm's Fairy Tales have some hero being forced to pick up a basket of rice, or beans, or seeds, or pearls, or millet, or whatever, always with a set time limit to accomplish it in. What kind of villain prepares to murder a peasant, and rather than doing it outright, throws down a bucket of beans and forces them to pick it all up, knowing it's impossible in the time allotted?  Who would do that? In every case, the hero is saved by some small animal or insect that he/she has previously befriended, usually by dint of nothing more than not squashing them arbitrarily.  The small animals then labor for hours to gather all of the tiny seeds/pearls/grains of rice/millet/stones/etc, thus accomplishing an impossible task for the hero in short order.  Doesn't the challenger object to this?  No, they invariably throw down the challenge and then leave the area, laughing to themselves.  Call it the James Bond villain syndrome.  Someday when I have powerful enemies, I want to trap one in some slow-death contraption, and see if I enjoy it more watching, or just leaving them to die.  Does it make the boring meeting/lecture you have to attend that afternoon just fly by, knowing your enemy is gasping for breath as the closet you locked them in slowly fills with two-week old sour cream?  I'll let you know once I've tried it. 

I suppose the "pick this crap up" was a reasonable challenge in the pre-shop vac age, but it's so undignified. I suppose the humiliation of it had more resonance in the Middle Ages; what with starving serfs ready to kill for a bit of rice, and here some king throws a whole bag of it down and makes you clean it up.

Still, what sort of epic fairy tale quest is that? I tend to think of such things more along Herculean tasks; you know, like holding up the earth on your shoulders, or diverting a river, or slaying a Kraken.  I can't see Hercules having to pick up every fleck of a 50kg bag of flour.  It would be beneath him. Literally.  Yet like every other Grimms' tale has that sort of thing in it, so maybe that was all authors could think of in the Middle Ages.  Or perhaps they figured their clumsy, lentil-toting readership would identify.

Anyway, back to Cinderella, she has to pick up all scattered dishes of lentils not once, not twice, but three times!  The first two times they are just on the ground, but the third time the stepmother throws them into the ashes in the hearth, for added difficulty. Little birds help her pick up every bit each time.  Even after they pull it off the third time, the stepmother still won't let her go to the ball. She goes anyway.

In the story the royal ball stretches over three days, and there's no midnight rat-to-coachmen curfew; Cinderella just runs off on foot each night to get home so her stepmother won't know she's been there (no one recognizes her, of course).  She ditches the pursing prince each time, on foot, in a huge ball gown, in increasingly absurd fashion.  The best one is when she climbs a tree and then leaps down the other side while Prince Dumbass is looking for her on this side.  What sort of tree has sides?  It's got a trunk and limbs in a circle, how dumb is the prince to not be able to see her in it?  And she's wearing golden slippers (yes, golden, not glass), some super ball gown, hair just right, etc. Real tree-climbing gear there. The prince isn't the shiniest penny in the fountain, a fact that's demonstrated numerous times.

Now anyone who has seen the movie has no doubt noticed the stupidity of the shoe test. Does Cinderella have the smallest feet in the kingdom?  And is that a highly sought-after trait?  Shoe size isn't exactly a finger print, surely one third of the women in the kingdom would fit into the golden shoe, unless her feet were just grotesquely small.

The authors of the story weren't clever enough to just make them enchanted slippers that wouldn't let anyone else fit into them, so they had to go for smaller feet, I guess.

Fortunately for her, the first house the prince checks in the entire kingdom is hers. He whips out the shoe, and stepdaughter #1 tries it on.  In the story the sisters are pretty, just not as pretty as Cinderella.  Still, how could the prince not recognize her, after slow dancing with her for about six hours a night, three days in a row?  Anyway, stepsister #1 can't fit into it, so she quickly cuts off her big toe.  Yes, cuts it right off, is then able to cram her foot into the shoe, and the prince is satisfied.  Somehow the gouting blood doesn't tip him off.

They ride off on horses, all happiness, but as they pass under a tree two two doves call out:

Prithee, look back, prithee, look back
There's blood on the track.
The shoe is too small;
At home the true bride is waiting thy call.

The prince then notices that the trail is covered in blood, from her gushing foot.  Now was the shoe like a clog, and solid?  So I mean is the entire slipper totally filled with blood, and it's sloshing out the top around her ankle?  God that's gross.

So he takes her back to her house and then stepsister #2 try it on.  She's got sled-runners too, but her solution is to cut off part of her heel.  Apparently she's got smaller toes than #1. Anyway, she slices her heel right off, and stuffs it into the shoe, which has hopefully been rinsed out at some point.  Putting aside the impossibility of cutting off enough of your heel to help (it's all bone, she use a saw?) fit into a smaller shoe, how could the prince not notice the spurting blood.  I mean he'd have to check it the second time, right?  Or does he just figure that one woman might be insane, but two of them can't be that nutty? 

The prince takes her off, no questions asked, and no examination made, until they get to the same tree and the same doves, who sing the same little song.  He then notices the puddles of blood behind them, and catches on.  Bright boy.

So after #2 is found out by her gushing, potentially fatal wound, he goes back and asks if there are any other women in the house.  Trusting fellow, eh?  Given his facial-recognition skills, I'm surprised #1 didn't have her stump cauterized by then and hobble out with a different color of lipstick on, which would probably have been enough to confuse Prince Vapid.

She didn't try it though, and somehow Cinderella gets a try, and of course the shoe fits perfectly.  I really hope someone washed it out in between.  The stepmother and sisters are furious, rather than sucking up as you might expect.  Surprisingly, Cinderella still invites them to the wedding, even after their years of torment.

Nature is less forgiving though, and as the stepsisters enter the church for the wedding, doves actually fly down and pluck out one eye each of the sisters! I mean right in the bridal train. Wouldn't that sort of disrupt things?  Nope, the wedding goes along just fine.  Pity they didn't have a video camera or it would be a finalist on one of those stupid blooper video shows.  Beats the time Uncle Earl's toupee fell into the punch.

Not only isn't the wedding interrupted, the sisters don't even leave.  They sit through the whole thing, having depth-perception issues, I'd think, and then on the way out, guess what?  Here come the doves again, ready for dessert, and each of them loses their other eyeball!  Those are some hardcore turtledoves.

The moral of this is that next time you're watching a movie that's got totally absurd and stupid plot twists and character reactions, don't blame modern cinema for the faults.  They had far stupider things in fairy tales five hundred years ago.

Silence of the Lambs

I recently read the original Thomas Harris novel, Silence of the Lambs, after having seen the movie probably a dozen times over the years.  It reminded me of seeing the LotR movie, after I'd read the books 3 or 4 times. In both cases, I spent much more time just mentally cataloguing the differences between them than actually watching/reading and enjoying the material.

Silence of the Lambs, the movie, was remarkably faithful to the book.  Dozens of lines of dialogue were directly lifted from the book; many of the best ones, in fact.  The screenplay was also expertly adapted, since virtually every change in the movie was an improvement on what was in the book, and things that were glossed over in the movie were things that the book described in more detail than we really needed to know.  The description of Hannibal's room in the asylum was dumb in the book, with bars and some sort of nylon screen keeping him back from it.  I couldn't visualize it; I imagined like a giant pantyhose sort of material blocking him off.  The Shamo pool plexiglass in the movie was much more effective and logical.

I did like in the book seeing a bit of Hannibal after he escaped.  And there was some more reality in him having to disguise himself.  (He's described in a plastic surgery hospital, wearing a big nose bandage, not from surgery, just for disguise, and he's there since he won't look out of place with that on his face. It's absurd in the movie(s) that he can roam around with no disguise at all, and no one recognizes him, when he'd be on all of those America's Most Wanted shows every week, covers of every tabloid, etc.

The book had more long dialogue than I can recall reading outside of a screenplay, and it was at times hard to follow who was saying what.  It's always harder to read dialogue and follow it than it is to hear it spoken.  So the long orations Hannibal gives when talking to Clarice were often hard to grasp the full nuances or menace or intimidation of.  Things that are abundantly clear in the film, with Hopkins' surpassing performance.

However since 95% of the dialogue in the book is replicated almost exactly in the film, I found myself hearing Hopkins saying the lines, which I know more or less by heart after seeing the oh-so-memorable film so many times, and I would just hear the scene as it was in film, rather than actually going by the words on the page.

I think I have to give the film praise, since it was an interesting book but nothing all that amazing.  I wouldn't have found it very remarkable as anything more than a slightly more literate than normal horror story.  While the film is amazingly good, elevated far above the quality of most movies, and certainly above that of horror films, which are by and large dreck.

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

As for LotR, it's a harder comparison.  The books are so old-fashioned, with the very verbose and technical Tolkien's prose, and slow moving, stately even.  The film is very studied and paced as well, and it's a long movie, but still skips over tons of stuff from the book.  I didn't miss the Tom Armadillo stuff, he always seemed really weird in the book, in a, "What the hell is this singing guy in the funny clothing doing here?" way.  I did miss the exit from the town, and the Prancing Pony stuff.  Them buying Bill the pony and heading out past the staring townsfolk was an interesting scene.

However overall LotR was such an excellent movie, probably more enjoyable than the book.  It gave the impression of time and effort without rubbing your nose in it as much as Tolkien does with the dozens of pages of "we were walking and we were hungry" that the reader is tempted to flip through to get to the next scene of interest.  The editing in the film was brilliant also, cutting back and forth between the areas of interest, keeping you up to date on what was going on in multiple places at the same time.  It had excellent action scenes, but still took the time to develop the characters and their individual personalities, something very rarely seen in action films.

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