Tag: movies

Subjectively About Film Adaptations. Part 2

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After my list of the best adaptations, let’s talk about the worst ones—again, from my perspective.

Leading by a large margin in my ranking is World War Z. I absolutely love the book. I consider it the best piece I’ve read on the theme of “we’re all going to die.” The book delves into the psychology of people in critical situations. It shows what makes modern society so vulnerable to global threats. Most people are unprepared to live without the comforts of civilization. Some will exploit others for profit until the last moment, while others will cling to false remedies, believing they won’t be affected, that the government will save everyone, or something else. There are heroes and cowards, and being a coward isn’t always bad. In short, the book is very much about people.

The zombies, too, are described in such a way that it becomes clear why humanity nearly fell: they’re slow but tireless, and they summon other zombies with their sounds. The infection didn’t spread immediately, which allowed the disease to reach global proportions.

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Subjectively About Film Adaptations

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Today, I’d like to talk about books. But not just books—my husband writes a lot about those, and does so interestingly—but about film adaptations.

Film adaptations are tricky. Translating the content of a book into a screenplay can be difficult, even for the book’s author, as cinema is an art form with its own rules and demands. Another challenge is casting actors that both fit the book’s characters and satisfy the director and fans. In the end, we get what we get.

I’ve compiled my personal ranking of the best and worst film adaptations from those I’ve both watched and read the original books. Today, I’ll share the best ones. And just a heads-up, everything is subjective.

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Edward Ross “Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film”

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How badly I wanted to read this book! And how great my disappointment turned out to be! It’s much easier to list what’s wrong with this book than to find anything good about it.

In Russian the book is titled How Film Works: Theory and History of Cinema and was marketed as “an extensive study presented as a stylish and engaging comic.” But contrary to the title and description, it’s not about how cinema works at all. Frankly, the translators share some of the blame here, as the original title is Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film, which didn’t claim to be about how cinema works, nor about theory or history.

So what is it actually about? If I were to sum it up briefly, I’d say this: it’s a collection of completely unrelated paragraphs that try to appear as a scholarly article with deep insights. More often than not, these “insights” come from other people, whom the author frequently quotes throughout the book. This is criticism in its worst form, where the writer attempts to explain what the filmmaker intended to convey, or what they were thinking. But reality shows that often the filmmaker wasn’t thinking about anything of the sort (there’s a great example with the horse in the film Afonya, which Georgiy Daneliya wrote about in his memoirs).

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Life is Beautiful: I couldn’t make it

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It so happened that I had never watched Roberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful. I had heard of it, vaguely knew the plot, but had never seen it.

I decided to correct this, as I’ve never avoided the topic of Jews and Nazism — I’ve watched all the significant films and read many books on the subject.

But the film turned out to be different from what I expected. The first half is a sort of prelude, with nothing about Nazis. It’s about the main character — what he’s like in life. Both the character and Benigni’s acting style (he plays the lead role) were a bit irritating, but I managed to endure it, waiting for other developments.

However, as soon as the film started addressing the story of Jews and the concentration camp, I couldn’t take it anymore. Knowing how Jews were really treated and what happened in the camps, this buffoonery irritated me too much. It seemed to me that this couldn’t have happened in reality. In my opinion, it felt more like an insult to what actually happened.

Maybe I’m wrong, but at some point, I realized that I didn’t want to and couldn’t continue watching. I simply turned off the film, though I understand that many people love it (8.6 out of 10 on IMDB).