Yesterday I finally went to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I read the novel (in Dutch) when I was around 12 and re-read it again a couple of months ago (in English) and loved it both times. The second reading was done with the upcoming film in mind, already thinking about what they would leave out, and change, and how much I would hate them for it. Turns out, they didn't leave anything out. Even more, they added stuff.
Now I won't write a review of the film here, as I think everybody who is remotely interested will have seen it (or go to see it) and form an opinion on their own, and those who are not interested won't be interested in my opinion one way or another (I have a colleague who openly admits to "never having gotten through the first Lord of the Rings movie" and "not liking Harry Potter all that much either"). I want to talk about films based on books.
There seem to be a lot of those around lately. The Hobbit being the main example, but the glorious, lovely, you-should-read-this-if-you-only-read-one-other-book-in-your-whole-life Life of Pi has also been put to film ("that would be the LAST film I'd ever watch", my non-fantasy reading/watching colleague said), and then there is Cloud Atlas, considered equally unfilmable but still to be found in a cinema near you (I'm currently reading the novel) and of course Anna Karenina (why oh why Keira Knightley insists upon working with Joe Wright and only Joe Wright is beyond me). Not sure why we're getting so many book-based films, maybe the studios are getting a bit anxious where they put their money, so they're only betting on stories that have already sold themselves? The Dutch film industry appears to be focusing on 'deciding moments in Dutch history' (with the Willem Barentz' journey to Nova Zembla, the 1953 storm, and now the bombardment of Rotterdam) or sappy love stories all revolving around one of the few internationally famous actresses we have, and otherwise there are a lot of action movies (James Bond (technically also book-based), and Tom Cruise appears to be doing some running around again), and strangely enough very few thrillers or comedies around. Not sure if this is always the case around Christmas, must be, as we're all longing for nice fantasy (that includes romantic) stories that end well, or high-action movies that end well (don't they all).
Anyway, with book-based films, you can mess it up so badly I'm surprised at how many good examples there are. Firstly, you can stick too close to the book. The first Harry Potter movies did this, and they sadly collapsed under their own weight. Then you can get too far away from the book, changing important plot elements or characters and just making it too weird. Like the Lord of the Rings film that had the eagles fly Frodo to Mount Doom and just drop the ring in. Kind of missing the story. Then you can 'interpret' the novel in a new way, which might shed a new light on the story but usually leaves your viewer quite baffled, like the Joe Wright Anna Karenina version set entirely in a theatre (I haven't seen it, I don't intend to, but I've heard enough about it).
Somehow, you need to keep the essence of the story, the characters, the atmosphere, and then make it work in another medium. I think Atonement is a good example, as they changed some important bits (the whole final part of the novel has been changed from a first-person narrator description to a television interview) but still staid true to the story. And then they added some bits, like the colours that show each character's personality, and the beautiful soundtrack, which makes the story work even better. And you can still go back to the novel, and read that and enjoy that, and it can exist side by side with the film without either one being better; they're just two different interpretations of the same story. I think Peter Jackson did the same with his Lord of the Rings films, and again with The Hobbit. The main issue here is that the viewers have already seen what comes next, so the creeping shadows and darkness that you can't read in The Hobbit (which is, after all, a children's book) have to be superimposed upon the story. But the humour is kept, and the characters are the same, and the story too, roughly, it just all plays out on a bigger canvas. And you can still go back and read The Hobbit and marvel on the bits that Tolkien stretched out over pages and pages while they don't really matter and find that the main climactic battle is over in a couple of pages and still enjoy and love it in it's own right, and then watch the movie and see the whole visual interpretation of it without either one 'spoiling' the other.
I'm so very much hoping that they did the same with Life of Pi, which is a very philosophical novel with an essence that is hard to find, and a story that might not work so well visually, as it takes place mostly inside the head of the main character. But still, I think it can be done. And the reviews are good, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Only once have I encountered a film that I thought was better than the novel, and in that case I'd watched the film first and read the novel later. It was a Dutch film, Phileine zegt sorry, based on the novel by Ronald Giphart. In the film, several separate characters from the novel were combined, several disjointed events were connected and relocated, and the many separate climax scenes were also combined, making the 'life lesson' that the main character goes through much more distinct. Sadly, the book was just a big boring drag after watching the film. Not sure if I would have liked the novel better if I'd read it before watching the movie, but just to be sure, I'm now sticking to 'source material first'. Which is why I'm reading Cloud Atlas at the moment, so I can watch the film with what it's based on in the back of my mind. A bit of a puritan approach, but hey, book-based films just are in a place of their own.
Friday 21 December 2012
Wednesday 12 December 2012
Book endings
I've recently read two of the 'hot' novels of our time; The Casual Vacancy by J.K.Rowling and Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan (if you are now wondering where I find the time to read such huge novels; so am I). I loved both novels, but found problems with both endings.
With The Casual Vacancy (as with the Harry Potter novels), I was immediately immersed in the story (although I had to flip back and forth to remember who everyone was several times), and it kept me riveted towards the end. With Sweet Tooth, it took me a while to get into the story (it also took the story a while to get moving), but once I got into it, about halfway through the book, it swept me along. For both novels, this is partly because you expect them to end badly, and you can't help but want to know whether it does. The Casual Vacancy just contains so many destructive people, who hate both themselves and each other, and are willing to do anything to get their own ideas pushed through. For McEwan's novel, well, he's McEwan. Most of his novels end badly, or in some huge revelation you never saw coming.
Sadly, with both novels, the ending disappointed me.
I won't give anything away, but in The Casual Vacancy, the focus is on a large group of main characters and some secondary characters, and the ending of the novel consists of the musings of one of these side characters, which then throws another light on one of the main characters. It is nicely written, but not the climax you are looking for. It just shows that you as reader were right all along; that main character was more likable than any other character in the novel realised. But no other character (apart from said side character) realises this, so there is no real growth or process or catharsis, and you end up on a low instead of a high.
In Sweet Tooth, as I was reading the ending, I got the feeling that this novel would turn out to be some Inception-like loop, which would give a whole new perspective on the novel, and novel writing, and make you wonder if what you'd read was actually real, or a story, or a story about something real, or something that never happened and actually could not exist. But then, in the final two pages, this was blown away by some simple references, and it turned out that McEwan had pulled the same trick as he did in Atonement (but slightly different, of course).
This made me sad. It made me sad because it means that he really will never write something as good as Atonement and Saturday ever again (Solar was the absolute low point, followed by Sweet Tooth) and it made me sad that he (and his editor) did not see this metaphysical loop-like possibility of finishing. He wanted to write an account of the 70s, his experience of the 70s, and that is what he did, so he could not pull it out into something that might or might not be real.
His writing is still great, I love his style and the way his words flow and the way he describes a scene and a character and the small details that make everything real, and he will remain my favourite author for quite some time to come, I think, but still, it is sad to see someone past his high point. But everything has to end some time.
With The Casual Vacancy (as with the Harry Potter novels), I was immediately immersed in the story (although I had to flip back and forth to remember who everyone was several times), and it kept me riveted towards the end. With Sweet Tooth, it took me a while to get into the story (it also took the story a while to get moving), but once I got into it, about halfway through the book, it swept me along. For both novels, this is partly because you expect them to end badly, and you can't help but want to know whether it does. The Casual Vacancy just contains so many destructive people, who hate both themselves and each other, and are willing to do anything to get their own ideas pushed through. For McEwan's novel, well, he's McEwan. Most of his novels end badly, or in some huge revelation you never saw coming.
Sadly, with both novels, the ending disappointed me.
I won't give anything away, but in The Casual Vacancy, the focus is on a large group of main characters and some secondary characters, and the ending of the novel consists of the musings of one of these side characters, which then throws another light on one of the main characters. It is nicely written, but not the climax you are looking for. It just shows that you as reader were right all along; that main character was more likable than any other character in the novel realised. But no other character (apart from said side character) realises this, so there is no real growth or process or catharsis, and you end up on a low instead of a high.
In Sweet Tooth, as I was reading the ending, I got the feeling that this novel would turn out to be some Inception-like loop, which would give a whole new perspective on the novel, and novel writing, and make you wonder if what you'd read was actually real, or a story, or a story about something real, or something that never happened and actually could not exist. But then, in the final two pages, this was blown away by some simple references, and it turned out that McEwan had pulled the same trick as he did in Atonement (but slightly different, of course).
This made me sad. It made me sad because it means that he really will never write something as good as Atonement and Saturday ever again (Solar was the absolute low point, followed by Sweet Tooth) and it made me sad that he (and his editor) did not see this metaphysical loop-like possibility of finishing. He wanted to write an account of the 70s, his experience of the 70s, and that is what he did, so he could not pull it out into something that might or might not be real.
His writing is still great, I love his style and the way his words flow and the way he describes a scene and a character and the small details that make everything real, and he will remain my favourite author for quite some time to come, I think, but still, it is sad to see someone past his high point. But everything has to end some time.
Monday 10 December 2012
Pushing papers around
So this internship I'm taking is about preparing for the working life that comes after university, more particularly, the working life in a publishing company. But interestingly, most things I'm learning have nothing to do with the work itself, but more with the things happening around it, such as 'going to lunch with colleagues', 'having a meeting with people from different backgrounds' and 'interacting with people on cold, stormy Saturday mornings when everybody wants to be in bed but they have to be at some stupid conference they don't want to be at'.
Another thing I'm starting to learn about: office bureaucracy. Today was a case in point, one that drove me almost mad. Now I'm not going to give you any names or specifics, but it's handy to know that the company I intern for is a publisher of educational books, and that they have a lot of their materials online.
Now some time in September, my supervisor got an email from a teacher saying that there were mistakes in one of the answer sheets in the online database, and that she was annoyed by this. She mentioned one specific case, and then said something about 'grammar assignments in the upper levels' also containing mistakes. I removed the mistake from the mentioned exercise and my supervisor emailed back asking the teacher whether she could be a bit more specific about where the other mistakes were. The teacher replied grumpily that she was not planning on telling us.
So about a month after the first email, my supervisor asked me if I could check all (that's right, all) answers for the higher level questions, to see if there were any mistakes. I did this, and emailed her with the mistakes. Then about 2 weeks later she emailed me asking whether I could correct these mistakes. I had thought some specialised author was going to do this, but it turned out I could just do it myself. So I did.
However, there was one question where there was no answer at all, it was simply missing from the answer sheet. I marked this question and send everything back to her, saying that I could not correct this question as I did not know the original author's intentions. She got back to me this morning, saying that the author in question is no longer working for the company (the questions were made in 2007), so I should just do the best I could. So I did, and finally, this afternoon, I was able to email the completely corrected files to IT to be uploaded. A full 3 months after the initial email from the teacher.
I got an immediate reply from our regular IT editor that I should contact another editor, as this was not her area of work. Okay, I thought, just one more email and then I'm done. I resend the email to the second editor, crossed my fingers, and got an immediate reply. Success! I thought. But no, it was an out-of-office reply, stating that the editor would be on holiday until the 2nd of January...
Taking into account the multitude of email this person is going to have after an month's absence, I should be happy if the files are uploaded before my internship finishes. That will be a full 4 months after the teacher initially send her email. All the work I've done on the project could be condensed to about 6 hours. So all the rest of it, the emailing, the waiting, the misunderstandings, the miss-sending, all of that took up the rest of the 4 months.
I'm now starting to see how it is that in such huuuuge companies, stuff always takes longer than you expect. It also makes me less grumpy at our mortgage guy, who delayed our mortgage by 10 days. 10 days is peanuts, I now know, it could easily have been 4 months!
Another thing I'm starting to learn about: office bureaucracy. Today was a case in point, one that drove me almost mad. Now I'm not going to give you any names or specifics, but it's handy to know that the company I intern for is a publisher of educational books, and that they have a lot of their materials online.
Now some time in September, my supervisor got an email from a teacher saying that there were mistakes in one of the answer sheets in the online database, and that she was annoyed by this. She mentioned one specific case, and then said something about 'grammar assignments in the upper levels' also containing mistakes. I removed the mistake from the mentioned exercise and my supervisor emailed back asking the teacher whether she could be a bit more specific about where the other mistakes were. The teacher replied grumpily that she was not planning on telling us.
So about a month after the first email, my supervisor asked me if I could check all (that's right, all) answers for the higher level questions, to see if there were any mistakes. I did this, and emailed her with the mistakes. Then about 2 weeks later she emailed me asking whether I could correct these mistakes. I had thought some specialised author was going to do this, but it turned out I could just do it myself. So I did.
However, there was one question where there was no answer at all, it was simply missing from the answer sheet. I marked this question and send everything back to her, saying that I could not correct this question as I did not know the original author's intentions. She got back to me this morning, saying that the author in question is no longer working for the company (the questions were made in 2007), so I should just do the best I could. So I did, and finally, this afternoon, I was able to email the completely corrected files to IT to be uploaded. A full 3 months after the initial email from the teacher.
I got an immediate reply from our regular IT editor that I should contact another editor, as this was not her area of work. Okay, I thought, just one more email and then I'm done. I resend the email to the second editor, crossed my fingers, and got an immediate reply. Success! I thought. But no, it was an out-of-office reply, stating that the editor would be on holiday until the 2nd of January...
Taking into account the multitude of email this person is going to have after an month's absence, I should be happy if the files are uploaded before my internship finishes. That will be a full 4 months after the teacher initially send her email. All the work I've done on the project could be condensed to about 6 hours. So all the rest of it, the emailing, the waiting, the misunderstandings, the miss-sending, all of that took up the rest of the 4 months.
I'm now starting to see how it is that in such huuuuge companies, stuff always takes longer than you expect. It also makes me less grumpy at our mortgage guy, who delayed our mortgage by 10 days. 10 days is peanuts, I now know, it could easily have been 4 months!
Wednesday 5 December 2012
Facing the difficulties
Today, the 5th of December, is usually a day of joy in The Netherlands. It's Sinterklaas, meaning presents, poems, sweets, chocolate, and family time. As there are no small children 'believing' in Sinterklaas in my family anymore we celebrated it last Friday, but many of my internship colleagues are leaving early, and there was a Sinterklaas walking around the building handing out pepernoten and sweets just an hour ago.
But today, its more a day of misery. Bad things seem to be happening all around me; people getting fired, plans going awry, things they've worked towards for months suddenly being cancelled or changed... I won't go into specifics, as these are not my personal things, but somehow, they all come at the same time.
I've had some bad stuff myself; yesterday I agreed with my supervisor that I am going to completely rewrite my MA dissertation, which will take a lot of work, as I am basically starting all over again from scratch. This is something I decided on my own, and I'm happy with that decision, so it's not completely a bad thing, but still, it threw me for a while. And then today, the guy at the bank told us that we won't be getting our mortgage at the time we thought we would, so we wont be able to sign our contract and get the key on the date we'd planned, so now we've had to move everything around, from the signing day to the day the contractor is going to inspect to the day we actually start working.
This was more than annoying, this was actually enough to make me quite angry, as the bank guy told us the stuff would be done/available by a certain date, and now he was telling us that they were very busy, and had to do overtime, and were understaffed, and boo-hoo, and he couldn't make it. They should have seen this coming weeks ago, as the mortgage laws are going to change by 1 January 2013, and lots of people are wanting to get in on the old system while they still can. And moreover, him working overtime is none of my problem, we're paying him to do this work, so he should be doing it (in time!).
But in neither cases I really got angry. I got annoyed, but not in the shouty "I won't talk to you because you're ruining all my plans but I will shout at you until you give me what I want" way that some people have. I get annoyed for about 10 seconds, and then I switch into practical "okay, this is not the way we'd planned it or wanted it, but this is the situation we have, so how can we make it work anyway?" Pragmatism. I never knew I was pragmatic until faced with these kinds of things, and I'm happy I am, because being angry and/or annoyed and/or shouting your head off at the person who needs to help you doesn't get you anywhere.
But that doesn't take away from the fact that some people are having a really bad day today, and that there's a wall (a mountain, more like) of stuff coming up for me to do, all of it over the holidays, meaning no rest for the interning, dissertation-writing DIY-ers. I hope I can retain the positive view on things that I have now, which is mostly based on "I/we'll figure it out in the end". And you always do.
But today, its more a day of misery. Bad things seem to be happening all around me; people getting fired, plans going awry, things they've worked towards for months suddenly being cancelled or changed... I won't go into specifics, as these are not my personal things, but somehow, they all come at the same time.
I've had some bad stuff myself; yesterday I agreed with my supervisor that I am going to completely rewrite my MA dissertation, which will take a lot of work, as I am basically starting all over again from scratch. This is something I decided on my own, and I'm happy with that decision, so it's not completely a bad thing, but still, it threw me for a while. And then today, the guy at the bank told us that we won't be getting our mortgage at the time we thought we would, so we wont be able to sign our contract and get the key on the date we'd planned, so now we've had to move everything around, from the signing day to the day the contractor is going to inspect to the day we actually start working.
This was more than annoying, this was actually enough to make me quite angry, as the bank guy told us the stuff would be done/available by a certain date, and now he was telling us that they were very busy, and had to do overtime, and were understaffed, and boo-hoo, and he couldn't make it. They should have seen this coming weeks ago, as the mortgage laws are going to change by 1 January 2013, and lots of people are wanting to get in on the old system while they still can. And moreover, him working overtime is none of my problem, we're paying him to do this work, so he should be doing it (in time!).
But in neither cases I really got angry. I got annoyed, but not in the shouty "I won't talk to you because you're ruining all my plans but I will shout at you until you give me what I want" way that some people have. I get annoyed for about 10 seconds, and then I switch into practical "okay, this is not the way we'd planned it or wanted it, but this is the situation we have, so how can we make it work anyway?" Pragmatism. I never knew I was pragmatic until faced with these kinds of things, and I'm happy I am, because being angry and/or annoyed and/or shouting your head off at the person who needs to help you doesn't get you anywhere.
But that doesn't take away from the fact that some people are having a really bad day today, and that there's a wall (a mountain, more like) of stuff coming up for me to do, all of it over the holidays, meaning no rest for the interning, dissertation-writing DIY-ers. I hope I can retain the positive view on things that I have now, which is mostly based on "I/we'll figure it out in the end". And you always do.
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