The Book vs. The Movie

Hi, my name is Lauren, and I like to read.

I read a lot of books. John can attest to that. I like to read books I've read before. There's something comforting about knowing what will happen, how you will feel. It's like watching your favorite movie - you know everything already, but you watch it because it reminds you of a time in your life, or a person you know, or a feeling you get.

My love of reading only becomes problematic when I see movies based on books. I can really only think of one movie from a book that didn't disappoint me, While Oleander. They left out some of the plot points, but they retained the feeling and tone of the book without doing a frame-by-frame recapture, if that makes sense.

Which brings me to two movies coming out this year: The Lovely Bones and The Time Traveler's Wife. Let's start with The Lovely Bones:

The Lovely Bones is the story of Susie Salmon a girl murdered at the age of 14 in the 1970s. I'm not spoiling this for you, you learn this in the first line of the book, on the book jacket, in the trailer, etc. Susie narrates the book from heaven. She watches her family as they struggle to come to terms with her death, trying to find her killer, and how to live without her.

The Lovely Bones is a beautiful book. Alice Sebold has a way with metaphors that can take your breath away. I cried at the end of this book. It's very sad, but very sweet.

The other day I saw the trailer for The Lovely Bones, directed by Peter Jackson. Take a look. Pretty good right? It looks very true to the book, from the actors to the images of heaven, to the drama involved in finding Susie's killer. I'm excited to see this one.

Now, The Time Traveler's Wife.

The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Nifenegger, is about a man named Henry who spontaneously travels through time. This is how he meets his future wife, Clare. He meets her when she is 6 years old and he's in his 30s. When they meet, he's from the future. They don't meet in real time until Clare is in college. The book is about their meetings with each other, his travel, how his travel affects their lives, how they must cope with a life from which he is absent from her in real-time, but visiting her in the past.

It's an intriguing book. The time travel is the premise, but it's used for dramatic purposes. This isn't a sci-fi novel, it's a dramatic story.

So what did they do? Turned it into a fucking rom-com, the 2009 version of The Lake House.




Does this look like a movie you'd really want to see? Does this look like anything other than a Sandra Bullock or Drew Barrymore movie?

What makes me even more sick is the fact they changed the ending.

So stupid. They took a great book and made it terrible.

I mean, just look at the photos up there! Which one would you rather see? Ridiculous.