On the Big Screen

We've been busy busy busy over here lately, what with finishing up all the things necessary to get Quality Control out and available (by the end of the week, barring catastrophe) on the Cherie front and "101 Things That Can Go Pear-Shaped" on the personal front.

Frankly, Cherie is a Godsend. I would far rather wrestle her words than my kids.

Part of the "fun" this past weekend was my middle child getting invited to a sleepover and to the movie theater to go see the LEGO Movie with his best friend. This is problematic because DinoBoy was the only one invited, but since there's only 20 months between them, VelcroBoy looks on DinoBoy's best friend as *his* best friend, too, so I had a devastated child... which means, you guessed it! I had to take VelcroBoy to see the LEGO Movie. I also took Girl-child, who wasn't pleased with me at all, because if I have to suffer...

But wait! It gets better!

The movie (or the projector, or *something*) wasn't working! So we were told (there were maybe a dozen people in the theater) to go to one of the other movies with the same showtime -- which, since everybody was there with small kids, pretty much meant Mr. Peabody and Sherman -- and that we would get passes to use for any movie, any time. They were able to get the LEGO Movie up an running in time for the next showtime, so the three of us actually ended up watching two movies for the price of one, except it left me feeling exhausted. Luckily, as it turns out, I enjoyed both movies.

I'm really not a movie person. I mean, don't get me wrong. I enjoy watching stuff (especially now that I'm becoming a crocheter; I blame my mom!) but...I don't know. I can commit to hours and hours of reading a single book (sometimes over and over and over again... *ahem*) but the idea of sitting still and WATCHING a screen for 2 hours? Just doesn't do it for me, generally. While I would love to see some of my favorite books brought to the big screen that way, I know that some things would have to be sacrificed for that to happen, and usually the stuff that gets cut is the stuff I most cherish about books -- that chance to see inside a character's head. There's an intimacy to reading, maybe because of the way so much internal stuff is shared, while the external is left to the reader's imagination. That is reversed with a medium like film (or the digital equivalent), where the focus is on the external and you have to sort of extrapolate the internal.

That said... what are your favorite book-to-screen adaptations? Least favorite? Book/series you'd most like to see in that medium?

My answers: Honestly, pretty much anything BBC touches -- I love the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice, Jeeves and Wooster, anything they do with Agatha Christie... But I also really love some of the 90s updates of classics -- 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless. My least favorite, probably, is the Harry Potter series -- love the books, love the movies, but I have to work really hard to mentally separate the two and try to look at them as totally different things. As for books I'd most love to see? I don't really know the answer to that yet. I'll think about it.