hey. i'm using a very exciting new widget to post, so let's see how it works.
i went to see the da vinci code today. if you've spoken to me within the last few weeks, i'm sure i've expounded on the lackluster nature of the book. surprisingly, i didn't think that it was that bad. one of the biggest advantages the movie has over the novel is that you don't have to read dan brown's awful writing to get through the story. you go through the same plot elements, especially in the beginning, with much less over-dramatization. you don't have the constant "...and then, he saw something in front of him that would change everything... forever!" followed by a totally unrelated chapter. it's the band-aid equivalent to reading.
another thing that makes the movie more palatable than the book is the fact that the book was written to feel like a movie. there's no way you can go through the pages of brown's novel and not think that somewhere in the recesses of his mind lay a movie script. the book is flashy, and has plenty of twists and turns, but lacks depth and substance, which is pretty much how i would describe your average hollywood fluff piece. okay, so the first problem with this new blogging widget is that as you keep writing the widget doesn't stay the same size, but keeps getting longer and longer, until the widget runs right off the screen. at the moment i'm about to do exactly that, and there's nothing quite as exciting as typing blindly. also, for someone as long-winded as myself, i feel unbelievably boxed in. gorammit.
okay, i've copy and pasted into the normal posting box... disappointing.
as strange as it sounds, the movie turns south when they start meddling with brown's plot. now, i'm a big a critic of brown's as the next guy, but man, oh, man. what i think it ended up being is that the screenwriter, incorporating the two most significant qualities of hollywoodization--laziness and desiring flashiness--went overboard. it's kind of like the physics experiment where you throw a ball out of a car when it's going 60 mph, and you throw the ball at 20 mph (or whatever) and the ball ends up going 80 mph. they took a book, which was already plenty hollywood (which i guess i'm using as an arbitrary adjective to describe blockbusters and the like) and tried to make it more hollywood. they ended cutting out parts that didn't need cutting out, and adding stuff that just made the whole damn thing stupid. however deficient brown may be as a prose writer, he's not a bad plot maker, a fact laid bare by the total wrenching of the plot at the end, so kudos to him for that.
anyway, time to walk the dogs. there are other observations to be made, but we'll leave that for another time.
à la prochaine
i went to see the da vinci code today. if you've spoken to me within the last few weeks, i'm sure i've expounded on the lackluster nature of the book. surprisingly, i didn't think that it was that bad. one of the biggest advantages the movie has over the novel is that you don't have to read dan brown's awful writing to get through the story. you go through the same plot elements, especially in the beginning, with much less over-dramatization. you don't have the constant "...and then, he saw something in front of him that would change everything... forever!" followed by a totally unrelated chapter. it's the band-aid equivalent to reading.
another thing that makes the movie more palatable than the book is the fact that the book was written to feel like a movie. there's no way you can go through the pages of brown's novel and not think that somewhere in the recesses of his mind lay a movie script. the book is flashy, and has plenty of twists and turns, but lacks depth and substance, which is pretty much how i would describe your average hollywood fluff piece. okay, so the first problem with this new blogging widget is that as you keep writing the widget doesn't stay the same size, but keeps getting longer and longer, until the widget runs right off the screen. at the moment i'm about to do exactly that, and there's nothing quite as exciting as typing blindly. also, for someone as long-winded as myself, i feel unbelievably boxed in. gorammit.
okay, i've copy and pasted into the normal posting box... disappointing.
as strange as it sounds, the movie turns south when they start meddling with brown's plot. now, i'm a big a critic of brown's as the next guy, but man, oh, man. what i think it ended up being is that the screenwriter, incorporating the two most significant qualities of hollywoodization--laziness and desiring flashiness--went overboard. it's kind of like the physics experiment where you throw a ball out of a car when it's going 60 mph, and you throw the ball at 20 mph (or whatever) and the ball ends up going 80 mph. they took a book, which was already plenty hollywood (which i guess i'm using as an arbitrary adjective to describe blockbusters and the like) and tried to make it more hollywood. they ended cutting out parts that didn't need cutting out, and adding stuff that just made the whole damn thing stupid. however deficient brown may be as a prose writer, he's not a bad plot maker, a fact laid bare by the total wrenching of the plot at the end, so kudos to him for that.
anyway, time to walk the dogs. there are other observations to be made, but we'll leave that for another time.
à la prochaine
posted by Charlie Beckerman at 16:53
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