This week Booking Through Thursday asks the following questions:
And, the reverse–which actors have been particularly badly cast in roles of characters you first met in the pages of a book? Do you blame the actors or the writers and other film-people for the failure? Who would you have cast instead?
As I wrote last week, I’m not a big fan of many of the recent book to big screen conversions. Most of the time I blame the writers or directors for the abysmal adaptations, but I think that the actors need to take some of the blame for willingly accepting bad scripts or lousy character portrayals.
I’ve written previously at length about my low opinion of what Peter Jackson did to Tolkien’s stories. Because of my huge disappointment at the treatment of the Lord of the Rings books, I just can’t bring myself to watch his adaptation of The Hobbit. It is my favourite book and I don’t want that spoiled for me in any way. I don’t think the LOTR movies are bad in themselves, but they don’t faithfully portray the story that Tolkien wrote. Some of the main characters are missing and some that are included have a very different nature than the one portrayed by Tolkien. Eomer is one character in particular that had a very different portrayal, but this is more down to the writing than the actor.
One other major disappointment of recent years is the first Percy Jackson movie. The actor is too old for the character for one thing and the ending is so wrong that I’m surprised there is a second movie coming out soon. I’m glad that I read all the books first before even seeing the first movie. I wasn’t going to bother with the second movie, but I’m curious to see how they can pull it off after the fiasco of the first one.
I realise that for some people these sort of things are minor details, but for me, I can’t stand the integrity of the original story being lost for the sake of visual entertainment. Don’t even get me started on the distraction of 3D!
Two weeks from everywhere 