October 5th Blog

Today was yet another interesting and eventful day of film and literature. We started our class off with a quote from A.O. Scott, the head of the New York Times film department. In other words, he is an experienced and qualified movie critic. The quote that we discussed was, "Bad literary adaptations are all alike, but every successful literary adaptation succeeds in its own way. The bad ones...are undone by humility, by anxious obeisance to the cultural prestige of literature. The good ones succeed through hubris, through the arrogant assumption that a great novel is not a sacred artifact but rather a lump of interesting material to be shaped according to the filmmaker's will."We pointed out that Scott uses advanced vocabulary like hubris and obeisance which shows his credibility as a film expert. In my own words I noted that the quote means to say filmmakers are successful when they are over confident and adapt the literary piece in their own way. Then as a class we analyzed his quote and said that good adaptations alter the source material, whereas bad adaptations follow the original writing word for word and typically leave plot gaps.

The next topic of discussion was movies that could apply to Scott's quote. Kayla started us off with Forrest Gump and mentioned that the film was very inaccurate compared to the book. Even if she is right, it's very difficult to hate on that movie. Ben followed up with Lord of the Rings, specifically the Fellowship of the Ring. He said that the book was very mundane at times and the film adaptations from Peter Jackson really brought the books to life. After Ben finished digressing about the movie trilogy Hartman stepped in and explained how he hates the Percy Jackson films for their inaccuracy as well. When the class stopped venting about hated movie adaptations, we moved on to an important upcoming assignment. 

The Intertextuality Essay is the newest endeavor of our class. This essay should be about the differences between the summer reading book that you read and the film adaptation of it. It has to be in proper MLA format [look it up if you forgot how] and also 1,000 to 1.200 words long. The essay is due three weeks from now on October 26th at midnight. After getting introduced to this assignment, we examined essays from last year. The first one, Sample A, was about the movie and book Room which was Academy Award nominated last year. The thesis stated that the film adaptation characterized "Ma" as helpless and juvenile but the version of her in the book by Emma Donoghue is independent. The next essay, Sample B, was about The Godfather film by Francis Ford Coppola and the book written by Mario Puzo. The thesis of this sample said that the movie version left out several family connections/relationships that the book explored.