The Inevitable Movie Post

Book!
I'm only going to do the one because I'm legitimately that excited about it.

1. Isla and the Happily Ever After by Stephanie Perkins
IT'S HERE! IT'S FINALLY HERE! You need it in your life! NEED it. You have no idea. I might need to go reread it now, or maybe the whole trilogy...


This is the time for YA books. Not only that, this is also the time for YA movie adaptations. It seems like every time a YA book gets a decent following some studio or another is grabbing the rights. It seems like a good bet, I mean these are films with built in fan bases. What could go wrong?

Oh, so much.

If you're adapting existing text with existing fans into a movie that you've put so much money into promoting how do you mess it up? Is it bad casting? Bad screenwriting? Really bad CGI? We all seem willing to forgive the writers of the books for a multitude of sins, why not the screenwriters? Is it because the characters aren't their creations? It's not their world to play with? Whatever the reason we are all over bad movies.

But what makes an adaptation good? I know it's pretty subjective but there's usually some form of semi-consensus about the quality of the movie. People like it and stand up for it for the sake of their favorite book but they know it's not really that good.

I'm going to talk about and sort of rate some of the more recent attempts to find the next big YA adaptation.

The Fault in Our Stars
For a story like this one casting was essential. There are no big action sequences or wild plot twists to drive this movie. The weight of the entire story rests on the shoulders of whoever is playing Hazel and Augustus. They drive the story. Just them. I was skeptical when the casting was announced but they really won me over. They were exactly what the adaptation needed to be successful.


The Hunger Games (both)
These have a lot more going on in them. This is a blessing and a curse. There's so much plot that it's easier to hide any casting missteps (I'm still not sold on Kravitz as Cinna). The downside to this is that there's more material to cut. There are plenty of things that I really wish had been kept, a lot of world building and examples of just how terrible the Capitol is but I see why they cut what they did. Aside from Kravitz I think the casting is pretty solid. Lawrence owned the first movie and Sutherland is delightfully sinister as Snow. The movies are definitely flawed but they're still some of the best adaptations to pop up.

Vampire Academy
I can almost feel the eyerolls. If you saw the trailer for this you know how ridiculous it looked. It's true. It is definitely ridiculous in parts but, funny story, so are the books. The books cover all sorts of ground without taking themselves too seriously and the movie manged to do that. Sure, there are a lot of high school politics but the characters are 17 and in school, there should be. I was surprised when I saw it how awesome of a choice Zoey Deutch was for Rose. She was perfect. The movie didn't do well as a whole but it's a great adaptation. Unfortunately the plot of the series really starts in the next couple.

Divergent
I love these books and the movie is decent. It's more than decent and the cast surprised me, again. But I had a major problem with how the end was handled and how much they softened Tris' character. If it weren't for that I would have loved this one much more (but seriously, she doesn't hesitate)! They took a major plot point for the series and blunted it to make it more palatable for audiences and I think that was a mistake.

City of Bones
Okay...so...this one wasn't the best and that really surprised me. The Mortal Instruments fanbase is pretty rabid (I mean that in a good way, I swear). They were all over this movie. All over it and they're not small in number. No one in the cast was what I imagined but they were all the same sort of off so they worked as a whole. But they changed too much in the story to make it outside audience friendly and I think that made them lose people that should have stuck with them. Also, the humor in the series is all in Clare's fast-paced snarky dialogue and they tossed in too much slapstick to make up for the lack of snark.


Beautiful CreaturesThe tricky thing about this movie seemed to be translating a book where there's a male protagonist into a movie that would appeal to it's primarily female fanbase. I don't know why this is tricky. Ethan is a great protagonist. He's, hands down, my favorite character in the series. But the movie somehow managed to become more about Lena, which would be okay, but I never felt like it was quite as much her story as it was Ethan's and then completely changing the end, pretty much doomed the last two books in the series. They managed to take this great story with this amazing setting and mangle it. And they had such a great cast! Jeremy Irons! Emma Thompson! How do you mess that up?


I used to be one of those hardcore "BUT HE DOES'T HAVE GREEN EYES!' 'THAT'S NOT WHO SAYS THAT' people. Admittedly, the movie version of Prisoner of Azkaban ruined that for me. After that, nothing felt quite so bad (admittedly, I have a soft spot for Marauders and they were just gone). Now, I hope that they cast well and do the spirit of the book justice and try not to hope for too much.

And I think that's where adaptations sink and swim. Fault in Our Stars is such a good adaptation because the filmmakers knew who their audience was. They kept in the lines and the jokes that people wanted (I honestly think that helped Twilight too). They made the movie for fans of the book and the fans of the book (while already numerous) responded to that. They didn't try to make something that clearly already had wide appeal different to give it wider appeal (that rarely seems to work). They trusted their audience to take care of the project and the audience did.

So, here's to hoping that the filmmakers of If I Stay (friday!) and Maze Runner (September 19th) chose to trust the audience to take care of the film (I've already heard mixed things about The Giver).

-Amy

Consequence Books

And the three books of the last two weeks that I am excited we got into the children's section:

1. Allegiant by Veronica Roth
I have been annoying everyone with how excited I am about this book. I made keening noises at the boxes before we were allowed to open them. This book. I just...I am still filled with so many feelings. It was exactly what I wanted....I'll stop now.

2. The Mischievians by William Joyce
My love for William Joyce is a very real thing. When his Guardians series was turned into a movie I was easily the most excited person in the theatre. I was also supposed to be the Flying Book Girl from his The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore for Halloween.

3. Battle Bunny by Jon Scieszka and Mac Barnett
Alex gets the overly sweet Birthday Bunny and edits it into the incredibly awesome Battle Bunny! Beyond clever.


Consequence books are something that have come up in my life a lot recently. Partially due to my excitement over the last book in Veronica Roth's Divergent trilogy (see above) and partially because the revelation of how much I love them is a fairly new one to me.

A consequence book is a book that deals predominantly (or just heavily) with the...well, consequences of what happened in a previous book. Often they're reflective, like a character trying to deal with something that happened. Other times the action is directly the result of what happened in the previous book.

Generally, I'm, a big fan of consequences. I mean, maybe not in my own life, but in literature I'm a big fan. So, it drives me crazy when characters do something big and nothing happens. There should always be some form of backlash. If, for some reason, there's not it needs to addressed and I expect a really good reason.

I mentioned the Divergent trilogy because Insurgent (book two) is a consequence book. As I talked to people about the series (in my excitement about Allegiant's release) I came across more people unsure of the second. First I was baffled because I loved it so much and then I was just curious about what was so different about it that people who loved the first didn't like it.

Which was when I realized that Insurgent is so much about Tris dealing with what happened to her in Divergent. It has new plot in it, yes, but it's more about the backlash of the first book's violence. I though it was exactly what it needed to be.

And that was why I loved it. Roth does such a wonderful job of making her characters fully human and it's the consequence books that show how human characters are. I want to see them deal with what happened to them. When we see that they seem more human, we get a more fully realized picture of who they are.

(For the record, Veronica Roth does a really brilliant job of making her characters human outside of Insurgent as well.)

Another one that comes to mind is Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's Beautiful Chaos (book three). I get the strangest looks when I tell people that it's my favorite. But (and I feel we're beyond spoilers now since there's a movie and the first book came out in 2009) when Lena brought Ethan back from the dead in the first book we only got minimal consequences. We saw how that impacted her, not how it impacted Ethan. Mostly because he didn't know what happened to him, but it never set well with me.

Then Beautiful Chaos came out and that's most of what the book is about. It's finding out that he lost part of soul. That he's half of what he should be. That the world is out of balance. I loved it. I loved how it was handled. It was what I wanted all along.

Just like in my last post how I wanted the loss, I want the consequences. In life great actions often have dire consequences. If a story is going to be well crafted big actions should have big backlash. And seeing how characters deal with their own actions and what happens to them makes them human.

I love books with fast paced action and awesome banter but it's the books that deal with the consequences that stick with me the most.

-Amy