The Rabbit Room

Holy cow, the make-up was sooo bad. Painful to look at.

I heard they are going to go back and make movies out of all of the separate story lines… Just kidding.

Well, ’nuff said.

I figured this was either going to be unbelievably good or a complete train wreck. Looks like it’s a train wreck.

Also, it is not physically possible for Halle Berry to be in a good film. She may one day go back in time, step onto the set of Citizen Kane, and destroy cinema as we know it for all eternity.

I’m baffled by this, too. The scary thing is that it will probably get Oscar nods pushing actual deserving films aside.

There is no chance of this movie showing up in Oscar nominations (except for possibly some technical accomplishments).

If you’re not right, @Pete, the effects will resonate throughout the years to come…

Dash it all, it wasn’t worth it mate! 3 whole hours!

Please do review Skyfall when you get a chance.

Pastor McKenzie wanted to know if there’s a “worst makeup” award. Maybe the Golden Raspberry Awards should add that as a category just in honor of this movie.

Question: Have you read the book that this is based off of? I would be curious to know your thoughts on how the novel is laid out.

I have not read the book. I spoke with a good friend who has read the book, but not seen the movie. He said that the transitions in the book were inscrutable as well.

I have a theory about books and movies. I believe a book can inspire a movie, the same way that a book like “The Yearling” can inspire a record like “Light for the Lost Boy.” Inspiration, though, is not translation. It isn’t even paraphrase. Film and Novel are such radically different media that they should not be compared. “I liked the book more than the movie” is a lot like saying “I liked water skiing today more than eating popcorn yesterday.” OK, that may be true, but the comparison doesn’t mean much.

All that to say I would rather not know anything about a novel when I see the movie it inspired. When I have both read the novel and seen the movie, I do my best to separate them in my head. I usually fail and I end up comparing the two.

But can’t we agree that movies of certain beloved works like Lewis’s Narnia (for example) so completely failed to preserve the spirit of the books that it’s totally fair to say, “Stick with the books dude”?

I think it takes a lot for a movie adaptation of a truly great novel that had few flaws to begin with to be, itself, truly great. Some of the best adaptations are ones where on reflection I realize that the book needed some tweaks anyway. For example, a few of Jane Austen’s novels are a bit dusty and long-winded, but there was a glut of fantastic movies in the 90s (Emma, Sense and Sensibility, many more) that were just as good as the books if not better in their own way.

It also helps a lot if the author is involved in the adaptation. For example, look at _The Princess Bride_, a book and a movie that were very different, yet each succeeded brilliantly in its own right. That’s really rare.