Jumping on the bandwagon
typed for your pleasure on 13 April 2007, at 1.14 amSdtrk: ‘Ma recontre’ by Benjamin Biolay
I have to admit; the only Vonnegut that I’ve ever read would be Harrison Bergeron (for school) and Slaughterhouse-five (still a fantastic book), but I can definitely admire a bloke who not only came up with the concept of Ice-nine, but apparently had his den wallpapered with rejection notices from various publishers throughout the years.
RIP Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Random similar posts, for more timewasting:
So long, Bob on August 22nd, 2005
18 May 1980 on May 18th, 2006
April 15th, 2007 at 9.55 am
See, and here I figured he’d be nabbed by the Visitors for sure.
Ah, no matter. I’ll admit to the same limited exposure as yourself. I’ll add to that the fact that I watched the far less impressive movie version of Slaughterhouse as well. The humor of the black humor failed to make a meaningful appearance in the screen treatment. So much of it was bound up in the prose which was not easily transferred to a visual medium.
April 15th, 2007 at 5.51 pm
The film version of ‘Slaughterhouse-five’ has been on my list of must-see movies for years — I saw like about two minutes of it on late night telly years and years ago, years before I’d read the book, and I was intrigued. Billy Pilgrim and his inability to stay fixed in one time period was pretty impressive, and kinda scary if you really think about it. At the very least, fucking inconvenient…
And yeah, sometimes books just don’t translate well to the silver screen. Hollywood is getting slightly better with it, but what, ‘Slaughterhouse-five’ came out in the Seventies? Most of that decade was a smoking wasteland, especially for entertainment, but I can’t honestly say they’d do a better job adapting it nowadays.
April 15th, 2007 at 11.00 pm
The best movie adaptations are the ones where they conscientiously state that the movie and the book are two different tellings of the same story.
If the material is true to the spirit of the source material, but successfully turns it into good cinema, then its done its job.
If it tries to hew too closely to the original, and becomes a dry exercise or hopelessly confusing in the process (like Dune), it fails.
Likewise if it completely disregards the source material in spirit as well as plot and proceeds to piss all over it (like the disastrous Asimov adaptation of “I, Robot”–no Asimov robot ever killed a human!) then it also fails.
April 17th, 2007 at 4.35 pm
Personally, I would’ve loved to see the Jodorowsky-directed version of Dune, featuring Salvador Dali as the Emperor. I would’ve had kittens. Kittens! But I’m fairly certain that would’ve been even more confusing than Lynch’s version…
I completely agree with you: if the director takes the book and makes their vision/version, then it’s not so bad. Rather like when Monti, Stephen King fan extraordinaire, informed me that Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The shining’ only bears a passing resemblance to the book it was based on. On the other side of the coin, you have horrid brain-searing adaptations, such as ‘I, robot’, or ‘League of extraordinary gentlemen’, which I refuse to see, even under pain of death.
One day, I swear I’m going to write that post detailing what remakes I think are good or bad…
April 17th, 2007 at 4.38 pm
Getting back to Mr Vonnegut, I saw the best cod-obituary on .mp3 blog 20 Jazz Funk Greats:
‘If his recent passing away saddened you, just follow th example of the Trafalmadorians, remember that perhaps “he is in a bad condition in this particular moment, but that he is just fine in plenty of other moments”.
So it goes.’