..... Naturally, I was excited at first, but then I realized that most movies based on books suck. So I'm not sure if I should be happy or disappointed when it comes out on theaters.
I disagree. That's a totally subjective point of view on the matter. I can list a whole bunch of movies that are based on books that are great, some of which are personal favorites. About Fault in our Stars, I'm looking forward to the movie a lot. It looks great based on the trailer, and John Green is incredibly satisfied with who's making it and the casting choices. I'd rather hold my final judgement until I actually do watch the movie.
I think the majority of times when you rate the film based off the book it won't be as good or will be a total failure because it won't include everything and won't be how each individual pictured it. Of course, they can still be enjoyable :3 but I have not read Fault in our stars or plan on seeing the movie. The book seemed to me just another generic sad love story but apparently the writing is fabulous so I don't know and I doubt I'll ever read it.
I think the only book to movie adaptation I don't like is The Hobbit trilogy (and I don't find them good movies in general, adaption or not).
There's a reason for this. Namely a book being able to take all the time/pages it needs to effectively tell its story, while a movie is limited to roughly two hours or whatever studios think the audience will be willing to sit through. This means some characters can't be explored effectively and the plot can become overly streamlined. Adapting a book rather than translating it is often the better option, but when you do this purists cry foul for not being the exact story they read in the book. Example: Scott Pilgrim. I'm reading the comic now (btw rly wish I didn't watch the movie first) and it's simply not something that could be made into a film without cutting a lot out. There's just too much stuff going on. So what they did was adapt it, modify it to fit the media they were working with, which includes altering the story and some characters, and outright remove things from the story. Of course not everyone likes the film, which is totally understandable given how different it is, but in my opinion it's the perfect example of book to film adaptions and why adapting it rather than translating it is more viable.
You guys have a point, and I also heard of John Green having high hopes about it too. So maybe the movie will not be bad as I thought....
Well I can't find the actual tumblr post that he made, but John Green himself said that most of (if not all) of the lines used in the movie are verbatim from TFIOS. Now I don't know about you, but I think that is something that is a huge factor towards being a good movie. Not to mention it's shot in the same areas written in the book. John went through months of careful casting until he finally stopped on Shailene and Ansel. I don't know what you look for when deciding if a book-based movie is good, but I judge it by accuracy and similarity to the book.
Is it bad that I don't consider that great news? imo John Green's dialogue can sound very unnatural. It's alright on paper but when you hear it outloud it doesn't really work. I think that would be a major difficulty in adapting his books. I suppose it depends on the actors though. If anyone wants to check out a book to movie adaptation that shows a characater's internal development quite well, check out the 2005 Pride & Prejudice. Some other things from the book are sidelined but I really thought Joe Wright's style added another layer to the story.
