Spoiler warning bloop bloop.
otisthefish replied to your post: I think that Jonathan Safran Foer knows that sad and beautiful are connected.
You should see Everything Is Illuminated, if you haven’t already. It only focuses on one story within the book, but I feel like it preserved that story well. And it certainly didn’t plop in a happy ending where it doesn’t belong, if I remember right.
Everything is Illuminated only focuses on one story from a book that had around thirty stories within it, and by completely ignoring the tales of Brod it made itself a very pale imitation. Then it goes ahead and makes liberal changes to the story it was covering, making it an inaccurate and pale adaptation. But that doesn’t matter, so long as it holds true to the meaning and spirit of the text, right? BUT THEN IT MAKES UP A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ENDING WITH COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MEANING.
Everything is Illuminated, the film, should not have been called ‘Everything is Illuminated’. It should have been called ‘Crazy European Road-Trip’ or something. If you’re not going to try to make an adaptation so much as just take elements of a story and make a movie out of them while making up the rest, then do you know what you call it? ‘Inspired by’. That film was inspired by the book. It wasn’t an adaptation of the book. Not even close.
That said, it wasn’t a bad movie. It was a fine film in its own right I’m sure. But it was a lazy adaptation. I’m not one of those guys that walks out of a film saying oh the book was better. I usually find myself saying the book was completely different.
Take ‘I Am Legend’ for example. The closest adaptation of that film was the 1964 film ‘The Last Man On Earth’ with Vincent Price. Meanwhile the 2007 film with Will Smith actually took the name of the book and then went on to make up a completely different story with a completely different ending and moral. So why call it I am Legend? Why not call it ‘Dusk’ or something? It frustrates me.
