For the love of God and all that is holy, stop making the books that I love into movies!!!

Worst. Film. Adaptation. Ever.

Dear Mr. Peter Jackson,

I would just like to start off by saying that I love your adaptations of the Lord of the Rings, and I am eagerly awaiting The Hobbit. With that being said, I’d like to ask you a question and then a favor. The question: Why oh why does Hollywood destroy everything that I love? It keeps building up my hopes of something equal to your adaptations and only ends up breaking my heart. Here’s a rough list of what has caused me intense emotional/literary scarring in the past few years:

*All of the Chronicles of Narnia movies

*The Golden Compass

*Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

*The Last Airbender

*The Legend of the Seeker

These movies started off with broad fan bases, excellent plots and casts of characters, and high levels of interest. They get huge budgets and stellar actors. They then flush it all down the toilet by trying to please a very broad, general American audience by changing things, which doesn’t actually help the non-fans understand the plot any better and only pisses off the real fans. All of this ends up with no one liking the film and ensuring that the rest of the trilogy remains in book form.

Now for the favor. I can think of three ways that you could potentially help this disease of Hollywood.

1.) Direct everything of any literature value or importance because you’re amazing and true to the source.

2.) Convince the big wigs of the industry to let Joss Whedon have total creative freedom and have him help you with all of the good adaptations.

3.) Teach other directors with potential how to research and create a script that doesn’t piss off the existing fan base.

Do you think that you could have any influence on the shocking state of nerd culture in Hollywood? Or at least, book/literature nerd culture? The only adaptations that don’t leave me crying and seeking professional help seem to be the graphic novel films, but I suppose that’s because the idiots who write screenplays already essentially have a storyboard in front of them. Thank you very much Mr. Jackson.

Love,

A lit nerd

What I miss most about college

I’ve recently been discussing books with my officemate, and we had a discussion about the film adaptations of the Chronicles of Narnia. She’d only seen the movies, so I began breaking down the books and why they’re better. She let me rant for awhile, but it was obvious that she couldn’t keep up and that she wasn’t really interested. And then I realized, what I miss most about college is talking to educated and engaged minds about the books that I’m passionate about. I miss the structured setting where people have a common group of books to base discussion off of and then people bring further insight and reading material into the conversation as necessary. It’s so difficult to talk to just anyone about books because you might have nothing in common. Of you can’t fully illustrate a brilliant point because your audience hasn’t read one or more of the books that you’re comparing.

What I miss most are my peers. I miss watching “Interview with the Vampire” in Dan’s living room at one in the morning to further prepare for our Screening Fiction class the next day, stopping after every other scene to break down the motifs and compare it to the other clips that we’ve watched in class. I miss writing papers next to classmates T-minus 12 hours before it’s due and being able to engage them in conversation to help ease you through writer’s block. I miss theorizing about our professor’s lives with Rachel up on her roof on sunny spring days.

I miss being challenged to see deeper than the page. And I miss having someone adequate to challenge me.

Are there any other young adult literature enthusiasts that would like to engage in discourse about favorite books? I’m most familiar with the Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials, the Abhorsen trilogy, and The Hunger Games trilogy.  I’ve read much less scholarly YA books as well that I could discuss at length, but I haven’t done much outside research on them. I guess Harry Potter counts too, but I’ve only read them for pleasure, not for analyzation. *sigh* I guess that The Twilight Saga has to count too, but I’m warning you right now that while I admit to reading them several times for pleasure, I WILL rip them to shreds on a literary level. Of course, I’m always up for reading new books to talk about. I’ve heard that Ursela LeGuin’s “Earthsea” series is a must read for someone of my interests.

Pullman > Rowling

Did I get your attention yet? Good. Did I piss off all the Harry Potter fans? Eeeeeeeeh, not so good since there’s a LOT of you. While I absolutely LOVE Rowling and Potter, I do believe in the statement that is the title of this blog post, and I mainly made it just to get your attention. I know. I play dirty.

I did an intensive independent study on C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. At the end of the study, I wrote a paper focusing on the theme of maturity in the His Dark Materials trilogy. Then I modified this paper for my senior thesis.

The point of this post is that I love Pullman and what he did for young adult/children’s literature. And while this series is hated and misunderstood in the United States (what else is new?), I believe it’s one of the best epics in print. And for the last time, IT’S NOT ABOUT KILLING THE CHRISTIAN GOD. YEEEESH people; read it and try to understand it before you burn it. *sigh*

But, the other point of this post was to tell you that I’ve made two new pages where you can read my independent study paper and the shorter bastardized version that they made me do for my senior thesis. So go click on them in my pages to read them!!!

Yeah, you are pretty much fucked...

Oh, and the movie SUCKED. EFF you Chris Weitz. You turned something that I love and cherish and (although you made it very VERY pretty) turned it into SHIT. You should be ASHAMED of yourself and your “screenplay.”