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Adaptation Meloncholia

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July 14, 2018
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As an avid consumer of all things movies, books, TV, and music, I tend to keep myself fairly up-to-date on entertainment news—which of my shows are canceled or renewed or brought back from the dead; when a favorite author or artist is dropping a new book or album; which summer blockbuster hits the big screen when—so imagine my surprise when I click over to YouTube last week and I see Netflix’s new trailer for its small-screen adaptation of Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.

Not a press release announcing Netflix had optioned the movie rights, not a casting announcement or even a filming notice—the two-minute-long official trailer, complete with release date. And this was the first I was hearing about it.

Even more to my surprise, I didn’t feel excited. It wasn’t just concern about the quality of the adaptation; I felt disappointed, maybe even a little bit sad. (Maybe more than a little bit sad.)

I read To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the first in a trilogy, last summer. At the center of the book is 16-year-old Lara Jean, who’s loved exactly five boys in her life. Every time she fell out of love with one of them, she wrote them a letter, expressing her love and why she’d moved on. She sealed it, addressed it, and tucked it away for no one to find—until someone does and mistakenly sends all five out with the mail, delivering her private letters to the very people who were never supposed to read them. What follows is a sweetly romantic, wonderfully heartfelt comedy of errors that would only ever take place within the pages of fiction but is all the more magical because of it.

I liked it enough to run out and buy the sequel as soon as I finished it. It was sugar-spun YA fun, a perfect summer read, and Lara Jean—so patently human, endearingly genuine, and almost painfully earnest—was a narrator I loved spending time with.

So why wasn’t I thrilled to see her brought to life? As much as I loved reading about Lara Jean and her romantic mishaps, I wasn’t anywhere near as attached to her story as I was to, say, Harry Potter or the Hunger Games, and I was over the moon about the announcements of those adaptations.

But a book doesn’t have to be a favorite for us to feel connected to it, and unlike the Hunger Games and Harry Potter, no one in my immediate social circle had read To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. I experienced it entirely alone, and Lara Jean’s journey—a very personal one—became personal to me as I read it.

Seeing that trailer on YouTube, a promo for the movie’s wide release, robbed me a little of that feeling.

Reading is, after all, an individual activity, even when we talk about it with our friends and family. What we imagine when we read—the way we imagine it, the way we react to it—all belongs solely to us, in that moment and after we close the book. Sometimes that experience runs so deep, so true, that we want it to stay that way—between us and the page—forever.

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Movie Novelizations: A Rogue Obsession

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May 4, 2018
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A few weeks back, Jess covered the page-to-screen adaptations that don’t get enough credit—the ones that measure up to the source material and the ones that exceed it—but there’s another kind of adaptation that doesn’t receive much fanfare: movie novelizations.

I myself had never even read one until this winter, when I picked up my copy of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story by Alexander Freed, in honor of the movie’s one-year anniversary.

I’ve been a lifelong Star Wars fan, raised by parents who saw A New Hope in theaters half a dozen times, but I’d never dived into the wealth of Star Wars material that existed alongside the original three—then six, now eight—episodic films.

Until now.

Who’s to say why we become obsessed with the things we do? How to explain why certain things take hold of us and others don’t, why the attachment runs so deep? Maybe there is no explanation. Maybe it’s just a feeling. Maybe the wand chooses the wizard. Maybe you’re born with it; maybe it’s Maybelline.

Any way you slice it, my Rogue One obsession? Very real.

So I did what any sane (if you can be considered sane while more than mildly obsessed) person would do: I went looking for more content. Official Spotify playlists, fanart (gasp!), fanfiction (double gasp!), and last but not least, its novel companion.

Reading the book version of the movie was, in many ways, exactly what I expected. I knew the entire plot, after all, when I started reading: the characters, the worlds, the circumstances, the consequences. I also knew there would be differences—scenes described in greater detail than I saw on screen; new ones added to give the reader more background, more context.

But the best part—and what I didn’t see coming, although I should have, because too often it’s exactly what gets sacrificed first when adapting in the opposite direction—was the depth of the characterization, caring and empathetic portrayals of each of the characters that matched the movie but improved upon it. Strengthened it. Their pasts, their emotions, their interactions and relationships with each other all richer and more meaningful. And because of that, the stakes even higher.

Rogue One—maybe more than any other Star Wars movie; don’t hate me—is a true ensemble film, so maybe it was particularly well suited for novelization, for following the different points of view of characters I already loved and loved even more by the time I finished reading.

I can’t speak to all movie novelizations, obviously, having read just the one, but this one might have been enough to convince me to try others. The interest has to be there, of course; I don’t think I’ll ever feel inclined to read hundreds of pages of a story I only feel lukewarm about. But the next time the credits roll and you find yourself wanting more, my advice? Look to the shelves.