Book to Movie Challenge Update

Today I have a couple of exciting updates for this year’s Book to Movie Challenge. This year for the challenge, Sergio of Tipping My Fedora reviewed over 20 books and their movie adaptations while I’ve been working pretty hard to meet my goal of 12. So I thought, you know who should be co-hosting this challenge? Sergio. So I asked if he’d be interested and he said yes! That means that for two of the quarterly round-ups, Sergio will be doing posts updating you on how the challenge is going while I do the other two. Once the linky for adding reviews goes live next year, you’ll also be able to add reviews at a post on his blog as well as here at Doing Dewey.

World War Z – A Bookish Movie Review

As many of you could probably tell just from the trailers, the movie version of World War Z is nothing like the book. Instead of a series of interviews detailing the scientific, political, and social details of a zombie plague, this is an action-packed continuous narrative starring stay-at-home dad Brad Pitt. I was very pleased that the ethnic diversity of the original story made it into the movie. I was equally disappointed by the fact that we no longer got much of the big picture of how the world slowly reacted to the plague. Instead, Brad Pitt and his family are caught almost completely unawares by an attack of fast moving zombies that convert victims into zombies in seconds to minutes. In addition to turning almost immediately, zombies are also identifiable by their creepy white eyes. I think this eliminated a rather interesting complication from the book. Most of the changes, however, seemed like the right choice to me. Following one character throughout made me much more invested in the story and the solution to the zombie plague, while implausible, was also more clever than the brute force approach adopted in the book. Overall, this is not the book and I’m almost not sure they should have kept the name, but it was a great movie that was at least as good as the book, possibly better.

Book to Movie Challenge: The Sequel

Although there will be a wrap-up post for the 2013 challenge later, I’d like to thank everyone who participated for making this challenge such fun that I can’t wait to host it again next year. Plus, can you believe all of the movies based on books that came out this year?! Doing this challenge, I’ve been amazed at the number of book to movie adaptations there are and I’ve loved seeing some great books brought to life on screen.

The Count of Monte Cristo – A Bookish Movie Review

I’ve noticed that I’m more likely to think the movie is better than the book if I’ve seen the movie first, and The Count of Monte Cristo is no exception. Obviously compared to the book (especially a book as long as The Count of Monte Cristo!) the usual liberties were taken to streamline the plot. Entire subplots and characters disappeared and in some cases, I do think this was to the movies detriment. The movie also added even more swashbuckling and sword-fighting than were in the book, which was probably unnecessary.

Book to Movie Challenge Check-In

Hi all! I can’t believe it’s October already and we’re three-quarters of the way through the Book to Movie Challenge! I’m finally starting to get caught up, having read eight books and watched six movies (review of The Count of Monte Cristo movie to come). So far, I think my favorite movie was The King’s Speech  and my favorite book was Sense and Sensibility. And now on to how everyone else is doing!

Sense and Sensibility – A Bookish Movie Review

I loved this movie, both as an adaptation and as an incredibly well done movie. In fact, I think I actually liked it better than the book. Obviously, in any movie adaptation there will be changes made to simplify the book into a two hour story. For the most part, I found the removed scenes in this book had adequate replacements. There were two small things that I felt changed essential things about the characters, but overall I thought the adaptation was quite faithful to the feel of the book.