By Madison Killen
So, there are a lot of movie adaptations that I absolutely love. I am a die hard Lord of the Rings fan; the books are incredible, but I think that the movies are too. There’re also the various adaptations of Pride and Prejudice (I prefer the BBC one but the most recent one is delightful as well).Then there’s a middle ground category for movies I could do without (the Harry Potter series………….) because I love the books so much and the movie adaptations are, to me, meh. Most movie adaptations fall into that category.
But then there is a category for an entirely distinct feeling of fury and existentialism that I feel when I experience atrocious movie adaptations. One in particular comes to mind: My Sister’s Keeper. My mom handed me a Jodi Picoult book as I left for winter vacation at my grandparent’s beach house in high school. At that age, I was apprehensive of anything that my English teachers did not hand me. But I ended up loving it, at the very least for legitimately making me cry. I was not an emotional person! To me, the conclusion was a shameless appeal to my Pathos but also artfully crafted. It worked. So when the movie trailers started coming out, I was pretty pumped.
The movie enraged me. The book was not supposed to be about a girl who has cancer! It was about other complexities that it brought upon her family and an ultimately surprising and poignant ending that obliterated the possibility of a predictable narrative of the slow demise of a cancer patient! WHAT HAD HOLLYWOOD DONE!!!! When, at the end of the movie, it became clear to me that the director had completely altered the end of the story–the MOST IMPORTANT PART–I sat in the theater with the rage of thousands of years of adversity and dead puppies in my heart. The movie had accosted, kidnapped, assaulted, raped, pillaged, tortured, murdered, and buried in the back yard the book. It was like watching that Animal Planet show where police rescue tortured kittens that had been set on fire–it made me want to DO SOMETHING.
Of course, I didn’t. People actually liked that movie. Disgusting. I’ve always had an aversion to Cameron Diaz anyway.
The Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal 