Oh yeah, forgot about Berlin Alexanderplatz, the Fassbinder version. Probably thee most novelistic thing one could hope to find in audio-visual form. I know literary adaptations and serials go way back in cinema history, but it honestly feels like a novel in how multi-faceted and well rendered it is, like you're in a 3D world, geared up for full-on immersion. All of the beats are played well, he completely nails the complex character dynamics, the Weimar-era detail, the allegories, the humor enmeshed with dark subject matter. And it never gets too predictable or lapses into a pattern. It's a trip. Someday I'd like to read the book--Fassbinder certainly sells it.

Here's a nice lowbrow example: Jack Reacher was much, much better than One Shot, the novel it was based on.

The AV Club called it "mythmaking for self-satisfied sociopaths," which is true, but doesn't change the fact that it's compulsively watchable with some great action setpieces.

Michael Crichton's "Sphere" -- The movie was better than the book, I guess. If you're into Math at all, the plot of the movie is really cool. I saw it randomly once and didn't realize something like it existed.

DaveA wrote: Sat Oct 08, 2022 6:33 pm Oh yeah, forgot about Berlin Alexanderplatz, the Fassbinder version. Probably thee most novelistic thing one could hope to find in audio-visual form. I know literary adaptations and serials go way back in cinema history, but it honestly feels like a novel in how multi-faceted and well rendered it is, like you're in a 3D world, geared up for full-on immersion. All of the beats are played well, he completely nails the complex character dynamics, the Weimar-era detail, the allegories, the humor enmeshed with dark subject matter. And it never gets too predictable or lapses into a pattern. It's a trip. Someday I'd like to read the book--Fassbinder certainly sells it.

At pushing 16 hours, I think it becomes easy to be novelistic. Not that it isn't great, but I think it should be categorised as serial.

A_Man_Who_Tries wrote: Sun Oct 09, 2022 1:29 am
At pushing 16 hours, I think it becomes easy to be novelistic. Not that it isn't great, but I think it should be categorised as serial.

I think this is spot on, particularly when the criticism of most film adaptations of novels is that they omitted this or that. At 16 hours you don't need to omit anywhere near as much. Part of me thinks that at that length and detail, what is the point of adapting a novel into a film or TV? If the aim is to make it "the same" as the novel? The two media are significantly different. Like, if a composer was going to adapt a novel into a piece of music, and their adaptation was a recording of someone reading the novel with music underneath, what would that give anyone?

One of the main reasons for screen adaptation is that it's a hugely expensive form, and it's easier to fund with known and already-popular IP. You're much more likely to be able to afford to make a 2 hour (or 8 or 16 hr) version of a successful book than you are to make a similar project solely from your own imagination. Because of that, adaptations are usually shackled to "doing the book" rather than making a primarily cinematic and/or original film.

The Long Goodbye

Blade Runner

If we're talking about Berlin Alexanderplatz, and how it seems uncommonly novelistic, only so much of this can be chalked up to its duration. Yes, its relative lack of brevity does afford it a certain immersion where the viewer is concerned, but it’s only in the movie being well rendered and dynamic in the first place that any of this means anything.

The idea that “long easily equals novelistic” (if you will) is suspect as there are plenty of TV shows or movies that go on, and on, and on, and have very little in common with the novel, at least the well written one worth reading. A filmmaking team can jam a lot of plot points, or “events,” or conflicts, or so-called “gravitas” from a book into a film, but it only amounts to anything meaningful if the feel of the source material and the implicit truths are transposed as well, or perhaps, transmuted in an interesting way, creating something new. In the early cinema era there were a number of people who tried to adapt classic novels for the screen, but many got it all wrong because the films were overly busy on the plotting front but didn’t have much “life” in them.

Am not the biggest Kubrick fan, honestly, but I think he was one the money when he said:

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

Along these lines, Fassbinder understood what he was doing with Alfred Döblin’s book. He wasn’t cashing in on “hot IP,” pouncing on a pre-existing fan base, as many hope to do today. Instead he was trying to make a work of art that would stretch beyond the confines of formula and tacky commercial accoutrements, while still being consistently watchable. And he succeeded.

He did, but he wouldn't have in three hours or less. That's just how it is.

It's also why novelas make for more-rounded adaptations. Not saying for a minute that it matched the source matrtial, but The Painted Veil was a great example of an adaptation which carried content and context with appropriate restraint and respect.

Will concede that cramming all of that into three hours or less would be an unenviable task.

Herbert Selby Jr was fortunate twice w/ the film versions of Last Exit to Brooklyn (great film) and Requiem for a Dream (kinda style over substance but strong enough).

Bertolucci did a great job w/ The Sheltering Sky.

I would hesitate as an adult to call Fight Club a great book but the film is pretty powerful. One of the few times the cinematic reinterpretation vastly outclasses the literary source material, IMO.