#32: The book is always better than the movie, or is it?

Here's your classic conundrum. A movie based on a book. If you read the book you might spoil the movie. If you watch the movie you will ruin the book. That's what people say, but it it really like that? Let's talk about it.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to freetalk Podcast, the show where we have one objective, to take your English to the next level, the fun, and simple way. My name is Alan, I am your host and today I will be your guide tour on this discussion. But before we embarke together on this journey, let’s talk about a couple of things first. Firstly, if you are listening to this episode right after we published it, you know today is Thursday and not Wednesday. I got a lot of work last week and it was impossible for me to make this podcast on time. So, one day later, but here you have it. Secondly, we recently opened a patreon page. If you like what we are doing and you want to help us make more, you can visit the website www.patreon.com/freetalkingles, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N .com/freetalkingles, and make a donation. You can donate from as little as 1 dollar a month, and believe me, it would help us a lot, we would be able to make possible all the projects we have to help you finally learn English and I would be forever grateful to you. Ok, let’s jump right into today’s topic. Today, once again, we are talking books.

Maybe it’s just me, but very recently it seems like a lot of people are getting into reading, you know what I mean?  When I was younger, literature talking, was not a thing. Your favorite books or what you enjoyed the most about reading was not really an everyday topic. Growing up, my friends and Iwould talk about other stuff. Maybe TV shows, sports, girls, but I don’t remember having any casual conversation where the subject of the discussion was books. It might be relevant to mention here, that this could be really an isolated event, that means, something that doesn’t happen at large, to all people, only me. You see, my life was book-free until a couple of years ago. If you had asked me back in 2011 what my favorite book was, I’m positive, almost completely sure, that I could not have come up with an answer, because I was not the reading type, and neither were my friends, at least not that I knew of. The intensive reading portion of my life began around 2012 when I really discovered the magic of reading and all I did or talked about was books. This was also around the time when I really started using social media, particularly facebook and twitter. And then, when I was exposed to all these people, and when I had a chance to read some of their opinions, then it really hit me. Like, hum, apparently reading is a thing everybody loves. So, yeah, maybe it’s not that recent, but I can’t help but think it is.

Anyway, the real subject of this episode isn’t really if people like to read or not, but rather, a common discussion that arises, almost inevitably, when people talk about books, and that is whether the book or the movie is better. As you surely know, there have been many adaptations of books into movies. Stories that were originally imagined and designed for the printed word, for books, but later, maybe because of the success of such book, or because of the creative impulse of some filmmaker, they were turned into movies. There are countless examples of this. Just to mention some of the most famous, we could drop a few names. The Harry Potter saga, The lord of the rings, the James Bond series, A Clockwork Orange, books by renowned authors on the likes of Stephen King, Jack Kerouac, Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and well, the list of the famous adaptations goes on and on. There are also hundreds and hundreds of movies that we see or have seen, but that we don’t really know that were, in the first place, books. Did you know, for example, that Jurassic Park is based on a 1990 novel? Well, I didn’t.

Anyway, the point here is that we could easily divide people into two categories when it comes to this. Those who prefer the book, and those who prefer the movie. Sure, there could be some people who enjoy the book as much as the movie, true. But in reality, people have the tendency to choose sides, that means, it’s either the book or the movie. Now this is what I think happens. Some people are very proud of the credentials that they have given themselves. Some people like to call themselves, bibliophiles, people who love books. They love to have them, read them, collect them, smell them, and, much like vegetarian people, they like to talk about their passion at every single opportunity. Don’t take this the wrong way, please, I don’t mean to insult anybody, this is just an innocent observation. And, on the other side of the spectrum, we have cinephiles, people who love movies. They are usually devoted moviegoers, people who go to the movies quite often and are, usually, very knowledgeable; they know or claim to know a lot about the cinema. We don’t have to go to such opposite extremes. You don’t need to be a bibliophile, nor a cinephile, but more often than not, you probably have a strong preference for one format over the other. I, myself, don’t know where I’m at. Because I enjoy a good book, as much as I enjoy a good film. Some books I like have great, or good, or decent, and sometimes, bad, movie adaptations. But the same happens the other way around. Some movies I like may have been based on great, or good, or decent, or terrible books. But, to move closer to the topic of this episode I would like to talk about the common pet peeves. That’s a new word for you, isn’t it. Pet peeve. That’s two words: P-E-T P-E-E-V-E, and that is a minor annoyance that an individual identifies as particularly annoying to him or herself. For example, I may say, “I hate it when people use their cell phones in public transportation.” I mean, that’s so commonplace nowadays, right? A lot of people use their cellphones in the public transportation and most people are ok with that, but I’m not. I hate it, and that’s my pet peeve. So, what are some of the most recurrent pet peeves when it comes to this, what are the things people complain about most often about movie adaptations of books? Let’s see.

Number 1.- “That’s not how I pictured it!”
So, you read a book, then you learn that they are making a movie about that book, and you go see it. But what you see on the screen is not what you were expecting to see. Because the way the writer described the places, the people, their appearance, their personality, even the tone of their voices, is maybe not what the filmmaker had in mind. And that is bound to happen. Bound to, B-O-U-N-D to, means that it’s obvious is going to happen. Books are created by one person’s imagination, by what they are living at the moment of writing, by the way, they see the world. And that view is not only different from the view of the person making the movie, it’s different from yours, from mine. 500 different readers of the same book may have 500 different ideas of the same thing. So, it’s only natural that the result is not really what you had in mind when you went to see the movie, right? Are we on the same page? Great, let’s carry on, let’s continue.

Number 2.
Limited Storytelling time.
Authors are really free, as far as extension is concerned. It’s known that writing a book requires a lot of work. Some authors spend years and years working on a book. They start off with a basic idea, a concept, and as they keep on writing, they come up with new characters, new situations, new plotlines, they can extend and extend as much as they want. They might have started with a 100-page book but end up with a 500-page final story. For you, as a reader, that doesn’t really pose a problem, because you can read a big book during an entire month, a little every day, another couple of pages before you go to bed. But when someone takes upon himself the task of making that book into a movie, their time is limited. They have to fit the story into 2, 3 hours of film maybe. And that, of course, means they have to cut things off of the movie. The non-essential. They decide not to include some characters, to leave out entire chapters, to change the essence of some others. They don’t really have an option. Making a movie out of an 800-page book and keeping every single detail would be impossible. And here again, the subjectivity is at play. The director thinks that this is the best way to tell the story in film. I disagree, but you agree. We can’t make everyone happy, and people want to be happy.

Number 3.
The movie gets lost in translation.
I always talk about my fascination for reading books in their original language. Every language has words that don’t have a match in other languages. I’m going to give you a quick example here. There’s this word in Portuguese. Saudade. This word is considered by some language specialistsone of the most difficult words to translate into other languages. It expresses a feeling, that is close to melancholy, nostalgia or longing, but not entirely. Saudade means Saudade. You could read the same fragment of a book containing this word, translated by three different translators, and the choice of words could be different in all cases. Because each person has a different interpretation of the word and they will use the word they consider most appropriate, depending on the context, but in the end, you will not get the idea that the original writer who decided to use the word Saudade was trying to communicate. Well, something similar happens in the book-to-movie process. Let’s suppose that the writer used an expression like this one: “Marie saw a shadow on the floor and she screamed full of panic.” What does it mean to scream full of panic? Is it a loud, strident cry. Is it long, is it desperate? If I am the director of this movie, what do I say to my actress? Scream full of panic. What does that mean? This kind of interpretations is for the reader, for each reader. Any description made by the author is going to be questioned. A director could use the exact same dialogues written by the author, and still, the audience would not be satisfied. Marie said, “I’m leaving”, and her voice was breaking. Breaking how?! As I said, something is going to get lost in translation.

Well, these are some of the things people complain the most about movie adaptations, but to end this discussion, I would like to make a case for them. I would like to mention something that we can only get when we see a movie. And that is, that they give us a common ground.

Take Harry Potter, for instance. J.K Rowling did an amazing job at creating an entire universe of characters and places, full of magic and adventure. You may prefer the books to the movies, or the other way around, but when you think of Harry Potter, the character, who do you see? Daniel Radcliffe, am I right. Daniel Radcliffe is Harry Potter, end of the story. Perhaps he is not the best actor to play this role, perhaps his appearance is different from the picture you got when you read the book, but he is Harry Potter. For me, for you, and for everyone. Thanks to the movies we all have a face for Dumbledore, for Draco, for Hagrid. The Harry Potter movie saga made it possible for all of us to see and share the depiction of Gryffindor, the Quidditch tournaments, the brooms, everything. And I think that’s something really valuable. Not the only thing, of course, but a very valuable one.

Thanks to The Lord of the Rings movies we know now what Smeagle’s voice sounds like. You may like it or not, but it has a voice now. Movies give a voice to an otherwise voiceless medium. They allow us to enter a world that had been created entirely out of words. With background music, sound effects and transitions. Movies complement the books we love, and sometimes, also, movies invite us to think more, to imagine more, to read more.

What do you think? Are you a book or a movie person? I would like to know your take on this subject and if you agree with any of the things I said today. You can do that by visiting our website www.freetalkingles.com/podcast/bookmovie

And, to finish today’s episode, let’s have a quick word on pronunciation, shall we?

Ok, the word on pronunciation for this episode will be, in fact, just one word. We will talk once again about reduction. This is a very, very, extremely common reduction in spoken American English. One that if you learn, practice and incorporate into your everyday speech, will make you sound so much more natural, and this, of course, will give you a lot of confidence. I’m talking about the word THEM. T-H-E-M. Them is the object pronoun of the pronoun They. We use it to indicate who or what receives a certain action. For example, if we say:

They teach, they is the subject, the subject of the verb teach. Who teaches? They. They teach.

But if I say:
I teach them. Who is the subject? Who is teaching? I am, and who is receiving the teachings? They. So, in this case, we say, I teach, them. Ok?

Now, all clear here, but what about the reduction?

Well, when we pronounce this word alone, it sounds like this. Them. Them. It’s a full sound. We can hear the TH sound, TH, we can hear the e sound, as in bed, and the m sound, We have them. But when we reduce this word, the sound will be something like em, em, see?
 It’s like a schwa sound, remember schwa? e, e, e, and the m. Em.

So, my sentence goes something like this:
I teach ‘em
Another example.
You killed them.
It sounds like:
You killed’em

She bought them.
Sounds like
She bought’em

Ok?