ok so my longtime reader(s) know that i adore this book… love this book… think this book is a perfect gem of a book (see here, if you’re not clued in as to why). so it was with great expectations that i went to the movie today.

and ugh, what a botched abortion of a movie.

i’ve walked out of three movies in my lifetime. with books, which generally require an investment of some hours, i don’t feel so bad about putting them down unfinished. but with movies, man, they’re only a couple hours max, and it’s quite impossible to evaluate the whole without waiting to the end. so i almost always try to sit through to the end.

but not this one.

everything lovely and complex and morally ambiguous seems to have been excised from the movie. everything deep. everything you want to go away and think about, and then come back and re-read and think about some more.

plus, what a monumentally arrogant eejit the director must be, to have just thought, hey, i’ll toss out two thirds of this masterpiece and put in a lot of tedious images of round things instead. and the music! it seems to have been written with this in mind: how horrible does it have to be before it drives people out? like this! then yay, let’s do that!

i don’t insist that movie adaptations follow the book–books and movies are very different forms, and i do actually get the difference. but i think if a movie is going to take a book’s premise and its title, then it owes that book a debt to honor its heart. if this book and movie were people, the movie would be a rapist.

some day i really do hope a director makes a movie of this book and does it justice.

and one last thought on all the positive reviews of this flick: they’re proof that people are afraid of looking stupid and that emperors can still get away with wearing no clothes.