Heart of the City by Steenz for March 30, 2010

Oldest gimmic in the… in the…

Using the motion picture version over the original written version sure is quite stupid.

If you’re listening to it on an audio book, then that would be no problem, right?

She’s caught in the [Charlotte’s] web of deceit!

Could have simply downloaded it off the web.

Right on, Joe. But even more: with a book, the story unfolds in your own head, and no movie can capture that, or what it means to you.

The first time I read Victor Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris” (better known as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”) I was astonished at the ending.

All the movie and animated cartoon and comic book versions in the world will not tell you how the book really ends. That’s because the actual ending is so overwhelmingly tragic that nobody dares to subject a general public to it. It makes even grown men cry.

(Hugo’s lesser-known “The Man Who Laughs” is even worse, or better, depending on how you look at it.)

So a word of advice to Heart: Don’t choose “Hunchback” for a book report, and take it as a warning about relying on any movie version of any book (besides the basic dishonesty of it).

Some freeholder!

“Freeholder”? I don’t understand. Explanation please?

Hey, the Classics Illustrated version of Moby Dick had great visuals. It left out all that long, boring stuff about the mechanics of whale-hunting, though. I loved those, but I never used one to fudge my way out of reading the actual book.

There was an old “Leave It To Beaver” plot where he was supposed to read “The Three Musketeers” and watched the 1939 film version with the Ritz Brothers.

At the beginning of the year, my 8th grade teacher (Mr. Z) assigned the entire class to do a book report on either The Illiad or The Odyssey by years end. Classics Illustrated was acceptable. Of course, I had brown hair then, too.

Every teacher knows about movies (and Cliff Notes) and how to catch the cheaters with stuff that isn’t in the movie or is different.

You might think it’s pretty obvious that teachers know about movies, but every year there are a few students too stoopid to figure that out….

-Cougar :{)

Joe-Allen, you are SO right! Just take The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter for example. I still can’t believe they left out the identities of Messrs. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs from The Prisoner of Azkaban. That information added so much to the story.

I remember having to do an oral book report. I picked a book that was also made into a movie. I had read the book, then saw the movie. Some other student (the class “bully”) who was trying to get me in trouble mentioned that this book was also a movie. The teacher asked me if I saw the movie. I said “yes” then proceeded to list many of the differences between the book and movie. I got an “A” and the class “bully” got shown up in front of his “friends”.

With homeschooling, I wanted to make the point to my sons that a movie based on a book, and the book weren’t the same. So, I made a point of reading the book to them first, THEN we’d watch the movie. The movie (especially if the period was much earlier than present) was helpful for understanding costumes, etc., but they found out how much different the story lines were between the two. We were really hacked when we read a mystery, then watched the movie, and the murderer was different in the movie than the book.

I read the Lord of the Rings books originally years ago–then reread them before seeing the movies. I like both the books and the movies, so you’re not right about everybody R_Noonan63!!

rerun