Frazz by Jef Mallett for March 15, 2018

has collapsed from an overload of potential jokes I could make about this

Every day for twenty years I’ve dry mopped two thousand square feet of Saltillo tile. Ommmm… After about the first two times I learned that both lifting the mop and putting down the mop will disburse already collected dust into the air. Not to be derrière retentive but cleaning is the thing. — The mop handle is way too short, it would not work. — Holding a mop horizontally brings its center of gravity to one side making it awkward to hold with two hands. Of the ways to hold the mop horizontally with two hands both palms down is the least comfortable and offers the least control. — The handle/head clip assembly is reproduced faithfully indicating the cartoonist drew from the experience of seeing one. Volunteer to dry mop a museum twice a day for two months. Wax on, wax off. — I saw Karate Kid when it came out. The wax on, wax off, has been part of the culture since. It wasn’t until two years ago I noticed WOWO could be a double entendre. Was that the idea? Did everyone else get that instantaneously? Duh @ me! Lol!

I have learned to never watch a film made from a book I read. The experience is usually awful, and can go as far as ‘want to scream in fury at the destruction of a good book’.

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes a scriptwriter does the job a good book editor should have done – cutting out inane subplots, extraneous characters, etc. – to produce a tighter, more involving movie that is better than the book. Here’s a handful that I think worked better on the screen than on the page – Jaws, Little Big Man, The Godfather, Fight Club and The Wizard of Oz.

Sometimes the movie is just as bad as the book. i.e. “The Shipping News”

Movies work for school if the assigned reading is Shakespeare. But has no one ever told Caulfield about Cliff notes?

Each format has its own strengths and weaknesses. A movie, for instance, can give us a visual establishing shot in a second that would take 3 pages of boring narrative in a book. OTOH, books can give us insight into a character’s thot processes in the form of an aside that a movie would have to do with a jarring voiceover.

Also, I’ve heard it said that no character on the screen can do justice to the image the viewer had already created in her or his mind, but that only works for consumers with good imaginations and/or lots of worldly experience, not so much for an impoverished kid in Appalachia or Compton.

for Hooligan918 and Selma_Flamel from yesterday, my first two published murder mysteries are “Death Comes Darkly” and “Death Goes Overboard” . Both available on Amazon or Barnes and Noble online. My third will be out this September. Thanks for asking!

If you saw the movie “Noah” on Hallmark, you will know that the writers should have at least read the Bible s a little before making the script. Couldn’t count the major flaws, not picky little things but major issues.

I once heard an analogy that a good movie adaptation of a book is like a different view of the same mountain, while a bad adaptation takes you to an entirely different mountain.

Of course, a bad adaptation can still be a good movie. How to Train Your Dragon is an example of that. There are very few points of similarity between the book and the movie. I preferred the movie to the book, though.

There were several films of Les Misérables that existed many years before we read it in French class.

There is a flaw in the reasoning that watching the movie will get you school credit for reading a book. That is that any teacher who has assigned a specific book has also made the test so that it specifically asks questions that are only answered in the book.

Another word of warning — watch out for novelizations of the movie version. Use the original novel when making comparisons. {end of rant}

I haven’t seen a theater movie in years and very few on TV, but the only one in which the film clearly surpassed the original was The Africa Queen. I was sorely disappointed on reading its basis.

What does he mean “hardly ever wrapped in time to substitute for assigned reading”? I sure don’t read most books in less than the movie’s runtime.

Oh, wait: For all his smarts, Caulfield’s in elementary school. He’s expected to read books short enough for most kids to finish in an afternoon.

I’ve observed that movies of classic children’s books – e.g. Mary Poppins, Doctor Doolittle, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – are often better than the book. My theory is that while a book only has to entertain the parent for maybe 20 minutes to get the kid to sleep, a movie has to entertain them for 2+ hours. Of course, CCBB having Roald Dahl as screenwriter helped.

So, is the visual better than the written? Let’s take a look, shall we?

Consider two events: The Charge of the Light Brigade and the Bombing of Guernica.

Tennyson wrote a poem, and historians have drawn maps with circles and arrows explaining what happened.

Picasso painted it, and historians have written about it.

Now consider two questions. A) Which is more descriptive – the written or the visual, and 2) which is more powerful – the written or the visual?

I hope that most would agree that the answer to each question is relevant to each example. If we agree on that, then the answer to my thesis question is, " it depends ".

Sheesh. I really need to stop philosophizing in the shower.

Example of horrible film adaptation from a story: Stephen Kings Lawnmower Man. The movie had NOTHING to do with the story.

And since Caulfield’s name comes from Catcher in the Rye, have seen the whole movie?

Example of horrible film adaptation from a story: Stephen Kings Lawnmower Man. The movie had NOTHING to do with the story.

And since Caulfield’s name comes from Catcher in the Rye, have seen the whole movie?

In 1970-something a movie was made of Ursula K. Leguinn’s “Lathe of Heaven”; I actually don’t remember how well it worked, but I do recall that the movie was the same story, characters, and events as the book. A rare thing indeed!

Two movies that were as good, if not better than the book. For me at least. The Grapes of Wrath and The Graduate