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During the Spanish trip (see posts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11) I was reading LA Confidential.
It is an awesome book. It's thick and dark and rich (like good goulash) and I want to return to it to spend more time in that world. James Ellroy puts words together in a pleasing way.
This bit is more about how well they adapted it because yeah, I can see why they said it was unadaptable (see also there are many bad goulashes out there).
What interests me is how well they caught the characters even when they really changed them (especially Jack Vincennes). Because they really get how Bud White is a great hulking brute with a giant squishy heart and that's both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. (And that he adds the heart that Ed Exley, bless his cotton socks, does not have. He is a great man, not a good man.)
They do cut the bit where it's not his violent qualities which help him hunt down the bad guy, but the brains that everyone assumes he doesn't have because he's a hulking brute. (Also Russell Crowe is perfect as him. Like actually perfect.)
They also cut a lot of Inez but I can see why because to do everything in the book, you'd have to make it a mini-series.
Jack Vincennes is interesting because they make him both less relatable (corrupted by fame vs hiding a terrible secret) and a lot more (because his secret makes him a terrible human being while you know corrupted by fame is at least relatable). I'm presuming they had to to hook a big name actor (I am eliding for a reason).
I think it's that actually getting the characters to feel right is the difference between a good adaptation and a bad one. It's like Ran and King Lear, they get the important bits of the characters so all the changes work. This is versus say the Disney Musketeers, which gets Milady and the Cardinal so wrong that the whole thing cannot work, no matter how closely (or not) they stick to the rest of it.
It is an awesome book. It's thick and dark and rich (like good goulash) and I want to return to it to spend more time in that world. James Ellroy puts words together in a pleasing way.
This bit is more about how well they adapted it because yeah, I can see why they said it was unadaptable (see also there are many bad goulashes out there).
What interests me is how well they caught the characters even when they really changed them (especially Jack Vincennes). Because they really get how Bud White is a great hulking brute with a giant squishy heart and that's both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. (And that he adds the heart that Ed Exley, bless his cotton socks, does not have. He is a great man, not a good man.)
They do cut the bit where it's not his violent qualities which help him hunt down the bad guy, but the brains that everyone assumes he doesn't have because he's a hulking brute. (Also Russell Crowe is perfect as him. Like actually perfect.)
They also cut a lot of Inez but I can see why because to do everything in the book, you'd have to make it a mini-series.
Jack Vincennes is interesting because they make him both less relatable (corrupted by fame vs hiding a terrible secret) and a lot more (because his secret makes him a terrible human being while you know corrupted by fame is at least relatable). I'm presuming they had to to hook a big name actor (I am eliding for a reason).
I think it's that actually getting the characters to feel right is the difference between a good adaptation and a bad one. It's like Ran and King Lear, they get the important bits of the characters so all the changes work. This is versus say the Disney Musketeers, which gets Milady and the Cardinal so wrong that the whole thing cannot work, no matter how closely (or not) they stick to the rest of it.
