I’m on the record as having issues with many adaptations, even of stories I love. One of the primary reasons is in the matter of likenesses: The character on the film is seldom the same as the character in your head, who will always be superior because it’s your vision. Witness Laurie Juspeczyk, a chain-smoking, cursing, occasionally overtly hostile woman in her late thirties, brought to the big screen as a woman ten years younger who bears none of Laurie’s charm, vulgarity and rage. One of my favorite Stephen King short-stories stars David Drayton, a man who the story implies is an average guy in his forties who paints for a living. In the film adaptation, he’s played by square-jawed, heroic Thomas Jane, fresh off literally playing a Marvel superhero. Granted, it’s the least of the issues with that movie (I will decry the ending to the last of my days as Just Plain Wrong), but it does illuminate the dichotomy between reading a story and viewing it, leading to today’s adaptational query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) always hears Deadpool’s “yellow voice” as Neal Patrick Harris, no matter how great Ryan Reynolds is, asking: What’s the worst case of “Not The Character In Your Head” in your favorite pop-culture?
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for the record, i loved the ending to the Mist, that’s kinda what made the movie for me.
forgot the actual response, apparently you can automatically post just by hitting Enter outside of the text box! who knew. mildly related though, i feel like most Stephen King adaptations get the characters wrong. Jack Nicholson seemed damaged from the very beginning, as opposed to a person who descended into madness as he spent more time in the Overlook. Starsky or Hutch (i forget which) being the go-to for Salem’s Lot also seemed a little too leading man, and not “shlubby single dad” enough.
a weird one for me (at least weird in that it wasn’t a previously existing piece of media before being made into a movie) was George Clooney in From Dusk Til Dawn. i always felt like Seth Gecko should’ve been a little more rugged, maybe like Kurt Russell should’ve played him.
btw i always imagined Kyle Kinane being the voice of Deadpool before the movies came out.
It’s SOOOO dark. Like, Outer Limits dark.
I have to say that the “Molly” from the Runaways TV show does such a disservice to the character as to distract from the spot-on “Gert” in the same show. They take a character who is a thin, tiny slip of a child visibly appreciably younger than the other Runaways and cast an actress who looks bigger and older than half her castmates. (And somehow the show expects you to still view her as years younger than the others?)