Hi all and welcome to the first Book to Movie Challenge Check-In! I hope you’re all having a great time reading and watching so far this year. As always, my co-host Sergio of Tipping My Fedora is rocking this challenge, with 15 book to movie adaptations reviewed already! Since I love Agatha Christie, one of his reviews which I enjoyed the most was Marple: Endless Night. This first review not from the two of us hosting the challenge was a review of Gone Girl from Wendy at Wensend. Similarly, the latest non-host review was All Quiet on the Western Front from Bettina at Impressions Notebook. Personally, I’ve made it through two book/movie pairs: Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Monuments Men. I’ve also read Sharp Objects for my book club, but it was so dark, I might be too nervous to watch the movie! Below is the link-up for continuing to add your reviews in 2014. Thanks so much for joining in on this fun challenge! Continue reading
I liked the book of The Monuments Men enough to go see this in theaters, which is not something I often do. I ended up enjoying it pretty well, but was a bit disappointed in the changes made from the book. I liked seeing the story brought to life. Even the helpful cast list the author had is no match for seeing living, breathing people when it came to engaging my sympathy for a large number of characters. In both the book and the movie, the humorous and the serious mixed in sometimes jarring ways. Saving art is important! And oh by the way, here’s a sad story about people dying to make you question the value of art. I found the juxtaposition stranger in the movie than in the book though, perhaps because the trailers I watched made me expect a light-hearted story. 
The TV show version of Dexter does a great job capturing the feel of the book, especially Dexter’s personality. As in the book, he comes across as both both creepily likeable and morally ambiguous. From watching the first two episodes and googling a bit, it seems as though the first season of this show is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the first book, Darkly Dreaming Dexter. There were plenty of direct quotes and so far I didn’t notice any major plot changes. However, Dexter’s relationship is played up a bit, becoming more complicated and more romantic. Another change is that the pace of his vigilante murders is increased to keep each episode interesting. The whole season is the plot of just one short book after all! Even though the show becomes completely separate from the plot of the books after the first season, I would guess that most fans of the books will like the show and vice versa.
If you haven’t signed up yet and would like to get in on all this book to movie goodness, you can join any time 
The TV adaptation of Orange is the New Black was both better and worse than I expected. I was pleasantly surprised by the perfection of the casting. Not all of the characters were exactly as I imagined them, but they were all instantly identifiable. I was even more surprised and impressed by how much more relatable Piper was in the TV show. As much as I adore books, I often find movies more emotionally moving. Sorrow, love, violence… intense situations and emotions almost always affect me more viscerally on the screen. Orange is the New Black was no exception. Seeing Piper and her husband react to the beginning of her jail sentence made me even more empathetic than reading about it. In the book, Piper often seemed like a dispassionate observer of her situation. Despite an internal monologue shared with the viewer, Piper seemed more immersed in her situation in the show. 
Today I have a couple of exciting updates for this year’s Book to Movie Challenge. This year for the challenge, Sergio of Tipping My Fedora reviewed over 20 books and their movie adaptations while I’ve been working pretty hard to meet my goal of 12. So I thought, you know who should be co-hosting this challenge? Sergio. So I asked if he’d be interested and he said yes! That means that for two of the quarterly round-ups, Sergio will be doing posts updating you on how the challenge is going while I do the other two. Once the linky for adding reviews goes live next year, you’ll also be able to add reviews at a post on his blog as well as here at Doing Dewey.
As many of you could probably tell just from the trailers, the movie version of World War Z is nothing like the book. Instead of a series of interviews detailing the scientific, political, and social details of a zombie plague, this is an action-packed continuous narrative starring stay-at-home dad Brad Pitt. I was very pleased that the ethnic diversity of the original story made it into the movie. I was equally disappointed by the fact that we no longer got much of the big picture of how the world slowly reacted to the plague. Instead, Brad Pitt and his family are caught almost completely unawares by an attack of fast moving zombies that convert victims into zombies in seconds to minutes. In addition to turning almost immediately, zombies are also identifiable by their creepy white eyes. I think this eliminated a rather interesting complication from the book. Most of the changes, however, seemed like the right choice to me. Following one character throughout made me much more invested in the story and the solution to the zombie plague, while implausible, was also more clever than the brute force approach adopted in the book. Overall, this is not the book and I’m almost not sure they should have kept the name, but it was a great movie that was at least as good as the book, possibly better.
