2014 Book to Movie Challenge Wrap-Up
2014 is coming to a close and with it, the Book to Movie Challenge. This year we had 87 reviews entered with the most reviews coming from my co-host, Sergio at Tipping My Fedora , including the most recent review added of The Midwich Cuckoos. Although I didn’t do a very good job of reviewing the book to movie books I read, one I particularly enjoyed was All You Need Is Kill (adapted as The Edge of Tomorrow). I also liked the movie adaptations of Divergent (even better than the book, I thought) and The Book Thief (not as good as the book, but still a good movie). For those of you who are interested in continuing with the challenge next year, I’d like to invite you to consider hosting the challenge. Personally, I’m too busy writing the first paper of my thesis in January to want to be starting hosting a challenge right now and it sounds like Sergio will be scaling back next year as well. We both had a lot of fun hosting this year and appreciate you all participating!
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. 
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.
