Morning everyone.
I’ve said it here before and will say it again — I love all things King Arthur. Honestly, I have no idea why, I just do. When I heard Showtime would be airing a series called Camelot, I was on it. Friday night I talked my husband into watching it with me and I don’t know what to think of it. The actress in the role of Morgan is great and King Lott is also fantastic but from what we learned from googling the internets while watching, Lott will only be in two episodes so bad news for me. Merlin, well, they went with the political advisor version which I’m good with and I actually think it works better than the magic-man Merlin here anyway. There is a fantasy element to the show which could have easily been ignored (Unless it’s all fantasy and you go in with full fantasy blazing, I think you should forget it. All in or all out is the way I feel.) but they seem to be adding it grain by grain. I don’t know if it adds anything to the story yet; hard to tell with only one episode.
Notice how I haven’t mentioned Arthur yet? I don’t know if I like him. Reading a lot of Arthurian legend based books, I have an ideal Arthur vision and to put it kindly, it’s not him. Maybe things will change but for now I don’t know.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is this — when you read a book and have a set ideal of the characters, are you willing to edit them to fit a TV/movie version?
I’ll admit I don’t see a lot of movies but when I do, I can usually separate out the differences and move on. A book is a book and a movie is a movie. Different mediums, different stories. For instance, The Lord of the Rings — I loved the books and loved the movies. I was fine with it all even if it wasn’t what I had previously envisioned in all my readings of the books.
Somehow, I found myself having trouble with Camelot. I think the reason is that having read so many Arthurian legend books and their numerous takes on the characters, their faults, etc., I have a cobbled together Arthur but one I’ve come to like very much. Seeing the show and how its writers put together the different people and places, made me a tad annoyed that it wasn’t my version. But then again, maybe it was something my husband said:
“Ya know, some of the writing and acting here are pretty bad.”
I had trouble not agreeing with that statement. So maybe that’s it.
A few links to share this week…
A Game of Thrones. Oh, how I loved this book. George R.R. Martin, you are a genius. Tonight at 9PM there will be a 15 minute preview of the series which is set to start April 17th on HBO. After the above discussion, I still have high hopes for this series but we’ll see what happens. If you haven’t read the book yet and want to; join the book club.
50 books you don’t need to read before you die.
Cooking bibles? Mine – Julia Child’s Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom. By the way, I haven’t completely forgotten about the post where I mentioned I would take a look in some of my cookbooks and share a recipe. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Want to know what it was like to edit Harry Potter? Here ya go then. Oh, and if you want to see the latest movie poster, here. Funny how they don’t even mention the name of the movie. Oh, the Harry Potter marketing machine.
Yeah! A DC landmark bookstore will be here for me still.
The Hobbit is finally in production which means we might see Ian McKellan’s Gandalf looking the same age and not older than he did in The Lord of the Rings.
Happy Sunday.
Just Book Reading 