Vito Grippi

Not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, it makes perfect sense. Carver’s stories leave a lot of room for interpretation, to fill in the blanks. I’ve learned by now never to judge a film based on my perceptions of a book. That sort of thinking always leads to the “the book was better” argument. I’ve actually found some pleasure in reading a book after seeing the movie. But that’s only happened a few times (Little Children, Empire Falls), and I suppose that notion only plays into the argument even further.

At some point, we have to accept a film on its own merit, pretend the book does not exist for a couple of hours. This is what I tell people when the grumbling begins, which is, of course, easier said than done. That said, I recently spoke with a Harry Potter fanatic who had yet to read one book. It took everything in me to not explain that the movies came from books that were, in many ways, better. But that was an argument for another day.

Here are a few other examples of films based on short stories (from Bark).