Kevin's Watch

I have no way of knowing if the things I think make a movie a good movie are the same things Le Guin thinks make a movie a good movie. The idea is most easily demonstrated by one world-reknowned critic giving a movie a thumbs-up, and his equally reknowned partner giving it a thumbs-down. Anybody can say, "Go see yadda yadda, it's a good movie." But I won't see every movie that any of the world's 6 billion people say is good. I see the movies I see for other reasons. Something or other makes me want to see a movie. Maybe I heard something specific about the movie that attracted me. Maybe I like the subject matter in general. Hell, maybe some actress I think is particularly hot is topless in it.

But it can go the other direction, too. I sometimes have reason to not see a movie, and, like wanting to see a movie, that reason is never because of someone's opinion. Le Guin can say it's a "good" movie (although I suspect she was being diplomatic), if taken as a movie. If someone who never read the books saw it (or the abomination from the Sci-fi Channel), they might well like it. But these books have meant a great deal to me for almost thirty years. I was affected by them years before I ever heard of Thomas Covenant. I will not watch them be butchered again. I say if you want to make a movie that has almost nothing in common with a book beyond the names of some of the characters, then write your own story from scratch. And if you intend to use the names of a book's characters, but have them do things that are actually in opposition to their book-incarnations, then you're an idiot. What motivates someone to do such things is beyond me, and, at least for something that means as much to me as Earthsea does, I won't have any part of it.

Yeah, I'm with Fist. The only way I'll see a movie of a book I've read is if it's a faithful adaptation. (And even then I tend to complain because it's not perfect. )

If it's not faithful, then I know I'll hate it, no matter how good it is technically or theoretically.

--A

Fist and Faith wrote: A Wizard of Earthsea
The Tombs of Atuan
The Farthest Shore
Tehanu
Dragonfly**
The Other Wind

**Dragonfly is a novella that can be found in a collection called Tales from Earthsea. Tales has some other stories set in the archipelago that are not part of the story arc of the six listed above. However, at least a couple of them are FANTASTIC, and all are at least very good.

IMO, the best are Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind. Le Guin just keeps getting better!! But they're freshest in my mind, so I can't really say that for sure. The original trilogy blew me away, too, but it's been several years since I read them.

I shall bump this thread up on one of my rare visits to the watch these days, because the Earthsea series really deserve it.

But to add my two cents or whatever to this I want to say that although you might say that there is a story arc in the Earthsea somewhere I think that there really isn't. I have read these books at various times, and what I think is that they are all independent works that just happen to involve the same people several times.

In any case I recently managed to find "The Word of Unbinding" in one of my collections. It is one of the earliest stories, probably the very first one (1964). And it too is incredibly good.

Yes, The Word of Unbinding is excellent!

I'll still call the whole thing an arc of sorts, because the focus of TOW resolves a fairly big problem I had with TFS. Which, in turn, began in AWOE.