This movie season finds two examples of something Hollywood does very badly: Literary adaptations.
First up, consider The Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini's book is the type of Westernized-glimpse-into-a-foreign land fodder that plays well with the Barnes & Noble crowd, the story of innocence lost somewhere in pre-Taliban Afghanistan. It's respectably middlebrow stuff, moderately affecting though a tad calculated and ultimately shallow.
Still, I have no doubt it was at least written with sincerity. The movie, on the other hand, exists for no reason other than to win awards.
It's directed by Marc Forster, which tells you everything you need to know. Forster's credits include Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland and Stranger Than Fiction, all competently crafted, all lacking even a trace of personality. Which is no doubt why he was hired for this project; the studio clearly wanted an efficient technician to guide this baby to Oscar glory. Any trace of a point-of-view or personal vision wasn't required. Though the contours of the story would seem to require, nay, demand the touch of an artist, someone with an insight into the human condition, such vision would merely get in the way. The formula is simple: Popular Book+Pretty Pictures=Academy Award!
Actually, it almost never works that way. Remember Cold Mountain or Memoirs Of A Geisha? Of course you don't, and neither does anyone else.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have I Am Legend. This is the umpteenth adaptation, official or otherwise, of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel, and the umpteenth version to screw it up.
The approach here is the opposite of The Kite Runner. Though Matheson's novel is highly regarded by science fiction and horror fans, it has relatively little "serious" literary reputation. Rather than an earnest, respectful and boring adaptation, we have a loose, we-can-improve-on-this adaptation, taking the novel as a jumping-off point.
Which would be fine, if the film had any place to go. But since the final screenplay was written by Akiva Goldsman, Hollywood's reigning prince of crap (he wrote Joel Schumacher's Batman films and scripted The DaVinci Code, which means his spot in Cinema Hell is assured), suckitude was guaranteed from the get-go. Matheson's despairing portrait of utter isolation (as well as the dark significance of the title) is jettisoned in favor of a knock-off of 28 Days Later, which was itself a knock-off of George Romero's Living Dead films, which were ripped off from Matheson's novel. All of which makes you wonder why they bothered acquiring the rights to the book in the first place.
There are, of course, many fine films made from literary sources. Virtually all of Stanley Kubrick's films came from books, sometimes filmed faithfully (A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon), sometimes not (Lolita, The Shining and most obviously Dr. Strangelove), but always filtered through the prisms of Kubrick's eyes, mind and sensibilities. The Godfather and Jaws are great examples of trashy fiction turned into cinematic art. John Huston's adaptations of everything from The Maltese Falcon to Wise Blood and George Roy Hill's note-perfect The World Of Henry Orient and Slaughterhouse Five show how author's singular voices can be translated to the screen.
It can be done, but not by chasing awards and/or profits.
