Ashley and I went and saw Stardust tonight; a well timed few days after the hardcore fans and the giggling girls had flocked to it over the weekend. It’s one of my favorite books, and as much as I love integrity, I also understanding needing to change certain elements to adapt a story to a different media and appeal to a different crowd. Ashley hadn’t made it all the way but confessed to have loved the plot so far.
The theater was pretty empty (but 7pm on a Monday, what else can one expect) and mostly young couples and groups of hardcore-looking teens filed in. We sat silent throughout the film, except for a few scattered laughs from Ashley and myself. At the final zoom-out, Ashley turned to me and pointed out that “They did live happily ever after, like you said.” My reply: “Yes but this was a completely different happily ever after.”
As the credits began, the man sitting behind me gave a “What-ever!” and a “That sucked…” floated from the back of the theater. We all stood up and filed out together, leaving no film afficianado behind to watch the credits. One teen offered a “It was better than I expected…” only to receive cold glares from her group of friends. Together we trudged back into the theater lobby, with gripes of “I’ll stick to books from now on.” and “Well that killed my faith in movies.”
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Yesterday Matt and I hung around a Barnes & Nobles for several hours trying to stave off boredom, and I decided that I should finally buy a copy of Gaiman’s Fragile Things. Unfortunately, I was unable to reach the F-G section of ‘Fiction and Literature’ because a swarm of teenage girls and their middle-aged mothers had gathered around those shelves speaking loudly of Stardust and how Gaiman absolutely must become a favorite author of theirs.
One girl picked up the new trade paperback of Stardust, opened to the middle and exclaimed: “Tristran?! I’ve always thought his name was Tristan!” The girl next to her, probably a sister, reprimanded: “Always? You just saw the movie yesterday!”
One of my friend is a huge Neil Gaiman fan, so she was telling me about Stardust… it sounds like an interesting movie. XD And that little story with the girl and her sister is funny, ahahaha.
Are you one of those people that would rather keep something to yourself or do you not mind that little fangirls are reading the books now?
I don’t mind anyone reading Stardust because I think its such a good piece of literature. Its just that I hope these fan-girls are either disappointed by the novel’s differences from the film or, hopefully, end up enjoying reading the book (both the story and the experience) better.
So this is way way way way way late but I did not like the Stardust film at all. Possibly because I had just read the book, but seriously, I just didn’t like it.
Also I bought Fragile Things a few weeks ago and I can’t wait to start reading it. Too many other books to read, though. However, I did purchase and finish Coraline, which was good, but not nearly as scary as all the advertising had led me to believe.