A Link to the Past
Banned
It was pretty good :v I've been listening to the audiobook for a few hours (give or take) every night. I'd never read it before, aside from a cursory examination of the first handful of pages, but I had seen the mini-series. At the time I really liked the mini-series, and still kind of do - the acting is all well-done - but after having listened to the audiobook, it's hard to enjoy it now. There's so much depth to all of the characters that is lost from not having the time to really give them focus. For instance, I felt that Harold and Nadine were not adequately fleshed out in the mini-series. To me, they just felt kind of like a couple of assholes. In the books though, I found them to be way more sympathetic. It wasn't JUST that they were under Flagg's control, but also that Harold was an unloved child who didn't get any recognition for his accomplishments (both before and after Captain Trip). He was still a possessive douchebag, but the book takes it time to kind of establish a deeper awareness that he is or was being shit. Nadine meanwhile in the mini-series felt like she reveled in doing harm. Why was she influenced by Flagg? Aside from him directly imprinting upon her that she was the vessel for his would-be child, I only figured out some of her motivations in the book. It was especially valuable that in the book she was the parental figure for Joe/Leo, and expressed the fact that without someone to need her, she loses purpose. Every character has this kind of problem, but I thought that these two in particular were more egregious. Oh, and I suppose Mother Abigail too - she always felt more like a plot device than a character.
What really bugs me is that they are trying to do a film adaptation of the book, and it's like, the last time you did an adaptation you spent years trying to wrap your head around how to condense it all. How about going to HBO and create "The Stand" TV series? You can spend as much time as you want on the characters, and you don't have to cut down the violence (I was somewhat surprised just how more violent and graphic it was - talking about faces being blown away and such).
What really bugs me is that they are trying to do a film adaptation of the book, and it's like, the last time you did an adaptation you spent years trying to wrap your head around how to condense it all. How about going to HBO and create "The Stand" TV series? You can spend as much time as you want on the characters, and you don't have to cut down the violence (I was somewhat surprised just how more violent and graphic it was - talking about faces being blown away and such).
