I'm nearly finished plowing through I Am Number Four the book. This evening we took in IAN4 the film. I was actually somewhat eager to see it, mostly to find out what the writers did to counteract the literary sins that the book's author committed--especially knowing that Marti Noxon was on the writing crew. (Marti, if you read this, I will buy you dinner in thanks for this project.)
Going to film meant they could (a) rewrite the painful dialogue, which actually turned bits of the movie fun (b) cut out the narrator's internal monologue, which alternately bored and infuriated the reader and (c) cut to scenes of what's happening elsewhere, and break up the huge blocks of exposition. And I was intrigued by what they kept, what they cut, and what they rearranged.
Now, don't get me wrong. You can carve and mold a turd so that it looks like a Bavarian castle and delicately gild it, but in the end it still smells funky. They managed to turn an unrepentant eye-bleeder of a book into a not too bad film.
Coyote says two and a half wags, but bumps it to three because he laughed at one of the jokes.
As an aside: For those who are unaware, IAN4 was produced in James Frey's new literary sweatshop--the guy Oprah yelled at on national television for lying to her and hurting her feelings. And so I also laughed at a point in the book when our hero burst through a window, which "shatters into a million little pieces behind me". I cannot tell you if this was deliberate, and if so whether it was Frey going 'neener neener' or the author giving Frey a 'screw you', but I still laughed. Does that make me a bad person?
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