Well Worth the Wait

I've been making my way through some TV-on-DVD sets this past week—"Daria," "Undeclared" and, currently, "Parker Lewis Can't Lose." The kind of marathon viewing DVDs make possible sparks nostalgia, taking me back to who I was and what the world was when I first watched these shows (The house shirts! The combat boots! The answering machines!).

Going through episode after episode, I also started missing the old way we watched TV, having to wait a week or longer between episodes, the tension building over how cliffhangers would be resolved, our relationships with characters deepening as we spent months or years with them. Now being able to watch an entire season in one day, that payoff is gone.

Because I watched these three series (and the others I own on DVD), live on TV the first time around, I remember the waiting, the wondering, so major plot developments, like Lizzie and Steven getting together on "Undeclared," are less jarring because I remember it taking a few weeks to build as opposed to just a few minutes.

With Netflix releasing every episode of the new season of "Arrested Development" in one chunk for fans to devour in one sitting or savor over the course of several days, as opposed to being parsed out over several weeks or months in a traditional TV schedule, I wonder if our viewing experience is being diminished. I do enjoy marathon viewing of shows I've already seen but am not sure if I could develop the same intense appreciation for a show I've only seen on DVD as I have for the shows like "Daria," "Gilmore Girls" and "Parks & Recreation" because I invested months of viewing in each.

I used to get so impatient waiting through a six-week hiatus for my favorite shows, anxious to know how the conflicts would resolve. Even when having to wade through the frustrations of pre-empting and schedule swaps, the payoff of a brand-new episode usually made it worth the while. If the waiting is erased and time invested lessened, will our relationships with our favorite shows and characters weaken? Will we even have favorite shows anymore? Or will all shows, episodes, characters, plots and settings be mashed together as more bits of the endless stream of content flowing at us?

'Now a Major Motion Picture!'

I don't remember what movie I went to see, but last fall I saw the trailer for "Anna Karenina." It was stunning, the clothes, the sets of the play-within-the-film, the romance, the tragedy. I had to see it.

I missed the movie in theaters, finally catching it a few months ago on-demand after excitedly reading the book, which I enjoyed far more than I thought I would. My affection for the book matched with the impression left by the movie's trailer, I was prepared to be blown away.

I wasn't.

"Anna Karenina" is a big book with a half-dozen main characters leading paralleling and intersecting story lines. A two-hour-and-10-minute movie couldn't do the book justice. Too much had to be left out, left unsaid, implied or overly expositioned. Like most film adaptations, "Anna Karenina" was a mess and a disappointment.

I've read many hundreds of books in my life. Reading is one of my favorite activities and this year, thanks to the extra time I now have on my hands, I've indulged. I've read memoirs, classics (including the aforementioned "Anna Karenina"), essay collections, fiction, nonfiction. I've bought stacks of books, borrowed a few, made lists of what I want to read next. It's been a fantastic excursion.

Though I read it in high school (like so many of us), I used the release of the new film adaptation, and the recent reading of Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast," with its somewhat cutting descriptions of the man and his muse, as excuses to re-read Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." It's a really short book, less than 200 pages, so I read it in about two days with the hope of doing something I haven't done in ages—seeing the movie on opening day.

The new Baz Luhrmann adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" has built an insane amount of buzz and garnered really terrible reviews. I've followed some of the buzz (The Clothes! The Jewels! Leo! Carey!) and taken the reviews with a grain of salt. I like Lurhmann's films, his style, the work of his production designer/costume designer/production partner/wife Catherine Martin, and felt like I knew what I was in for and would enjoy the experience regardless.

I wanted to, I really did. I just couldn't.

The problem isn't the direction, the acting, the costumes, the sets, the music, the 3-D, the various tricks and bells and whistles. The problem is this is a film adaptation of a much-loved, much-analyzed, must-scrutinized book; a book that's existed in the hearts and minds of millions of readers for nearly 100 years; a book that, like most books, shouldn't be a movie.

Leaving the movie theater, I tried to think of good adaptations. The "Harry Potter" series came to mind, but even those compressed too much, left out too much, quickly explained away too much. "The Joy Luck Club" may be the best but maybe that's because Amy Tan's writing style feels so verbal that it was just easier to transfer it from the page to the screen.

Film adaptations of my beloved Hemingway's classics have been terrible. The voiceover opening to "The Sun Also Rises" made me laugh out loud. Casting in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "The Old Man and the Sea" was horrid. So many great characters, so much beautiful language, the tension, the struggles, all completely flat on the screen.

It's become so cliché, but Hollywood does have few new ideas, so of course studios are going to keep buying the rights to adapt popular books. As has been proven far too many times in the past, the great majority of those adaptations are going to be terrible. Like Gatsby building his fortune to win Daisy's love, the studios will forge ahead with their adaptations, even if it's a lost cause.