'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.