I will readily admit I’m a film fanatic. Left to my own devices, I will chain smoke an entire box set of movies without budging for bathroom or cigarette breaks. But I will also admit there is an entire genre of film which, unless it is required of me by my job, I will not voluntarily see.

I don’t mind gory slasher flicks or sappy romantic comedies or even unnerving, experimental films. No, the genre I avoid is much more insidious and widespread. These films can creep into the most discerning of Netflix queues, they can stow away on the most unassuming of marquees. They are adaptations of books that I’ve already read and loved.

So often with these films, it seems the Hollywood machine has rumbled to a yawning start and devoured some bit of beloved novel in order to spit out, Dr. Seuss Sneetch-style, a star-studded but less visionary re-envisioning of the original.

I’m not arguing that no movies should be made from books, nor am I advocating the reading of books in lieu of seeing movies, or vice versa. What I am saying is that to see a film of a book for which you’ve developed a fondness, especially a childhood fondness, is tantamount to librocide-not of the book itself, but of the vision you’ve conjured through the reading.

Witness the recent “Golden Compass,” which I saw under duress. I read the book as a preteen and remember a wild adventure housed in a world so fantastical that it would be impossible to evoke in the crushing confines of a first act. The movie tries anyway, and the result is a muddle of special effects and rushed plot points that don’t do justice to the transcendent adventure of author Philip Pullman.

In my prepubescent, self-interested mind, I knew exactly what protagonist Lyra looked like. (She was a small, scruffy girl with hair like a brillo pad and skin permanently smudged in soot; she would have been beautiful if only you could scrub off some of the grime.) Actress Dakota Blue Richards, while charming, is nothing like the Lyra I imagined. For one, she looks nothing like I.

To be fair, sometimes a film is a beautiful rendition of a book, adding appealing visual elements or presenting a new viewpoint: However silly the recent 3-D “Beowulf” was, it certainly presented something new. But I didn’t read Beowulf until I was in college and even then never much cared for it.

Sometimes, the movie surpasses its source material. Francis Coppola’s “The Godfather” is more nuanced and more starkly riveting than Mario Puzo’s book. I have no qualms with making a film that improves on a lackluster read, especially one so decidedly not appropriate for the younger crowd.

Sometimes, a movie merely meanders in the same mediocrity: “Memoirs of a Geisha” was an entertaining, but ultimately average, book. The movie, while visually stunning in a way a book could never be, falls victim to the same uninspired pitfalls.

Perhaps more authorial involvement in script writing and the final cut would do the trick. “The Cider House Rules” book and film versions were both written by John Irving. The book is an elegiac reverie that takes about three days to read, and the movie is an elegiac reverie that takes about three hours to watch. Unfortunately, the vast majority of films don’t benefit from this extended involvement of their creators, and they suffer for it. But perhaps it isn’t so simple. The change in medium is more than a simple page-to-screen move.

To take a book, especially one as wildly imaginative and personally beloved as “The Golden Compass,” and turn it into a film is to confine it to one single set of visual standards. Every image you’ve already conjured about the written world is dismissed, and your imagination is confined to one picture. The glory of books is that everything looks exactly the way you want it to, even if you mentally put your mother in the evil villainess’ place.

This confinement effectively removes you from your own adventure. I am no longer young Lyra, scrambling over rooftops and saving my friends from religious fanatics, or Harry Potter, scrambling along passageways and saving my friends from magical fiends. I am reduced to an audience member, watching as someone else gets to have all the fun in a world I feel I know much more intimately than they do. And where’s the fun in that?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Cadenza. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.