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Daren in Brief - ADAPTING CRAP
by Daren Foster

Shakespeare on TV

Daren Foster PODCAST May 14th 2009

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Daren in Brief
Adapting Crap

by Daren Foster

Yes, I have not been committing my brief musings to bytes much of late sojourning as I was around Ireland. That doesn’t mean my head’s been void of snippets of thought. It’s just that I’ve been too cold and/or drunk to type them out. Or to organize them in any sort of orderly fashion.

But I am back now. Almost dried out in both senses of the word. And ready to start popping off once again.

So here goes.. A Bunch of Reasons I Will Not Be Going To See Angels and Demons. Ever.

1) Tom Hanks.

2) Angels and Demons the book. It sucks or, at least the 12 pages of it that I managed to read before my eyes started to throb and threaten to bleed. I know, I know. Popular film wisdom tells us that it’s easier to make a good movie from a bad book than it is a bad book but Angels and Demons goes beyond the definition of bad, out past the realms of `atrocious’ and ‘deplorable’. How about `atrociable’ or maybe `deplocious’? Yeah, deplocious. During the height of the DaVinci Code craze before it was made into a movie, I picked up a copy of Dan Brown’s earlier book, Angels and Demons, at a friends cottage and thought I’d get a sense of what all the fuss was about. Almost immediately I was struck by the thought that this book could not have been written by an adult. Set aside the

one-dimensional characters and their absolutely deplocious dialogue, the sentence structures were put together as if by a 5th grader. Subject. Predicate. Object. Subject. Predicate. Object. Subject. Predicate. Object. No adult without some sort of learning disability could write this badly. More to the point, no one who wrote this badly could be able to spin a yarn compelling enough to make me want to set aside a few hours of my life to read it. So I threw it aside, certain that would be the end of it. Now it’s a movie. What do I know?

3) Tom Hanks. Did I mention him already? Well, just in case I didn’t. Hanks is a better actor than Dan Brown is a writer but he still may be the dullest movie star we have going. While he might not be one of the 5 people I’d most like to punch in the face (apparently he’s a nice guy), I just won’t shell out any money to see him. Especially in anything that’s attached to a Dan Brown project.

4) Dan Brown. What kind of writer is named Dan Brown?

5) Ron Howard. (See point #3 and replace all derivations of Tom Hanks with Ron Howard and actor with director and that will about sum it up.) Ron Howard should direct fewer films and narrate more Arrested Developments.

6) I can think of better ways to piss off the Roman Catholic church.

7) Tom Hanks. (See above.)

8) Dan Brown. (ibid.)

9) Dan Brown.

10) Tom Hanks.

11) Dan Brown, Tom Hanks and Ron Howard.

12)Ron Howard, Tom Hanks and Dan Brown.

13)Dan Brown, Ron Howard and Tom Hanks. And Dan Brown Brown’s books.