[quote]Professor X wrote:
simon-hecubus wrote:
Xvim wrote:
Hey Chump, I’ll give you the link to the interview with Moore and you can read it yoruself, minus my misrememberings 
I can see how Moore’s problem with movie adaptations started with TLOEG. They really fucked with the overall concept on that one.
To be commercially viable, it had to be greatly dumbed down and the presentation of some of the nuances/secrets of the characters compressed. I enjoyed the movie from a Big Dumb Fun point of view, knowing full well that the literary bent of the graphic version would be 99% lost on American audiences. My biggest complaint was the addition of Tom Sawyer to the League — it was the most obvious clue that the film’s producers “didn’t get it”.
I still don’t get him going on about Constantine though. He really only created the bare ‘chassis’ for that character. Subsequent writers were responsible for fleshing him out and expanding the back story.
I do wish the movie could have been done with the character as a cockney Brit though, I think people would have dug it. If they didn’t want to go with a real Brit, I think that someone like Brad Pitt could have pulled it off. He’s definitely got the scruffiness down.
Interestingly, Moore doesn’t mention From Hell, which was a very well done adaptation IMO. The main difference with the graphic novel was that it went into way, way more detail on the Freemason background and Gull’s internal monologues (i.e. descent into Looneyville).
I believe From Hell was self-published and one would hope that Moore profited nicely from selling the film rights for that one.
From Hell was brilliant. I have that dvd with me right now. I think the credit for that also goes to the Hughes brothers (twin directors) who simply “got it”. They also did Dead Presidents and Menace to Society which only didn’t get as much praise because of reasons that I won’t even go into right now because that is another debate entirely.
A book adaptation can be made and broken by the director. There are very few who do it right, but when they do, they deserve much credit for it.[/quote]
I don’t know about [i]brilliant.[i] Definitely enjoyable, and I do give the Hughes Brothers credit for adapting what most thought to be unadaptable.
The source material is somewhere around 600 pages of Moore’s ramblings about magic, the British royals, the Freemasons, and London Architecture. The Johnny Depp character is nowhere near the lead of the story in the GN; it’s mostly about Sir William Gull (Ian Holm.)