So last night was the premiere of the second season of HBO's "Game of Thrones". I don't know why it took so long for someone to realize it, but this is the easily the best way to adapt a novel to screen. Each episode is an hour long and there are 10 episodes per season, this way you don't have to cut anything a reader of the book might have enjoyed. This isn't to say that the producers have to adhere a hundred percent to the source material. "Game of Thrones", in fact, has scenes that never happen in the books. These scenes are necessary to compensate for the limitations of the medium. In a book, a character's motivation or back story could be told though inner thoughts or simple exposition. That doesn't really work on screen (except, of course, for the LOTR opening).

I'm tired of movies butchering a great book. Some don't even try to keep with the source. Take The Bourne Identity and its sequels; they took the title of book, the name of the main character, and the idea of an amnesiac government agent and discarded the rest. While the movies might have been good on their own, attaching the name of the book ruined them for me. LOTR was probably the best modern film adaptaion of any novel, but even that is dwarfed (haha) by the HBO series.

...and we're back!

I've decided to take this up again, Hopefully, I'll be consistent, though I won't make any promises. Hopefully someone will read this, though I know you won't make any promises. Truth is, I enjoy doing this, but a weekly football entry began to feel suspiciously like homework. That's not to say I'll never discuss sports here, just not as much. Hence, the name change. You still here?

As for the new name, it's a work in progress. The terrible secret about me is that I'm not nearly as creative as I'd like people to believe. Just ask all the novels I gotten two pages into writing. I began writing a fantasy novel, had the basic plot figured out, but soon realized that I'd have to make up names for all the people and placed. Not just name them, but make up names from scratch. Gave me whole knew level of respect for writers of the genre. I mean, bot only do they name the characters, but their names fit so perfectly. I mean, take Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, the name of any other human character would diminish the character. He can't be Boromir.

Speaking of LOTR, the casting has always bothered me. This has become an issue (the other way0 with The Hunger Games How is it that Peter Jackson casted this epic story with so many characters and the only ones who weren't white were the orcs? The orcs being the only non white characters was messed up on a few levels. First, the obvious, they were mindless and violent villans who mostly came out at night. Second, and maybe more disturbing, orcs were elves who'd become evil. So if you took the graceful, beautiful, perfect creatures and made them evil they went from white to black. Also, there were two separate camps of Men. Alright, I get it, you didn't want to make Aragorn black, you think that would bring unwelcome scrutiny to the film. Fine so Aragorn, Boromir, and all citizens of Gondor could be white. Why not make the Rohanians black? It's not a big deal.

There was an uproar about a year ago when news spread that Marvel Comics was going to have a half black half hispanic Spirder-Man. First, something about comic books that you need to know, the same character has many different comics dedicated to him. For example, Spider-Man will have many difference comic series' that he stars in that have completely different stories and are independant of each other. They're like alternate dimensions of the same character. Got that? Good.

Anyway, Marvel decided a few years ago to start a new series for all their big characters giving them origins in the modern world rather than whenever they were created. The original stories kept going, but the new ones were in their Ultimate series. So they started a new Spider-Man story. Eventually Peter Parker is killed off and a new character, Miles Morales, gets bit by a spider and dons the tights. Well, peole revolted at the idea that an iconic (fictional) character was going from being white to black. What I loved most about this was that the racists had no idea of what actually was happening and just heard "Black Spider-Man' got up in arms. Stupid. Same thing happening now with The Hunger Games.

That said, I too had a problem with the idea of Miles Morales. It wasn't so much that there was a minority Spider-Man, but that there was a new Spider-Man. If, when the Ultimate, series started they'd decided to make Peter Parker black, I'd think it was cool. just the idea that someone else could be Spider-Man seems to cheapen it a little. Make it less unique. But hey, that's the dork in me.

Sorry for rambling, this wasn't supposed to be this long.

Peace