"As an arm's-length Hoover reader, I can testify that the sometime "queen of BookTok" may be bonkers, but she does labor to have her characters rise to the occasion, change over time, do all the things that characters are supposed to do in novels. The problem is that her plots are so vivid and dramatic that the author is in a constant arms race to make the characters' reactions seem psychologically plausible."
"Far too often, you find them, instead, responding to insane happenstance with the flattest of clichés. Her readers seem to accept they're in for a bumpy ride, and Justin Baldoni's It Ends With Us (which has a much simpler story than Regretting You) landed the plane for most moviegoers too. But Regretting You, from director Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars), shows just how easy it is to misunderstand Hoover's appeal and put the exact wrong things on-screen."
Extremely popular romance novels often contain vivid, improbable interpersonal situations that invite scoffing and hate-watching when adapted to film. One recent adaptation attempts to replicate a previous adaptation's success but struggles to render the novels' dramatic turns into psychologically plausible on-screen reactions. The plots' vividness creates an arms race to justify character behavior, yet characters frequently respond to unlikely events with flat clichés. Some viewers accept heightened drama; others mock and hate-watch. A simpler story previously adapted landed better with moviegoers, illustrating the difficulty of translating melodramatic plotting to effective cinema.
Read at Slate Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]