I often choose books by searching for famous movies or shows on web. Often these great movies are based on bestseller books. So far I have always read the book first and then seen the show/movie. Be it Harry Potter series, to trailers of movies like Green Mile, Book Thief, Memoirs of a Geisha, and maybe few more. Lord of the Rings was my first and only experience of having watched and completely blown away by the movie so much that I issued the novel from our institute library, took a coloured printout of Middle Earth, laminated it, stuck it on my hostel’s room wall, and then read the book, all the while tracking the route of Frodo Baggins. A similar or maybe of a lesser degree fascination arose in me when I watched the movie Help. In my few hours long flight journey in an Air India plane, I was drenched with emotions as I saw the beautiful film packed with astounding performance by all actors. After almost 8 years of this experience I picked The Help to read. It is written by Kathryn Stockett.
The book is based on how coloured people i.e. Black Americans were treated by the Whites. The book has been written in first person by two black maids and one white woman. Aibeleen, Minny and Miss Skeeter. The hush hush stories of how maids are treated by their employers are said out loud when Skeeter decides to interview and publish a book of experiences of the different maids of her town Jackson, while maintaining complete anonymity about herself as well as the maids. It’s a great plot and has a captivating spirit.
However, I found the book to have dragged at many places. It could have avoided or shortened few chapters. Perhaps had I not watched the movie, it could have been more enriching for me. And unlike other books-based movies, this one adopted almost everything from the book. It didn’t skip any information or scene written in the book. That lead for me to have absolutely no surprises or freshness in the book. And as the movie is so well engraved in my mind, I could only visualise the actors while reading and was often anticipating to read the sections in the book that I already knew beforehand. Thus it didn’t take me off guard ever.
Overall my experience was that even though the book is good, my prior information of each and every upcoming paragraph lead me to have little excitement for the chapters ahead. I think I will always now try to avoid watching great movies particularly if they are based on books. This also gives me another reason to enjoy watching tacky and absolutely crap movies on a loop over and over again. Yay!
Aali Pant 