A Completely Different Tale from the Book

Rating: 3/10 (3 October 2018)

I finished reading the book yesterday, which I absolutely adored. It was one of those books that unassumingly wraps itself around your heart and palpitates your imagination back from the choking state it can find itself in after drowning a few days in the banality of a rather mundane life that most of us live. Suffice it to say it was a good book.
So, like a complete and total eejit, I decide it might be a good idea to go and watch the 2007 adaptation of said book. Now, by 'might' I mean 'most definitely believed it to be' and by 'good idea' I mean 'was ensorcelled by the stupidity of said notion enough to convince myself of such.'
Now I've known, as most modestly intelligent folk these days do, that the adaptations of books by Hollywood are often deviant (to say the least) from the original story and in some cases must be altered entirely, in bits and parts, in order to expedite a story line into the limited time-frame allotted by production budgets, run times and the very shrinking attention span of the average consumerist viewer. But never, in all my years and in my wildest imagination, did I ever conceive of an adaptation so wholly different from it's source material that I found myself chanting the the acronym 'wtf' like a Benedictine Monk chanting the Breviary. The movie was almost entirely devoid of everything contained within the pages of the novel. The only similarities, and dare I not say that without qualifying it with the notion that I am using the term 'similarities' loosely, were the names of the characters and a few (very, very, few) plot points.
The entire endeavor was like that of an apprentice mage fumbling around his masters book of spells and attempting to produce a complex Simulacrum but instead creating a deformed homonculus, or a badly rotted Golem.
That being said..
If you like your stories to start where they end, to give little concern for Character development, to rush the plot lines along at an exponentially rushed pace and to trade all of these for attractive actors/actresses and dynamic special effects, not to mention trading ALL THE MAGIC for poorly executed humor, then this is most definitely the movie for you.