Sunday, June 14, 2015

Hollywood's spin on "The Duff"

Before I start off I want to let you know that I know that the movie and book are almost never the same. It just doesn't happen as the director and write use the source material and spin it for the movie or TV show in some cases. Sometimes the changes or things that they leave out aren't noticeable and sometimes they are. There are are a few cases where the movie is better than the book, see Legally Blonde, and there are more cases were the book is better than the movie, see The Princess Bride.  More often than not Hollywood will take the name of a book and keep a couple of the character's names but then they will have completely different characteristics and the plot will have gone through the cookie cutter plot maker for Hollywood. This is wanted happened to The Duff

I read the book The Duff for the first time when the movie first came out in theaters and I really enjoyed it. The story was different and featured a strong female who didn't really make excuses but instead analyzed her actions at the end. However, based on the previews I had a feeling that the movie wasn't going to be anything like the book that I had read. I recently saw the movie for the first time and I was right. The movie keeps lets some characters keep their names, however all of the backstories are different.

You can change a character's name all you want, but keep at least a portion of their backstory, please! How do you have the same protagonist if she isn't taking care of her father or hiding from one of her best friends that she dated his brother? You don't. Instead you get a cookie cutter nerd protagonist who is kinda flat, which makes the story kinda boring. For the best friends they kept them somewhat the same, but they more or less combined them into a mish-mosh. In the book, each girl in the group gets a distinctive personality, and in the movie only Bianca has a distinctive personality.  Jessica and Casey are boring and almost a non-factor in the story. The best thing they do is shut down a website and make a dress.

Wesley's character gets the worst treatment, as in the book he explains that he is basically shunned from guys for competition reasons and his family shuns him due to other reasons. In the movie, he gets the, what has become cliche, fighting parents for sympathy points. You stripped this character of EVERYTHING that made him different and instead made him a typical teen character movie. A fraction of his character could have been kept for the movie, just a fraction. Toby gets transformed from a seemingly perfect guy in the book, to just a guy in the film. There is nothing interesting about him in the movie, other than Bianca likes him. His look probably gets the biggest change, as in the book is described as being straight laced and preppy; while the movie sees him as a rocker.

What makes me most disappointed about the film is that it takes out one of the original messages that I got out of the book. That if you start using a word that someone means negatively and give it a positive spin, then the power the word had is gone. At the end of the book the girls start using DUFF to comment on themselves, which means the power of the word is gone. That makes me saddest about this jump from page to screen, but I understand why this change was made. As everyone gets something different out of a book and with mainstream release, especially for teens, studios want everyone to get the same thing out of the movie going experience.

Should you chose to experience The Duff,  I obviously recommend reading the book and skipping the movie. As really the only thing it's good for it watching Robbie Amell, who you can catch on The Flash on TV.