I decided that Gossip Girl only sort of marginally counts, since it's a TV show rather than a movie. Using the deliciously trashy book series by Cecily Von Ziegesar as a jumping-off point, the show has both retained and changed elements from the books to create a first-class guilty-pleasure television experience. Some characters have been greatly enhanced by their TV incarnations - Ed Westwick's Chuck Bass has turned into this epically manipulative, womanizing character (as opposed to the pet-monkey-toting background joke that the character often is in the books), and the choice of Kristen Bell to voice the eponymous anonymous rumormonger was inspired - while a few have been done a disservice - the show has turned Vanessa the kind-of-punk filmmaker classmate with a shaved head and healthy cynicism about the goings-on of her peers into Vanessa the kind-of-whiny hipster with only marginal ties to the UES milieu of most of the characters.
A pleasant surprise of the show's second season is that the writers have returned to the books to provide new storylines. I know that some shows will use a book as inspiration, then move into their own stories as the show progresses (I've heard that this is the case with Dexter, but I don't know because I haven't read the books). Gossip Girl, however, has drawn characters and situations from the books into the adapted world that exists in the show - as a Yalie I was excited to see them bring in Blair's single-minded obsession with the school, even if the episode set at "Yale" was kind of a farce (in my elitist opinion :)). I, for one, am really hoping that they decide to incorporate Dan's uber-pretentious literary salon. For the most part, Gossip Girl the show encompasses the best of what its source material has to offer and uses it to achieve new heights of over-the-top soapiness every week.
No comments:
Post a Comment