Film Vs Book: Paper Towns and Me, Earl and the Dying Girl

I wanted to do this post because these two films based upon two great young adult books came out this summer. I owned both of these books but the films coming out gave me the impetus to read the books. I absolutely flew through both of them and enjoyed them both very much (as you'll have seen from my review of both!). I wanted to post about the films and the books because I enjoyed both elements of the way the story is told. This post does contain some spoilers so if you have no idea what either of these books is about, I suggest you pick them both up now, read them and then check back at this post. 

Paper towns. I loved the book because it was a bit of a mystery and was very fast paced. The movie has this same fast-paced element to it but the mystery element seems hyped up a little more, it is more, 'this is scary looking for Margo' than 'I wonder why Margo has us doing all of this stuff?'. One of the things I was most looking forward to seeing in the film, aside from the bit with the peeing in the car, was when Q and Margo break into Seaworld. There are two things missing from Margo's list in the film though and that was one of them (the book has 11 items, the film 9 items). I was a bit disappointed by this, as was my cinema companion and fellow John Green fan. I did love seeing the road trip brought to life in the film though and Margo looked exactly as she appeared in my head-yey!

Me Earl and the Dying Girl. I loved the film of this book as well but I have to say, the film didn't make me laugh as much as the book-surprising! There were certainly some laugh-out-loud moments in the film as there was in the book but I think possibly the images i conjured up in my head were just a little sillier and way out there. I really liked the way the scripted scenes that were in the book were done in the film. The books is part prose and part script and to get this effect over in the film, part of it is live action and some bits are animated with clay models or just general stop motions animation. The thing I also really liked about the film  was that you got to see snippets of the films that Earl and Greg made-they were fabulous. I like the fact that the books is mainly written in the second person and the film also achieves that by talking directly to us, the audience.

So as you can see, I liked both books and both films, not a very controversial post really, however I wanted to make clear that there are definitely difference between both films and their respective books. If you read and watched both of these this summer, I'm sure you'll agree with me that a great time was to be had by all!