The Descendants

I loved this book. Apparently it was originally a short story that the author changed into a book, her very first book, and it was made into a movie. Talk about beginners luck. In the book, Scottie, the younger daughter, shows up wearing a "Mrs. Clooney" t-shirt and I wondered how in the world they would work that in the movie starring Mr. Clooney without breaking the fourth wall but they just didn't include it. I wish they would have included Scottie's last scene with her mother when she finally tells her goodbye. A whole hell of a lot of the movie was narrated. That surprised me. It stayed true to the format of the book but I thought the idea of bringing it to film was to do something different, show flashback scenes, show him fighting with his wife or his wife cheating on him or jeez, something. But that script stayed first person from start to finish. Why did the screenwriters win an oscar for this if they didn't really re-write anything? They just pulled paragraphs from the book and had George Clooney do some jogging. Was it a good movie? Sure, but it was a damn good story to begin with and if you don't change anything that's kind of hard to mess up.