The Hours Movie - Not as many Hours long.

One of the first obstacles in adapting any book to film is simply fitting the vast amount of content a book possesses into a 2 hour long movie. The Hours would be no exception. It takes a long time to read a book and trying to pick out the most important parts to include in the film are the most important. While the character's history and mental ramblings are integral to the novel, they wouldn't be received so well by a theater audience. While the audience must still be clued in to the mental state of the women, a lot of their thoughts would have to be excluded for time restraints.

The most important aspect of The Hours is how the audience is put into the shoes of the three women. This must translate well in the movie or the entire effort is wasted. Fortunately, a film director has all sorts of tools which lend themselves to this very thing. Through the use of color, angle and music a quality director should be able to pull it off. During sad or somber parts the color should tone down to more blues and grays. The music should be long and drawn out with melancholy strings and slow passages. In contrast, when the women are feeling frantic or overwhelmed the colors should become high contrast reds and bright whites. The use of camera angles are important too. Unfortunately I don't really know anything about photography, so I'm not going to pretend to tell you how the director would use camera angles to relate to the audience, just that they should.

The Hours is based entirely on powerful emotional moments. In order to keep an audiences interest this has to come across and come across well. Due to the lack of action in the novel, the emotional moments would really have to shine in order for the movie to enjoy any sort of theatrical success. While it is possible to translate to theaters, I am eagerly looking forward to seeing just how the creators of the film version pulled it off.