Movie reviews: YA book to movie – City of Bones & Beautiful Creatures

I’m just catching up on all the “YA” movies. I know there’s a big push to support these projects but honestly, I’m underwhelmed.  Warm Bodies was good and The Fault in Our Stars looks promising, so there’s still hope.



City of Bones – IMBD

Based on the insanely popular The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare. This move stuck pretty close to the book, to it’s detriment imo. I can’t imagine too many people who haven’t read the books could understand what was going on.

I liked Lily Collins as Clary and Robert Sheehan as Simon but was sooo disappointed by most of the other casting. Especially Isabelle, Magnus and Jace.

Jace as played by Jamie Campbell Bower was awful. Instead of Jace’s bad boy, snarky humor we had a droll delivery of some of the best lines from the book. And that hair. I will never ever make fun of Jasper’s hair from the Twilight series again after seeing what they did to this poor kids hair.

This actually wasn’t quite as bad as I expected. It was watchable but the cast didn’t have much chemistry and the ending felt rushed.

Final verdict: Meh



Beautiful Creatures – IMBD

I haven’t read the books so I went into this with no expectations. I had a difficult time with Ethan’s heavy accent at first and I got a big Twilight ripoff vibe but I really loved the chemistry between Lena (Alice Englert) and Ethan (Alden Ehrenreich). They acted like two, realistic, fumbling, ordinary looking teenagers and I was charmed.

Once the big bad(s) entered the picture however, the movie took a nosedive into wtf-ery. Was this supposed to be scary? Funny? I didn’t know what they were going for anymore. The acting was wildly uneven and instead of the dark gothic feel that (I think) they were going for – it ended up looking silly.

I could tell that nothing was going to get wrapped up in this film . It’s one thing to do that in a book but I don’t think movies handle cliffhangers very well.

It’s also another case of feeling like I’m missing a whole chunk of background, one that readers would know. Particularly pertaining to Ethan.

Final verdict: Good beginning and I was digging the romance between Lena and Ethan but it went downhill pretty quickly.

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I’ll close out this post with the new movie trailer for If I Stay, based on the book by Gayle Forman. What do you guys think? It seems to capture the feeling of the book which makes me all kinds of sad remembering it and the sequel – Where She Went. I do think it’s one of those books that could translate well to film. It seems harder to do with the paranormal series. Probably due to the special effects coming off as cheesy.