But that's exactly what Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" gains in its most recent movie version, which stars Jack Black as a loudmouth underachiever who works in the mail room of a New York newspaper. Black's Gulliver -- everyone calls him by his surname, owing perhaps to the fact that his first name is Lemuel -- doesn't have much in the way of ambition, but he is nursing a fierce crush on one of the paper's editors (Amanda Peet). He finally works up the courage to ask her on a date, but chickens out at the last second, and in order to explain his presence in her office, he awkwardly puts in for a travel-writing assignment (get it?).

So far, so nothing like Jonathan Swift. Gulliver does eventually make his way to the kingdom of Lilliput, whose diminutive residents are permanently at war with nearby Blefuscu, and makes himself useful by singlehandedly dispatching the Blefuscunian navy. But that's about all that remains of Swift's 1729 novel. Well, that and a scene in which Gulliver extinguishes a fire raging through the Lilliputian king's castle by voiding his bladder on the royal residence.

Continue Reading...