Movie Based on Books

[monta]

It has happened to most of us, our favourite book is made into a movie and butchered.

But sometimes the reverse happens a mediocre book is an excellent movie.

And sometimes a terrible book is made into a terrible movie.

What books should never have been made it to film and what books are eclipsed by their film.

My first choice is Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, an average book but an excellent film

 

[Kilgore Trout]

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The movie was simply a complete and utter disgrace.

 

[Nepenthe]

The Shining. Horrible novel, excellent movie. Stand By Me as well though it was a novella and I liked both.
Fight Club. Good book, but the movie trimmed the excess and cut to the core.
L.A. Confidential. Ellroy's book is good, but meanders and focuses on a serial killer subplot that goes nowhere. The film is damn near perfect.
Spider. I really liked the book and had no idea how Cronenberg could pull off the unreliable 1st person narrative, but he did it, and I like the movie slightly more than the novel.

 

[monta]

L.A. Confidential. Ellroy's book is good, but meanders and focuses on a serial killer subplot that goes nowhere. The film is damn near perfect.

Damn near perfect is right.

I liked the Shining book, I was 11 mind you but it scared the bejeebers out of me.

 

[Nepenthe]

Damn near perfect is right.

I liked the Shining book, I was 11 mind you but it scared the bejeebers out of me.

I have an admittedly irrational dislike of King, despite him being the nicest human being, wonderful to his fans, and single-handedly reviving the horror genre in the 70s. Something about his books just bugs me and I can't define it...
Having said that I loved The Mist, it really scared me as a kid. And kinda enjoyed the film as well.

Forgot the worst...
Oh yeah ATS, Hitchhiker's Guide' was disappointing. But Zoe Deschanel and Bill Nighy made it slightly watchable for me. It was one of those "the heart is in the right place" type of things that just died onscreen.
Just about any Philip K. Dick film except for Blade Runner has been really bad. And Blade Runner has so little to do with Do Androids' I'm not sure it counts.
Jumper. Great young adult sci-fi in the Heinlein tradition just brutalized in film.

I'll think of 100 after I sign off...

 

[Kilgore Trout]

Love Asamov's Robot novels. The movie, I Robot...meh.

 

[gnomon]

Well I've been told.....

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
Excellent book. Excellent film.

Unfortunately I have too many books to read at this moment and this dinosaur, when it comes to renting films and doesn't have a netflix account, cannot find the film at Blockbuster. I can find every Will Ferrel movie but when it comes to something worthwhile...no.

I thought The Mist was well done. Because I have a thing about spiders and that one scene.........

On the other end:
How about Passages from Finnegan's Wake on film!
http://www.ubu.com/film/joyce_wake.html

 

[gnomon]

I get to double post.

The SciFi (now SyFy?) version of The Dresden Files was horrible.

 

[monta]

I am on the opposite side of the King camp, I find him creepy but I have a nostalgic love of his old books,Pet Sematary made me cry like a baby, terrible film.
Shawshank Redemption is better than the novella it is based on and Apt Pupil should not have been written or filmed. Not even Sir Ian could save us. The Green Mile was a watchable film, but mostly because of Michael Clarke Duncan.

 

[Nepenthe]

I am on the opposite side of the King camp, I find him creepy but I have a nostalgic love of his old books,Pet Sematary made me cry like a baby, terrible film.
Shawshank Redemption is better than the novella it is based on and Apt Pupil should not have been written or filmed. Not even Sir Ian could save us. The Green Mile was a watchable film, but mostly because of Michael Clarke Duncan.

Not to derail your thread...
I haven't read Pet' so I can't say, but the ankle stabbing scene is kind of a running joke with me and my friends. Hilarious I know, but it kills me every time. But Duncan! Yeah, I definitely agree. He's just sheer charisma, and he actually makes Daredevil tolerable. There, I admitted it. I have seen DD more than once.

I did like King's Dead Zone, but still thought the film was better. One of Cronenberg's smaller efforts but still amazing. And King's Running Man is well written, concise and has a powerful ending (even more so today for obvious reasons), but the film was campy and silly. Not that that's necessarily bad mind you.

 

[Caladan]

I loved William Goldman's The Princess Bride, and the movie became such an icon for so many of us to the point that its script's lines are a permanent part of our jargon.

I actually enjoyed THHGTTG, I suppose that a great deal of it is thanks to Zooey Deschanel, but some of the scenes were simply fun for me.

I agree with Nepenthe about Fight club, the book was short, a good read, but the movie became an icon as well.

My childhood book was Ende's Neverending story, which I always remember fondly, the first movie was still good and memorable, with the second one not living up to the legacy of the first one, but still was enjoyable for me as a kid, and the third, well I dont know what was that all about.

Gaiman's Neverwhere which first came out as a miniseries on BBC two was adapted into a wonderful novel. at the same time his novel Stardust which was a good read, was transformed into a highly enjoyable film.

 

[cardero]

Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum, Great book, great movie.

 

[rojse]

Just about any Philip K. Dick film except for Blade Runner has been really bad. And Blade Runner has so little to do with Do Androids' I'm not sure it counts.

Blade Runner was an excellent film, and was quite a liberal adaptation of the novel. The novel was also excellent, though.

I must say that I thought Total Recall was another good Philip K. Dick film. Sure, it was quite liberally adaptated - Dick stories do not typically have muscly action heroes in them - but it kept the Dickian ideas in them, particularly the questins about reality and our perception of it.

EDIT: A Scanner Darkly. The recolouration was a step too far, but it was a great Dick movie. And fairly faithful to the original novel, too.

 

[rojse]

Excellent Adaptations of Excellent novels

- Watchmen - sticks close to the original story and keeps nearly all of the elements of the original graphic novel. And yes, it can be followed quite easily even without having read the novel beforehand.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey - I don't know if you could call this an adaptation, as the book was written concurrently with the film (I have read "Lost Worlds of 2001") but the movie keeps all of the plot points that are important, and puts forward the story far better than the book did.

Bad Adaptations of Excellent Novels
- Jumper - take a deep, intelligent, and involving story, all well-characterised, and take away the intelligence and involvement, and replace that with "I am so cool. Look, I can teleport everywhere. I wear designer clothes and live in an expensive apartment. I fight bad people. Did I tell you that I was cool?"

I shall think of more later.

 

[Kathryn]

Well, this is a little off topic, but the movie I found most LIKE the book was "Lonesome Dove." I really enjoyed both the book and the movie.

The book "The Reader" was MUCH better than the recent movie which starred Kate Winslet. Skip the movie, read the book.

I don't think that CS Lewis' Narnia books are great as movies, though the books themselves are timeless.

I really can't think of a movie that was better than a book, come to think of it...

 

[Kathryn]

Oh wait - I thought of one! "Sophie's Choice" was a good book, but the movie was so perfectly cast and directed that I enjoyed it more than the book.

 

[freethinker44]

I like The Shining

The book and movie were very different from each other but equally great.

 

[rojse]

Another good movie adaptation was the Dune television miniseries. It was a faithful adaptation of the books, only adding a few extra scenes to help flesh out Princess Irulan, which I agree with. It was slightly cheap at times, and some of the scope of the book was lost, but quite watchable.

Oh, and the follow-up, Children of Dune, was not nearly as good. It felt more rushed, a lot cheaper, and the story it was trying to tell simply was not as good as the original.