Hey! I liked the TV version of Waiting for Godot.
you could fast-forward through all the boring bits ;).
In the show, the plant wounds Audrey, who insists as she dies that Seymour feed her to the plant so she can always be with him (sorta). They sing a song called “Somewhere That’s Green” to that effect, and it’s pretty darn weird. Seymour tries to kill Audrey II, but it eats him and the plants will go on to take over the world. The show ends with a song called “Don’t Feed the Plants.”
Or at least, that’s the version of the show I’ve seen. There are apparently a couple of different incarnations. And the original Little Shop was 1960 a Roger Corman movie - from there, it became a stage play Off Broadway in 1982, then a movie again in 1986, a cartoon in 1991, and then there was a revival on Broadway in 2003. Confused yet?
(I did have to look that up.)
From what I recall, the movie changed the ending of the play (which had the plants taking over the Earth) and a couple of songs, and added the song “Mean Green Mother from Outer Space.” Not really a bad adaptation overall.
Bye Bye Birdie was definitely awful compared to the play and A Chorus Line was no good, either.
The recent remake of The Time Machine was godawful in all respects, and bore no resemblance to H. G. Welles (despite being directed by his great grandson). Even the Rod Taylor version diverged somewhat from the book, but the newer version seemed to take the words “time machine,” “Eloi,” and “Morlocks” and nothing else and turned it into an incoherent mess.
There’s also the 1970 version of Julius Caesar, starring Jason Robards as Brutus. His performance is so dead (Maltin calls is “zombie-like”), that the entire movie is a full-fledged bore. Robards was a great actor, but he definitely has his limits; with O’Neill, or any time he played an American, he was great, but have him play someone who didn’t come from the midwest and he had no clue as to how to handle it.
Yeah, what was up with that? I remember seeing that version in high school and thinking “Hell, Billy H_____ who read the role aloud in 11th grade stumbling over every third word and in a monotone did almost that well”. It’s one of the flattest performances of all time, and from a man who was anything but a drone in most of his films.
If book-to-film is acceptable here, I nominate 9-1/2 Weeks, which was nothing at all like the novel. It had the same title, it involved a highly charged sexual relationship – and the resemblance ends there. The book was about a controlling, dominant-submissive relationship, bordering on the abusive, in which
the woman ended up being so emotionally burned out on the whole thing that she briefly went catatonic, and after she recovered said, “I will never again be able to feel anything above room temperature.”
I once had a small part in a stage adaptation that was much closer to the book.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead One of my favorite plays. What’s the only time I’ve actually fallen asleep in the movie theater?
Agreed. Largely down to Bogart’s sublime and sometimes subtle portrayal of Sam Spade.
Also, I think I, Robot was an excellent Hollywood adaptation of Asimov’s robots stories, for the reasons described in this post.
–Cliffy