Grisham’s, “Skipping Christmas,” was a fun little book. “Christmas With The Kranks,” was not a fun little movie.
I like the Starship Troopers movie significantly better than the book, so I can’t include it.
One that’s not been mentioned so far is The Tale of Despereaux. The book is a lovely poetic Newbery-winner about an idealistic, dreamy, wimpy little mouse that has to confront his weaknesses and passivity in order to save the day–as well as a rat who must mend a broken heart, and a terribly-abused girl who must find the courage to speak her mind, and a few other excellent characters. It’s gentle and thoughtful and funny.
The movie is about a wisecracking Indiana-Jones mouse who backflips off mousetraps and fights cats in set pieces. It ignores everything good about the book to make a quick, cynical buck.
Another case of an author disinheriting the film version of their work. Grisham was increasingly disgusted as the film got made, to the extent that he got them to change the name. I’m betting he had to sue them.
Respectfully, I think you mean The Brain Eaters (1958) with “Leonard Nemoy” in a very small role as an alien. Although IMDB lists a few alternate titles, “The Mind Parasites” is not one of them.
The Mind Parasites (1967) is the title of a Colin Wilson novel with Lovecraftian overtones, at least two-thirds of which was pretty good, as I recall.
Just out of curiosity, when was the last time you had your interocittor tuned-up?
I read Even Cowgirls Get the Blues before seeing the movie, and IIRC (this was quite a few years back) the movie roughly follows the story of the book and preserves most of the major characters. Quite a bit is left out or watered down, but that’s usually the case for novel-to-movie adaptations.
It’s my recollection that if anything the movie suffered from being too faithful to the novel, which probably wasn’t the best candidate for a screen adaptation. I liked the book okay, but material that on the page had an off-beat, rambling charm turned into a weird mess onscreen. There’s a scene in the movie that particularly sticks in my mind when the main character (played by Uma Thurman) says to another character “When you say the word [cowgirl], you make it sound like it was painted in radium on the side of a pearl.” I literally cringed at this, but that line is taken directly from the novel and hadn’t bothered me there.
“World War Z” by Max Brooks was an outstanding oral history of the zombie wars turned into a ho-hum Brad Pitt zombie flic. The only real resemblance between the two was having the same title.
There were dozens of them on MST3K.
One of the worst was a picture in which a stock car racing driver seemed to have the ability to jump a few minutes in time. The credits said “Based on a novel by H. G. Wells.”
Not a book, but yesterday I watched a recent peplum called “Immortals”, supposedly based on the mythos of Theseus. It should have been preceded by the warning “any similarity with mythological characters, whether alive or dead, is an unintended coincidence for which the team apologizes profusely”.
Do comic books count?
While I actually liked “V for Vendetta”, IIRC in the original comic V wasn’t a sympathetic character at all and the anarchism vs totalitarianism angle was presented as showing both sides being horrendously flawed and that one wasn’t necessarily better than the other. The movie decides to wrap a neat little bow on things by making V a hero and making it a generic “the heroes rise up against a dictatorship!” story with some pretty obvious George W Bush/War on Terror metaphors thrown in despite the British setting.
That should have been the warning on Kubrick’s movie version of Stephen King’s The Shining, too.
It’s what I get for posting late at night without checking to verify the facts.
Carry on.
…and my Interociter is just fine, thank you. And it doesn’t have that dopey triangular screen like in the movie. It’s got its proper square block of glass with the SpectraColor coating on it.
…Which brings up an excellent point. This Island Earth may not be a great science fiction novel, but it’s light-years ahead of the silly movie they purportedly made out of it. They jettisoned most of the original novel and substituted something that appeared to be cobbled together from a quick perusal of pulp science fiction magazine cover art. Even when they were relatively faithful to the book – in the opening section where Cal builds the Interociter, they managed to screw it up. In the movie the Metalunans thoughtfully sent him the schematics as well as the parts, as if it were an interstellar Heathkit*. But it was supposed to be a test of Cal’s abilities. In the book, he had to dope out what the parts did and how they fit together from the descriptions in the “catalog” (which was clearly a sort of encrypted set of plans). He screwed up while doing it and actually had to rebuild one of the parts. You also got to see the “qualifying exams” the Metalunans sent to some of the other scientist-engineers. It would’ve been better if they filmed it more as written, but they chose instead to dumb it down. (And, of course, the Metalunans didn’t want Earth Scientists to do their R&D for them – they were looking for skilled labor to help with their war effort)
*and how many Millennials are going to get that reference?
Stuart Little is another one whose melancholy, small-scale wistfulness was converted into yet another formulaic, animated, hyperkinetic, awful action film.
A childhood friend’s father had a go at directing Joyce’s Ulysses in the mid-70s. It wasn’t well reviewed, but it’s not a bad film, really. He did get some praise for making a brave attempt at the impossible.
Any film version of “Gulliver’s Travels”.
Films: Gulliver is a giant in a world of tiny people.
Book: Four parts with significantly different worlds, including sentient talking horses.
One adaptation that comes to mind for me is the YA novel City of Ember. The book involves a city isolated from the world–the city itself is lighted by electricity, but the rest of the world that they can see is pure darkness. What keeps the people from leaving the city is legends and fear of the unknown. The movie involves a city isolated from the world–the city itself is lighted by electricity, but the rest of the world that they can see is pure darkness. What keeps the people from leaving the city is aggressive, man-eating mutant moles the size of houses.
Actually, the Hallmark TV version starring Ted Danson actually managed to include material from all the books. It’s an interesting rewrite, and manages to hit the high points of the book, while preserving a lot of the satire.
(Ray Harryhausen’s version, while not all that faithful, at least includes the visit to Brobdingnag)
Another one that annoys me – someday I’d like to se an adaptation of Mark Twain’s a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court that contains more than a handful of incidents in the book, and which manages, for once, to convey Twain’s sense of humor and sarcasm. Every single version I’ve seen is terrible – either a vehicle for the star, playing to his strengths (Bing Crosby, Will Rogers) or a bowdlerization trying desperately not to offend (animated versions, the PBS adaptation, fer cryin’ out loud!), or a complete rewrite that just takes the idea of a modern person dropped into the world of Camelot.
PLEASE give me a version that gives us Hank Morgan blowing up Merlin’s Tower, and the Restoration of the Holy Well, and Hank Morgan’s rescue by Lancelot and his knights mounted on bicycles, and the Final Siege and Battle. Give us a version that shows Hank Morgan’s faults as well as Camelot’s, one where Morgan can say “Morgan le Fay had no idea what it meant to photograph anyone, but it was just like her to try and do it with an axe.”, where Clarence tries to start his own newspaper, and the knights are talked into wearing advertisements on their armor. I want the real off-kilter sense of humor of Mark Twain.
Either of the Jack Reacher movies. Tom Cruise just doesn’t cut it, even when they found a leading lady who didn’t tower over him.
In the realm of disappointing movies based on Stephen King novels, my pick is “Christine”. After a (mostly) excellent opening sequence in the auto plant, it descended into predictable crappiness (along the way, destroying all the insights into growing up and attempting to shed ugly duckling status).
This, and it was a real shame. I thought the novel cried out for a fake documentary format, and didn’t need any stars. Just ordinary looking actors in differing segments. But, that would not have been box office, so we got a standard issue adventure movie.
Regards,
Shodan
After the first adaption of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, nobody should have remade it. Especially with Johnny Depp in the title role.
eTA: Speaking of Stephen King, what about Children of the Corn?
Neither The Last Man On Earth (with Vincent Price) nor The Omega Man (with Charleton Heston) attempt to use the title from Richard Matheson’s I am Legend, but they seem to have more in common with the original work than the Will Smith movie that does.