I liked the recent film version of It much better than the book. Perhaps the book has just not aged well, and it had some plot points that never sat well with me.
Having a tough time seeing how you regard a film both good and unwatchable. If an actor blights a film, then would not that blighting take precedence over everything else? I suppose you can appreciate other aspects of the film, but a lead more often than not leaves their stamp on a film, and accordingly, much of a film’s merits is directly correlated to that.
Years ago, I was lying on the couch, reading The Right Stuff for the first time, and really enjoying it. The TV was on, but I wasn’t really watching. But then something on the screen caught my attention; something featuring shots from the early days of space flight. Turned out it was an ad for the movie version of The Right Stuff. I saw it opening day with the book still fresh in my mind; brilliant book and brilliant movie.
I saw the movie first, so I can’t say if the movie lived up to expectations. Having read it, I often think that the book was a satire of fairy tales, while the movie was a parody. Both were done by people who absolutely loved what they were parodying/satirizing.
On the advice of a friend, I searched some used bookstores for a pre-movie version of the book. The comments from the abridger are in red. When I wrote to the address for the reunion scene, the letter was returned unopened.
I grew up in the desert. My mental image of mountains and forests was rather lame. In Lord of the Rings, New Zealand’s landscapes were far more impressive than I had imagined.
Watchmen should have been a 12-episode series, but considering how much they had to abridge it, they did an amazing job.
The 1978 NBC version of Four Feathers, starring Beau Bridges and Jane Seymour, is more faithful to the book than any of the theatrical films.
The 1977 BBC version of Count Dracula, starring Louis Jordan and Frank Finlay, is more faithful to the book than most of the theatrical films.
John Carter too liberties with the letter, but was relatively faithful to the spirit, of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books.
LA Confidential
The movie version of 1408 is vastly superior to the book.
Can anyone compare ‘the body’ by King with the movie Stand by Me? I haven’t gotten around to reading the book, but I’d assume it can’t be better than the movie.
The 39 Steps (1935)
Definite improvement on John Buchan’s book where the steps of the title are literal.
The Killers (1946)
Elaboration on Hemingway’s short story makes for more satisfying entertainment.
Out of the Past (1948)
Kiss me Deadly (1955)
Derivative and/or potboiler pulp fiction turned into film noir classics. I would assume the same for Touch of Evil (1958), but I haven’t read the novel it was based on (I gather Orson Welles didn’t, either).
Ninja’d on LA Confidential (1997)
Certainly more focused than James Ellroy’s book.
Re: The Hobbit - Anyone seen this:
I would also be curious to know how Uncharted Seas by Dennis Wheatley compares with the film version, The Lost Continent (1968).
Like others have said, LotR was a great adaptation and in many ways was exactly what I was visualizing – except New Zealand. The terrain worked the majority of the time but I was expecting the Misty Mountains to look more like the Alps, Anduin to look more placid, and Rohan to look less volcanic. But The Shire, Mordor, and the White Mountains were spot on, and Rivendell was even better than I had envisaged.
I’d had high hopes for the Hobbit films, especially as it was clear that Jackson was pulling in material from the LotR appendices, etc., for connective tissue. The first movie disappointed me, but I was willing to go see #2. However, that one was such a departure from the actual book (and I disliked it so much) that I vowed to not even bother with the third film (and I still haven’t seen it).
It sometimes helps when the person doing the adapting is the person who wrote the book. 
The one time Vincent Price and Roger Corman actually did a faithful adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe was this:
It’s really just a filmed performance of Vincent Price reciting and acting out the stories of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Sphinx”, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”, but he does them absolutely straight, with no additions or changes. You can get much the same thing from the audio recording being sold of Price and Basil Rathbone doing dramatic readings of Poe, but in this case you get to see Vincent as he emotes.
I thought Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World did an excellent job capturing the spirit of the Patrick O’Brian books. It didn’t actually follow any one book - the plot was taken from at least 4 different books, with scenes & lines stolen from most of the others. But all in all, I felt like I was actually on the HMS Surprise for nearly the entire film.
I think this was it right here. Depp’s interpretation of the character was just weird and unnecessary and it pretty much tanked the whole movie for me.
Yes, and I am sorry there were no sequels as planned.
Russle Crowe did need to be a little pudgier,
but that is a nitpick. The film captured the spirit very well.
I have high hopes for Good Omens.
I was okay with Watchmen. Whatever flaws were in the movie were pretty much already in the source material.
The Owlship love scene did go on a lot longer than necessary, though.
This was a TV miniseries, not a film, but I thought the adaptation of Centennial was quite good. I know that Michener’s books can be a bit cheesy, but I really enjoyed that book in particular and the miniseries it spawned was excellent.
Shawshank Redemtion has already been mentioned, but I thought Misery did a good job, too. And although the movie was very different from the book in ways, I thought that Cuckoo’s Nest was quite well done.
I liked the film of Amelie Nothomb’s Fear and Trembling.
The first movie of 'Mice and Men 'was the only that lived up my expectation and the movie ‘Lord of the Files’ was a lot better than I expected it to be .