I’ll be damned. I know the guy who made that. Haven’t seen him in ages, but I knew him in college and check in on Facebook every now and then.
That’s a good one- it was almost perfectly done- every character cast with the best possible person to do it and well done on the dialogue which is the best part of the book/Gus especially.
When I first read Stephen King’s “Different Seasons,” “The Body” was far and away my favorite of the four stories (yes, even over Shawshank; not that both the novella and film aren’t great). It just resonated with me and touched me deeply at that particular moment in my life.
When I saw “Stand By Me,” it was as if the exact film I watched in my head while reading the book had sprung fully formed onto the screen in front of me. That was a rare experience, and, at the time, practically magical.
The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s version of The Call of Cthulhu is really very good, especially for a low-budget effort. They took the approach of making the film as if it was being made at the time the story was published, so it’s a black-and-white silent film. It’s played absolutely straight and pretty much as written, with stop-motion effects as they would have been done at the time.
For their next outing, the were more elaborate, making The Whisperer in Darkness as if it’s a 1940s movie, with sound, this time, and better effects (although still with much stop-motion for the Fungi from Yuggoth). They also added in much filler – a debate with famed anomaly hunter Charles Fort and a more involved (and downbeat) ending that goes beyobd the shock ending of the story, but it still captures the mood very well, and depicts the events of the story.
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned A Clockwork Orange yet. Although Burgess seems not to have liked Kubrick’s adaptation, and it was based on the American edition that lacked the important final chapter that was in the British edition, I was very satisfied with it.
I’ve always loved the PBS adaptation of The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula Le Guin. I think the budget was fairly low, so there weren’t really any “special effects”. Instead, they focused on the plot and the characters, and it’s eerily magnificent.
Ahh, me too!
Cool. 
That *is *magical.
I thought the film adaptation Grisham’s “The Firm” was much better than the book. At least the ending was.
The version with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich was very good, IMO. They had previously played those parts together on stage.
I just saw Neverwhere, the BBC film adaptation of Gaimans books. Very low budget special effects but otherwise spot on.
Has a movie adaptation of a beloved book ever lived up to your expectations?
Yes: The Hunt for Red October. An excellent book by Tom Clancy, a riveting read where anti-sub warfare details were expertly laid out in the gripping story. The movie was different, and it glossed over much if not many of the ASW details in the book, but it told the excellent story admirably well. I really enjoyed, and still enjoy, the movie.
John, until you mentioned this one I’d forgotten it, but you’re absolutely right. Sylvia Nasar’s book was excellent, and when the movie was coming out I wondered how the schizophrenia would be handled. But it was directed by Ron Howard, who usually does an excellent job. And he did!
And speaking of Ron Howard, there’s yet another one: the book by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger, Lost Moon, was an excellent read. But Ron Howard did a fantastic job with the movie, Apollo 13.
Not a beloved novel at all but one of my favorite movies is the French thriller *Diva *which came out in the 80s. I finally read the novel on which it is based and it was truly awful. Simplistic and annoying. The movie added several plots which wove together beautifully.
An aging Donald Sutherland, always superlative, stumbled his way through a film version of “The Puppet Masters”, a mediocre sci-fi story by Robert Heinlein. Sutherland at his worst is better than Sci-fi at its best.
That’s one of my most-disliked tropes too. For Watership Down, though, it’s basically like making a war movie - you know some characters are going to die. And the character in this instance being a rabbit is no big deal considering the film was about rabbits.
Seconded 1984. One of my favourite books, and I think it might be one of the best adaptions ever. It helps that the book was short and concise, so nothing really needed to be cut out, but still, it’s amazing how well they captured the everlasting grey despair of the book while also making it as good to watch as the book is to read.
Animal Farm also worked brilliantly as a dark cartoon. Animal Farm as a live-action movie failed because Christ, who ever thought that would be a good idea? Plague Dogs made me cry in both book and film format.
The Shining differs in many ways to the book (partly because of the book’s format) but is still a brilliant film. For me, if an adaptation is different, but still good, that works.
And the changes should be wholesale. The worst adaptions are in themselves not very good films, partly because they keep aspects of the book that don’t work in their re-imagining. If you relocate a book to America, change all the references so that it makes sense for America. If you add a love interest to a character that didn’t have one, then change the whole interplay between those characters so that their relationship is believable. Don’t just have them be the same as in the book but also shagging and declaring love out of nowhere. That’s fanfic. Bad fanfic.
For example, in Hitchhiker’s Guide they kept in the line about Ford (an alien character played by an American) being from Guildford (in Surrey on the borders of London). Perhaps it was intended to be weird humour, since with Ford’s accent in the movie he couldn’t possibly be from Guildford, but actually it just made Arthur seem spectacularly dumb rather than an everyman, drew attention to the casting and broke the fourth wall, which should never be done unintentionally. I mean, it’s fine to have an American play Ford Prefect, so why pretend he wasn’t American? And then Marvin - I like his design if it were for a different character, but they went for the whole doleful personality (brilliantly voiced by Alan Rickman) and made Marvin cute. When Arthur saw him he would have said aww! They could even have got away with that if they’d decided that part of Marvin’s angst was that all humanoids saw him as cute. But they didn’t, so it was disjointed.
The Jack Reacher adaption was OK as a film but man, why cast a short, inoffensive man as Reacher and then keep in the line about him being so physically intimidating that you’d be afraid if you saw him in a dark alley?
A Clockwork Orange is another film that made wholesale changes (not many, actually, but those it did change were thoroughly changed) so works as a film in itself. I understand why Burgess didn’t like it but for me as a viewer and reader they both work.
A good adaption should not scream “I AM AN ADAPTATION!” at you. It can do that while being faithful to the text or not, but generally if the main characters are missing key features of their personality, but the plot proceeds as if those characters still had their book personalities, then the adaption will not be very good, not just as an adaptation but as a story in its own right. It will be a plot fighting against its characters, which is never fun to watch.
A Room with a View is at least as good as the book, if not better. Certainly on my list of favourite movies.
Rated 100% (critics) 85% (audience) on Rotten Tomatoes.
Thank you for that comment. [aside]You might be interested in this web site, Does The Dog Die? You can also screen for other types of violence and even shocking special effects that you or your children may want to avoid-- or at least be prepared for.[/aside]
Manhunter was less true to the source novel “Red Dragon” than the later remake Red Dragon, but I like Manhunter much more.
“On The Beach”. The film follows the book almost exactly, though the book expands a bit more on the agonies of radiation poisoning. And of course the movie has that chilling scene of Ava Gardner on the cliff watching the submarine go down, for the last time, and the empty streets at the end…Such a sad book, and film. (A little too much Waltzing Matilda, and Ava G. and Gregory Peck have a romance which I don’t think they did in the book, but hey! A film maker would HAVE to put them together.)
Anne of Green Gables (the one with Megan Follows) was, imho, better than the books. It was the perfect combination of actors and storyline and setting. I’ve re-watched it many times.
While there were some significant inaccuracies in Lord of The Rings, being able to see the places I’d imagined for decades was amazing and exciting. The first views of Hobbiton as Gandalf approaches Bag End gave me chills.
I’d say all in all it definitely lived up to my expectations. (Nothing to say about that abomination “The Hobbit”)