In response to threads like https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=846068 , has there ever been a case of a movie that has severely disappointed you? I’m sure there has been, for one reason or another. Maybe you really liked the book, and hoped the movie would be good. Or you liked the concept. Or you were familiar with the star/director/writer’s style and abilities and had high hopes for the movie.
…and they you saw the film.
1.) Man of la Mancha – The producers of the Broadway show wanted to film this with much of the original cast. They were certainly available (they had appeared in one revival shortly before the film was released. A partial cast revival appeared after the film’s release). But the original producers lost control of the film and decided to go with a more “bankable” cast, which gave us Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren, two actors not noted for their singing abilities, in the lead roles. James Coco, as Sancho Panza, arguably sang too well. Most of the rest of the cast (aside from an oddly cast Brian Blessed, another non-singer) were pretty much unknown. Whose idea was this, anyway?
2.) Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings. Ralph Bakshi was the off-kilter non-Disney who could do technically good animation and didn’t mind sex and violence – heck, he’d done the X-rated Fritz the Cat, hadn’t he? But we should’ve paid less attention to the sex and violence and more to Robert Crumb’s complaining about how much the cartoon veered from his character. Bakshi had already shown that he could do edgy fantasy with Wizards, which had some disturbingly good scenes (mostly rotoscoped from Alexander Nevsky and other films). We shoulda paid attention to al that rotoscoping, because Bakshi did it a LOT in LOTR, to the point where some scenes look like hand-colored postcards. When Bakshi is doing straight-out animation, his stuff shines. Treebeard, Gollum, and the flying Nazgul all look great. But too much of the film looks like a hand-tinted movie. What disappointed me the most was the Balrog. I had hoped for a great animated Blarog which obviously wasn’t even close to anything you could film. What did I get? A rotoscoped Guy I a Balrog Suit. And it wasn’t even creative rotoscoping – it looks like hand-tinted black and white footage of a guy wearing a Balrog Costume with clearly fake wings.
3.) Damned near any adaptation of Heinlein is going to show up here, but two stand out, because they show glimpses of what COULD have been done. Disney’s adaptation of The Puppet Masters had really good special effects work and visualization, especially of the “slugs”. They also had potentially great casting, especially with Donald Sutherland as The Old Man and Richard Belzer (who not only played characters who believed in UFOs and Conspiraciers, but believed in them himself – an inspired piece of casting). But they cut out a lot of the science fiction background, re-setting it in the present day (which thus required a lot of rewriting), and their script obviously wasn’t well-thought-out. It’s riddled with stupidities and inconsistencies. I once read a blog by one of the writers, and apparently they had to put up with a lot of studio executive meddling. But still…
Of course, the other is Starship Troopers. I’d like Verhoeven’s over-the-top work on Total Recall and Robocop, but I wasn’t prepared for the complete mismatch between source material and movie that ST was. Not only was the philosophy and tone completely wrong, but they dumbed down the science completely and made the characters’ actions insanely stupid. (the epitome of which has to be the soldiers killing “bug” by standing around them in a circle and firing nonstop bursts into the creatures. No possibility of deaths from friendly fire there!) at times they didn’t seem to pay attention to the indications of the book at ALL. (Not content with making the – obviously if you pay attention to the book – Filipino hero Johnny Rico an unbelievably WASP character, they then have the family living in Buenos Aires. The only suggestion for that in the book was that his mom was there when The Rock dropped. But the film was well-made and the effects were absolutely gorgeous, so you saw What Could Have Been.
3.) Phantom of the Opera – I’m not talking about the adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical (see below for a word about that), but a re-release of the 1925 silent film. Back when I first got my VCR, I was appalled at the completely inappropriate music they used for every version of the silent film I’d seen, and considered re-recording it with my own music. One of the chief elements planned to use was the piece Judas Iscariot by Rick Wakeman, from his Criminal Record* album. It SOUNDS like the work of a psychotic organist (no comments about Wakeman’s own mental state, thank you), starting out fairly conventionally before going off into weird flights of disturbed-sounding musical phrases.
So imagine my surprise and delight to learn that Wakeman had written an entire score for the silent film, and that it was coming to the art cinema in Somerville, MA. I had to go. The film opened with an intro in the actual basement of the Paris Opera House, hosted by Christopher Lee. so far, excellent.
Then the music started. And, my god, it was awful. And not in the good sense of that word. It was later released as a videotape, but I never considered getting it. The music was re-released this past year. It’s gotten good reviews by people who have clearly been driven mad by the music.
