You do realize that the movie that is currently out is not at all based on Heinlein’s book, correct?
It is about the journey of the '66 Texas Western basketball team on their way to winnning the NCAA championships…that might explain why it looks nothing like the novel. 
I think a better question might be, has Jack Nicholson ever not looked at least halfway to batshit insane? The man’s a good actor, but if I wanted to depict a slow descent into madness, I’d probably choose someone else.
True, good ol’ Jack does seem… off-center at the best of times. So maybe that wasn’t so much the fault of Kubrick’s direction as it was Nicholson’s intensity. But at any rate, the movie does a very poor job of conveying the basic decency underneath Jack’s alcoholism. He begins the movie as a screaming asshole and ends it as a screaming asshole squared. No real development as a character, and no real descent into madness.
I should clarify that by “Jack’s alcoholism,” I meant Jack the character, not the actor portraying him. That’s the first time I’ve noticed that the actor and the character have the same first name!
Has anyone mentioned yet the bastardization of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” by Ron Howard & Jim Carrey. I for one have not forgiven them for it.
I with you on that!
OK, the ending was pretty skewed, but I liked it overall. 
Inventing a woman who didn’t exist in the book (whatever that bimbo’s name was that Zaphod supposedly dumped ages ago), Arthur and Trillian going off together, Trillian being arrested and sentenced to death by being fed to the Bugblatter Beast of Traal…I cannot count the ways in which that movie pissed me off. If you’ve never read the books it’s probably a fun movie, at least my kids thought so. I just sat there and fumedandfumedandfumed.
It was, and I share your pissed-offedness. It’s been one of my favorite books since it came out. And what pissed me off the most was that they didn’t even take the narrative as being written from Morgaine’s POV into account. They once again slung her into the “bad guy” role, even though the entire damn book was supposed to be Morgaine’s explanation of what happened and why she did what she did. The whole storyline of the Druids and how Merlin was father to Morgaine’s mother and the Lady of the Lake and what’shername was dropped, which well and truly sucked, because it explained the orchestration of getting Arthur on the throne in the first place! GAH!!!
Retaining basic plot points isn’t a foil against complete bastardization. Bastardization doesn’t always involve the introduction of new elements. It’s first sense is:
What gives The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy its quality? Not the overall story, which is more or less an ad hoc affair. It’s the characters, and especially the witty dialogue – elements which were compromised beyond redemption in the film. For example:
Now, of course you need to tighten things up when you’re trying to squeeze things into a smaller format like a two-hour film— but…
If you want to write an adaptation that respects an original work, you don’t include the set-up for a great joke and then throwaway the punchline. That’s reserving the bathwater and throwing out the baby. Totally inept. If anything, the last line should have been included, omiting the greater part of the back-and-forth. It is, after all, the one that gets quoted all the time. The way to tighten it up without destroying the actual joke is to have Arthur’s first response be "They were on display in an unlit cellar at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard.” If there simply isn’t room for a line of this length, that get rid of the set-up for it, because it’s chaff, and it’s not funny.
Same thing with one of the most of grievous sins in Disney’s Alice. Take an elegant joke involving a stopped watch: “I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works.” “But it was the best butter!”
Leave off the punchline, and simply have the Hatter put more inappropriate things into the watch. The watch runs faster because someone’s put butter, tea, sugar, jam, and mustard in it. More, evidently, is funnier, and clever logical absurdities count for nought. :rolleyes: