I don’t see how there would be any trouble getting into a conflict with Russia if it were Middle Eastern terrorists.
I hear that. I adore Shirley and her lovely little movies, but I WISH they hadn’t felt the need to co-opt classics the way they did. Just make them movies for heaven’s sake! They did the same with Heidi, though not as bad as Little Princess.
And how, pray tell, would they plausibly make it look like Russia was responsible without adding a second set of consipirators? Middle Eastern terrorists can’t launch attacks on US aircraft carriers (per the movie) or launch tank battles in then-divided Berlin (per the book). Traitorous Russian generals who are part of a neo-Nazi cabal can.
With a second set of conspirators comes the need to explain why they are conspiring together, adding more exposition and slowing down the movie.
Or did you just plan on having Ahmed the terrorist calling up the CIA and telling them the Russians did it?
Don’t tell me that you aren’t aware that there are Muslim terrorists in former Soviet republics. Simply substitute them for the Neo-Nazis and have them bribe the weasely Soviet commander at the air force base from the movie. It’s not that difficult to imagine.
Of course, your beef was not the failure to include “Muslim terrorists,” but rather “Middle Eastern terrorists.” I think terrorists in the former republics are far less concerned with the US and far more concerned with simply getting the Russians out of their respective countries. How many US flag burnings have there been in Grozny?
More to the point, your scenario would require us to believe a Russian commander – a former hard-core Soviet communist who presumably thought things like the invasion of Afghanistan were good things, and who continues to favor military action against rebels in the Causcaus – would be on speaking terms with rebel groups in the former republics.
Stranger things have happened IRL.
How many Americans had heard of the Taliban pre-9/11, when this movie was in production? How many could even find Afghanistan on the map?
The fact is, pre-9/11, the face of Islamic terrorism to Americans belonged to places like Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Heck, in Clancy’s novel, the terrorists are Palestinian.
That being the case, at the time this movie was made, the filmmakers could not connect the terrorists to the general without a lot of exposition explaining how these Middle Eastern folks are ultimately connected to the general. You’d have to explain about Afghanistan and the Taliban, about to what extent the Middle East guys and the Checyan guys share common goals and why, and then craft some plausible way for the Checyans to end up talking to the Russian general about attacking the US.
And that would royally screw up the film’s pacing. **
Perhaps so, and I agree that plausible connections can be made – indeed, Clancy’s novel makes them. But can they be sufficiently explained within the constraints of the film medium?
FTR, an interview with the filmmaker notes this:
The question isn’t whether political correctness caused them to substitute neo-Nazis for radical Muslims, it’s the fact that neo-Nazis having the power and connection to do what they did in the movie strains WSOD to the breaking point.
If they couldn’t make it Islamic radicals, they should have made it hardline Communists (who DO have power in Russia and other former Soviet republics) or something else. Neo-Nazis are often murderous and always vile, but more than anything else, most are incredibly STUPID and have never shown any ability to organize on any level.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - The Book was good, and I liked the movie. The different characters inter-acting makes the book and movie good. Alot of what was written - word for word from the book became dialogue in the movie. The movie had to be constricted for time, there was 4 different trials of Jim Williams spanning 8 years. The movie would have been a mini-series, so I forgive Eastwood for cutting things out. The movie was acted well, and I don’t think took anything from the movie, it made me want to read the book.
“Dune”. Did I miss it, or has nobody mentioned “Dune” yet? To me, the heart of that book is Paul’s relationship with the Fremen, how he earns their trust and devotion, learns their ways and thus the truth of the planet’s ecosystem – and the movie blows that off in like 30 seconds. The friend I saw it with ranted all night about how the book had been butchered.
I don’t buy that about terrorism one bit. If anyone thought of the word hijacker, tell me they didn’t picture a middle eastern man? What about the PREVIOUS WTC bombings? And I knew all about the Taliban and had been engaged in debates for a couple years prior, whether the Taliban rule was worse on men or women. A lot of people were aware of it. But Taliban or no Taliban, aside from far left (Angela Davis commie types) or far right (McVeigh) terrorists, you generally thought of Arabian types when you thought of terrorism.
To the above poster, my husband asked me whether Dune had been mentioned; and said they literally glossed over entire volumes of the series. I say, don’t make it into a movie then!
Nomination for horrible adaptation - Flowers for Algernon; made into a STUPID assed movie called “Charly”. Excellent book (if you can get past the woman-hating paranoia), shitty movie. And the movie undermined the entire POINT of the book. Shamelessly.
One of my least favorite movies was the Dan Aykroyd/Rosie O’Donnell flick Exit to Eden. In the Anne Rice book, which was written as Anne Rampling, the Aykroyd/O’Donnell characters, and the whole PLOT OF THE MOVIE, do not exist in the book.
Clear and Present Danger. Gawd, I hated that movie.
–Patch
I read the book as a teenager and saw the movie on cable. I knew it would have nothing to do with the book when I learned that Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, Frankie and Johnny) directed it, but I was still dismayed when I saw it. Exit to Eden is by no means a great book, but the book wasn’t remotely sexy (Rosie O’Donnell?!), which the book was.
Anyway, one of the worst movie adaptations I’ve seen:
All the Pretty Horses I had a bad feeling about it when I saw Matt Damon was cast as John Grady Cole, who is just sixteen in the book. The only good casting choice was Lucas Black as Jimmy Blevins, eerie because when I read the book he was who I envisioned playing the role in a movie (I read it when Black was starring on the series “American Gothic”). The movie has none of the beauty of the novel and Damon is just too damn old. The story loses its power if you have a grown man going through what Cole went through as a kid in the book.
There are lots more, but many of them have been covered in this thread already (like the Stephen King ones).
Some good adaptations:
Crash I was stunned by David Cronenberg’s faithfulness to the novel, right down to the thigh penetration scene. Deborah Unger was perfect as Catherine Ballard–just the perfect mix of iceyness and sexiness.
Hamlet The Kenneth Branagh version. The Bard’s work just leaps to life in this movie. A young Kate Winslet is fantstic as Ophelia.
Mother Night Surprisingly good adaptation of Vonnegut’s novel. Nick Nolte and Sheryl Lee are both excellent in it.
I was going to nominate Romeo + Juliet, but I guess the original is strong enough to withstand even the likes of Baz Luhrman.
Nightfall was a particularly atrocious adaptation of a good Asimov work.
Many adaptations of Stephen King’s shorter stories aren’t so much bad as completely disconnected to anything he wrote. The Running Man, as someone mentioned earlier, along with Maximum Overdrive and The Lawnmower Man are almost completely unrecognizable.
There’s no fundamental reason that movie adaptations have to be awful. Yes, it’s a different medium, and some compromises have to be made, but an awful lot of excellent movies have been made out of books. Look at
**Gone with the Wind
The African Queen
Bridge on the River Kwai
Doctor Zhivago
The Godfather[/B
just to name a few. An awful lot of movie adaptations, however, are awful. Especially, for some reason, SF and fantasy. There’s no need to change these so completely, but the moviemakers do. Consider most of the adaptationas of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allen Poe. Most of these are terrible – and bear little reesemblance to the originals. The few good adaptations, in faxct, stand out. (Disney’s 20,000 Leagues, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Around the World in 80 Days, etc.).
Veerhoeven’s Starship Troopers has already been cited. One could add all the other Heinlein adaptations.
But The Andromeda Strain kept pretty close to the book, and was a good flick. So was the second version of The Thing. Sadly, these films are in the minority.
I think if any movie maker had their druthers, they’d be completely faithful to the book they’re adapting. But remember, this is Show Business. There’s usually no way an entire novel can be adapted into a 90-minute film. Levels of detail have to be taken out.
In addition, in order to sell the idea of a script to producers, filmmakers have to give in to producer demands or they don’t get financial backing. This is Show Business; few producers are willing to go broke for the sake of art. If they don’t think a gay guy and a woman can carry a film, they’re not going to fund it unless the filmmakers strip away the lead’s homosexuality.
Books have the liberty of going into a lot of detail, and it’s not a luxury that movies have. It seems to me that books that are more dialogue intensive stand a better chance. That’s why Elmore Leonard is such a popular choice for movie makers. I think Get Shorty was actually better as a movie than as a book. In the movie, we get to see actors interpreting the lines with facial expressions, body language, and style. If the book languishes on those sorts of details, the timing is lost and the effect is boring.
Supposedly David Lynch did film a fairly faithful version of the book.The addition of sonic weaponry excepted. Trouble is it was about 7 hours long.So all the stuff you mentioned ended up on the cutting room floor. For years there were rumours about a directors cut and an extended version floating around but the last i heard the missing film is no longer around.
Still it’s not a bad film if you know the book well and can mentally supply the missing plot.It looks fabulous and the soundtrack is superbly atmospheric.
I don’t think their druthers would always be so, or more short stories would be done faithfully. Or they wouldn’t just add some opposite political slant just for the sake of their own political views.
Some good (if not great) movies that bore no resemblance to the story/book they were adapted from…
Children of the Corn (Stephen King)
Wizard of Oz
Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
(If you can stand it, Tim Burton is remaking Wonka…I suppose he wants to do it like the book? It WOULD after all be a completely different movie; the original flick ended up being just a satire of popular culture; so it could be good.)
I find it amusing that the OP brought up as an example of a good adaptation the first thing that popped to my mind when I read the thread’s title: The Stand.
Oh, all in all it was pretty good and got a lot “right”, but a couple of things in the series was so jaw-dropping stupid and wrong that I never bothered to watch it again.
For starters, the character of Nadine Cross was totally destroyed by the idiotic portrayal by Laura San Giacomo. Instead of the lonely, tortured woman that the audience is rooting for to do the right thing, we get this vapid slut, sounding of whiskey and cigarettes, whom we know is going to go over to the Dark Side the second we see her on the screen. Her characterization destroyed the Larry/Nadine dichotomy - a man who is outwardly “bad”, but inwardly “good”, and the woman he meets up with whom is the exact opposite: good on the outside, bad on the inside. I thought the Larry/Nadine relationship was one of the few times that King took the effort to fully think about his characters’ relationship to each other, and LSG friggin’ blew it.
The scene where everybody descended into Boulder all at once (it was the last scene in one of the episodes) was illogical - what, everybody just happen to arrive at the same time? That was convenient. :rolleyes:
Anyway, that LSG thing pretty much did it for me. God, she sucked. :mad: