CalMeacham: I didn’t think The Dunwich Horror was that bad. It was certainly better than The Unnameable. However, I agree with you in general about adaptations of Poe and Lovecraft.
Well said. Two more:
7. The Council of Elrond is depicted as petty bickering by the best and brightest of Middle Earth.
- Gandalf the White defeated by the Witch King.
Well, tweech his own.
I thought it was an example of the let’s throw a buncha stuff together and hope it works. And it wouldn’t have been hard, even with a low budget and circa 1970 effects, to craft a compelling (and more comprehensible) movie out of Lovecraft’s actual story.
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When was this? Gandalf never did that in the film, iirc.
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That was sorta in the book.
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The books are unclear what happened, but are you saying Gandalf would have just shrugged and said “OK, sure, send me to Sauron.”
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There was bickering.
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Gandalf was confronted by the Witch King in the books, and things looked bad- until Angmar was called off by the Rohirrim arrival. Angmar was even gloating.
You know, “Ready Player One” is one of my favorite books, showing a great deal of love and care for its source material. Its a shame they’ve never made a movie about it.
I SAID ITS A SHAME THEY’VE NEVER MADE A MOVIE ABOUT IT! :mad::mad:
I would like to throw M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender into the ring. It is supposedly based on an absolutely fantastic cartoon series that aired on Nickelodeon Avatar: The Last Airbender but I am not sure how they could have seen the series and then produced the crap that was the movie.
The series has great, deep characters that learn, grow and develop overtime. It features the challenges of being a young boy, thrown into a world you don’t understand and being expected to save it. It explores a world at war by first painting the instigators as evil and then showing how it is wrong to think of your enemies that way. They show all the shades of grey of humanity. I cannot recommend the series enough.
The movie, however, is bad. The characters are paper thin, the element bending mechanics are all changed for no good reason, its weirdly racist without any of the greys that were explored in the series. All of the humor the series had, which was necessary because the characters are young teens, is gone. It’s nearly unwatchable.
ETA: Also, the acting was terrible. SOOOOO TERRIBLE!
As Gandalf the Gray he fought the Witch King, and his 8 Morgul-Bros, simultaneously, on Weathertop. Score: 0:0. He also fought the 2nd most powerful Middle Earth baddie after Sauron, the Balrog. Score: 1:1.
As Gandalf the White, he blocked the WK at the gates of Minas Tirith. When the WK left to deal with the Rohirrim, GtW made to chase him down, until Pippin stopped him.
One that’s annoyed me since childhood: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The book was a love poem to a car. A car chock-full of over-the-top incredible little gadgets but also a roaring snarling high-performance roadster, albeit one from an earlier time. It was a car that would get impatient with traffic and blink an instruction at the driver to pull the knob. (And when Mr. Potts was slow to comply, it changed to “pull, IDIOT!”) He does so and the radiator cooling fan pokes out the front, the mudguards swing out on the side, and it flies over the traffic.
Looking like this, dammit, not like this. That latter piece of crap is a goddam parade float!
Aside from that, there’s virtually no relationship between the plot of the book and the plot of the movie other than
a) the invention of a popular candy makes Mr. Pott rich enough to buy a car;
b) the car can fly; and
c) has the same title
His wife has been disappeared, a host of new characters inserted, they never go to France, never defeat any dangerous criminals, and the other fancy capabilities of the car are omitted.
But mostly it’s just not the car it’s supposed to be. The movie Chitty looks more like that jalopy that Archie Andrews used to drive around Riverdale.
Goldfinger also improved on the book, or at least fixed a major plot error. In the book, Goldfinger’s plan was to steal all of the gold from Fort Knox. But as Bond explains in the movie, that would be logistically impossible.
I suppose The Spy Who Loved Me is also worth a mention, as the book is terrible but the film only used the title - the story itself is completely original and uses nothing from the book. Although this was by design. Reception of the book was so poor that Fleming himself stipulated that no plot elements from the book could be used, only the name.
He did hold them off at weathertop, but how many? and then in his own words- he “escaped”.
Gandalf stood in his way but the Witch King just laughed at him. “Old Fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!”
After Angmar left, Gandalf just sat motionless for a bit, the started to ride thru the gate. After Angmar? if so, why just sit there for a while?
Not only did the movie Goldfinger fix that logistical hole, it also considerably improved Bond’s role. In the novel, he ends up as – I kid you not – a glorified secretary, helping out with Goldfinger’s paperwork. Reading it made me picture Bond in the back room while Rob Schneider sits there, doing his 25-year-old SNL routine:
“Bond. James Bond. The Bondster. Double Oh Seven. Makin’ copies.”
Fleming must have realized what a mistake that was (or had it pointed out to him), because in his last published work, The Man with the Golden Gun, when he wants Bond to get close to Scaramanga, he has him become Scaramanga’s bodyguard, which is infinitely cooler.
(Speaking of which, The Man with the Golden Gun is definitely a case of dumping on your source material. )
I could understand The Spy who Loved Me coming up with a new plot – they had to, both because of Fleming’s stipulations and because the original was pretty dull. But did they have to steal the plot from their own movie version of You Only Live Twice!
And You Only Live Twice was another case of dumping on your source material.
Unfortunately, they made up for it with “The Big Sleep.”
Since we’re on Bond books, Moonraker also dumped on it’s source. The book is IMHO one of the better books, while the film is arguably one of the worst. Other than the name of the villain and the idea that rockets are somehow involved, the movie is a completely original story.
Another book that comes to mind is The Running Man by Stephen King. The book and the film share the idea that the protagonist is being pursued by hunters on some sort of dystopian game show, but that’s where the similarities end. In the book, the main character voluntarily appears on the show to raise money for medicine for his sick wife/daughter (sorry, it’s been awhile since I read the book and I forget which). He is released from the studio with a 12-hour head start and can travel anywhere in the world, accumulating prize money every day he survives and winning the grand prize if he can last 30 days. I wish someone would do a version closer to the book, actually.
I’m extremely worried about Amazon adapting Iain Banks’ Culture series. Then again, I was worried about The Expanse, and they nailed it.
You’re right, Tolkien doesn’t specify that all nine attacked him at night, only that all nine were at his heels in the morning.
As to the WK’s words, they’re just that. Minutes later, he was killed by a hobbit and a woman. Other than his ability to project fear, he had no special powers to prevent his own death.
GtW, on the other hand, claimed to be more dangerous than all save Sauron. Who else would have pursued, alone, the WK right into the midst of Sauron’s army?
Just checking but are you aware Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley are two different people?
A hobbit with a special magic bane dagger,
*It was enchanted with the power to harm the Witch-king of Angmar himself by a weaponsmith of Arthedain long before. When he stabbed the Witch-king in the knee with it, it distracted the Nazgûl and broke the spell binding his undead flesh to his will, allowing Eowyn to kill him by driving her sword into his unseen head, thus fulfilling the prophesy of Glorfindel that “not by the hand of man shall he fall.”
*
“So passed the sword of the Barrow-downs, work of Westernesse. But glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago in the North-kingdom when the Dúnedain were young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will.”
No other blade…would have dealt that foe a wound…
And of course a *woman *who was able to fulfil the prophecy, unlike Gandalf.
Dead or Alive is a fighting video game series that 100% heavily leans on its gimmick that most of the fighters are women with absurdly large chests, to the point it has 4 spin-off games that are entirely these women playing beach volley-ball in tiny bikinis.
Dead or Alive then was made into a live-action movie, where notably none of the female stars portraying the video game characters had physiques like the video game characters, rather being the typical Hollywood skinny women with small chests.
It’s like if they made an Oregon Trail movie with no wagon, or a Super Smash Brothers movie with no Nintendo characters.
AIR, in the first movie Tom Cruise looked like Tom Cruise. But in a latter version, they managed to film him in a way that made him look like a big main. Credit to the director for that.