I enjoyed both Kick-Ass and RED very much.
A Kick-Ass sequel is coming out in August, with the main cast returning: Kick-Ass 2 (film) - Wikipedia
Since a thread on it was bumped recently -
Book: The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Film: The Ninth Gate, starring Johnny Depp and directed by Roman Polanski
Vaguely spoilery:
The film completely omits the major storyline about a possibly real, possibly forged draft of a chapter of The Three Musketeers and all of the conspiracy/mystery/bibliophilia around it. Which makes sense since films necessarily have to cut corners, but it also makes the book’s title useless here.
It otherwise kind of stays faithful to the remaining material - barring reuse of characters for different purposes - until near the end. In the book, the forged pages are not the acts of Lucifer, but instead of a pair of forgers, and the mysterious woman who protects the lead character is not trying to lure him into Hell, but is a fallen angel (possibly Lucifer but this is not clear from my memory) who has been wandering the earth, deeply lonely, and fell in love with the lead character. The book’s ending is rather touching, while the movie’s is very confusing and even apocalyptic.
The Club Dumas has a lot of literary references, I see: The Club Dumas - Wikipedia
Tons, and invents a mess of fake books to refer to as well. So it’s a great book for fans of books to read, IMO.
I’m going to assume this will also deviate from the book as that one is REALLY gruesome. Plus the scene where Red Mist machine-guns a bunch of young kids for no good reason is unlikely to test well in the US these days, if ever it would have.
I’ve never had a more negative reaction to a graphic novel than I did to Wanted. I didn’t think the movie could be any worse, but I hadn’t counted on Hollywood’s amazing ability to disappoint. They took a wildly violent, nihilistic and pretentious example of the very worst of the comic book genre and made a boring, forgettable action movie.
I mean, say what you like about the GN (and I liked a few things), at least it was lively.
Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea was turned into a very bad min-series on the Syfy channel. Among the changes: the copper skinned people of Ged’s land are made white; the celibate wizard is given a love interest and many new characters are introduced. LeGuin pretty much wrote an open letter saying don’t watch this show.
The big “reveal” in L.A. Confidential was established pretty early as a given fact in the book. Thankfully I saw the film before reading the book (actually listened to the audiobook), so thankfully it didn’t ruin the movie for me… but if you read the book then went to see the film you’d lose a lot of the suspense.
This version is indeed faithful to the novel. I recommend it.
John Irving asked them to change the title precisely because it was so different from the book. I have a feeling he also didn’t think it was very good. I didn’t love the book, but the movie was awful.
In the novel, Quasimodo interrupts the priest being nasty to Esmerelda. There is a lot of writing about what Quasimodo is thinking about. His confusion and allegiance.
In the silent film, the scene is brief and wonderful. Like Quasimodo, we are deaf watching the film. Like he, our vision is obscured watching the old black and white film.
This. I mean, I can see somewhat altering the facts in a film based on a true story, but THIS?! Did they ever say WHY?!
They already HAD a good alternate title if they’d just given it a little thought. Steve Martin’s character is named Tom Baker (no scarf or jellybabies, though). So why not call it “Baker’s Dozen”?
I just remembered the story by George R.R. Martin story “Sandkings.”
It got made into a made-for-TV-movie on Showtime. The only thing that was similar was that there were creatures in the sand that could fight and eat.
SFC Schwartz
Yeah, afraid so. The movies are fantastic action flicks, but they completely omit the original plot twist from the first book that makes the entire series make sense. Same with Shooter, the Mark Wahlberg-starring movie version of the novel Point of Impact - the movie completely omits the clever plot twist central to the entire book and substitutes a revenge fueled bloodbath by the main character. Not that that’s a bad thing, but after reading a taut thriller in which the main character brilliantly outwits everyone who betrays him, seeing an alternate ending where he simply murders them all is a bit of an eyeroller.
I agree. There is, of course, already a perfectly good (and largely faithful) movie of the book made in 1950 with Myrna Loy as the mother.
Isn’t that basically “Tremors”?
I know, I liked it. That just adds to the shame of the most recent movie.