I don’t mind they changed the ending of HANNIBAL and left out his back-story, but I definitely mind that they omitted Mason Verger’s sister Margot. OK, leave out the whole lesbian-bodybuilder-who-needs-a-child-for-inheritance stuff. Just make her the sexually-emotionally-abused co-dependent caretaker of Mason, who at the final moment in enabled by Hannibal to finally avenge herself and blame it on him.
I WAS a reader from the beginning, and I’ve got those issues – it most certainly WASN’T made clear that was the case, and it’s bugged me since the beginning.
I don’t mean that the web button syicks up like a doorbell button, waiting and eager for any excuse to be activated. But it certainly didn’t look recessed in Steve Ditko’s drawings. It looked as it’d still be too easy to accidentally activate. I sure as heck don’t recall anything about the button requiring “Spider Strength” to activate.
Gone With The Wind knocking out all references to the Klu Klux Klan was historically inaccurate censorship.
Yes, I was. Sorry for the confusion.
I didn’t like the political correctness change in Clear and Present Danger changing the captain of the Panache from the tough male character in the book (Red?) to a female.
I’m with you on all of these - especially Aragorn and Eomer meeting on the field of battle; that’s my favorite moment of the entire trilogy, along with the unfurling of the King’s flag on the corsair ships!
And the Witchking-Gandalf scene was utterly botched.
Overall I think PJ did a fine job, but there were really some points where he should have stuck to the books.
The comic Wanted was completely different from the movie. The comic was much better, IMO. Sicker and more fun. I don’t know why they gave the movie the same title, it was so different.
Obligatory LOTR response: Adore the FOTR movie; it was everything I ever hoped it could be. Can’t quibble with any changes. OTOH I quibble with almost all the changes in the next two. sigh. The scene where Theoden almost burns his son alive should have been incredibly powerful, as in the book. The Scouring of the Shire should have been in there. The Houses of Healing. Oh heck, I’ll refrain from going on and on.
True, but they also took out the casual use of the N-word. And I think most people could figure out the “political meeting” Frank/Ashley/Dr. Meade went to rode to Shantytown with.
The Godfather
For as good as the movie was, I don’t like the way it portrayed Michael as a bitter man consumed with nothing but revenge.
The book is about how you knew he was just like his dad, and destiny is fulfilled. He knew that his dads world would feed on itself until it was destroyed, that’s why he wanted to go ‘legit’ in Las Vegas. He never killed his brother. Furthmore, the idea that Kay would get an abortion to keep another Corleone from being born. I hate that.
I have to chime in on this one. I originally read the books as a teenager. I recently tried to read them again. Ugh! They didn’t carry very well, did they? It marks only the 2nd book in my memory that I couldn’t finish (The first being Mystic River). I found my self saying “I get it already, Carlos, Cain, your mental anguish! Enough already!” Plus I didn’t like that they killed Marie!
That being said, I loved the movies.
RE: Hannibal
I agree that, given that Lecter is unusually intelligent, in the movie it would have made a lot more sense for him to either sever the handcuff chain or pick the lock. Only an idiot would cut off his own hand in that situation.
My memory of the movie is less than perfect, but IIRC we don’t really see what he severs. People tend to assume that he cuts his own hand off at the wrist, but in order to slip the cuffs he’d have needed to cut off only his thumb…the rest of the hand would then slip easily through the cuff. Lecter would know that. Hell, he could slip the cuffs just by breaking his thumb with the blunt side of the cleaver. Pulling his hand through would be excruciating, but possible.
The movie ending was not only not true to the book, it wasn’t true to the character as established by the movies.
I don’t count the new Godfather novels (“Godfather Returns”, “Godfather’s Revenge”, “Godfather vs. Alien”, etc.) by Mark Winegardner as canonical, but I did read the first one and perhaps the best part was a revelation about Kay:
In the Winegardner novel you learn that Kay suffered a late-term miscarriage [or stillbirth]- it was completely natural- but she told Michael that it was an abortion because it was the thing that she could think of that would hurt him the most even though it wasn’t true. Also in that novel Michael has the doctor who performs the family abortions [and Lucy Mancini’s vagoplasty] killed, assuming he was the one who performed Kay’s nonexistent abortion.
Again, not canonical and most of the book is silly, but that I’ll integrate because that always bothered me as well.
I came in here to mention Shawshank, and it’s worth noting that in the novella, there wasn’t just one warden. They condensed Warden Norton (and Byron Hadley) into single characters and made them last the entire movie, when in the stories, Red’s period of incarceration was longer than the tenure of many wardens and many head guards.
To me, that was the most brilliant change about “Rita Hayworth.” It gave the characters enough continuity that we actually cared what happened to them, which is why we could see Warden Norton off himself at the end. In the novel he was just a bit part and he never would have merited much of an ending — and actually, Andy Dufresne just walked off with the cash. He never reported it to the newspapers, either, as I remember it.
The movie version was much better, more satisfying. King should’ve written it that way, but I figure he had wardens going in and out to accentuate the passage of time (which is easier to show in a movie by aging the actors and changing the costumes and set design).
The Lord of the Rings. This merits an entire thread. I understand why they made the changes that they did, because the needs of cinema are different, but some of them still bother me.
One (dislike): in the book, Faramir has the same strength that Gandalf possesses, to reject the Ring. But you know, after they made such a big deal with Galadriel freaking out (and what was that?) about the Ring, they couldn’t just have a mere Human say, “Ring? No thanks.”
Two (dislike): the march of the Ents should have been inspired by Pippin and Merry. That was the whole purpose of Boromir’s sacrifice in the first place. It seems as if the Ents would have gotten round to marching on Isengard on their own, eventually; Merry’s and Pippin’s presence had nothing to do with it.
Three (like): they didn’t want 15 years to get the movie started. Gandalf shows up at the beginning and declares that the Ring is dangerous and it should be kept safe; and instantly Frodo does nothing for 15 years. He lounges. He practically goldbricks. He loafs around in Hobbiton. Tolkien undermined the dramatic urgency of his own plot here. The movie handled this better, allowing Frodo to get hiking immediately.
But in the movie Merry and Pippin did inspire the invasion of the Ents - they said flat out they wouldn’t get involved and until the hobbits made Treebeard walk past Isengard had no intention to. Unless you’re saying that’s how it should have been in the book and the movie did it better like you did with your third point? 
Merry and Pippin only half-assed “inspired” the Ents to march on Isengard, because the filmmakers a) wanted to give them more to do, and an inspiring speech just wasn’t enough; and b) they didn’t want to bring in the Ents too early because it would undermine the tension at Helm’s Deep.
I understand why they did it, but it still tastes sour; it’s almost as if Treebeard might accidentally have noticed the destruction of the forest on his own one day, and he would have got round to Saruman eventually.
In the book, Treebeard knew all about it — but was too paralyzed by the long-term view that the Ents must not involve themselves in minor affairs of Men to get involved. I think it would have been much more exciting to see Merry and Pippin recruit a powerful neutral ally, than have everything hinge upon which road they took home.
Cold Mountain
The addition of the entire battle scene at the opening of the movie - WTF? Added nothing to the story.
Thank Og someone brought this up. A lot of people say the changes made from LOTR to the movies of the same name were cinematically necessary. This is simply untrue, and this particular segment is the kicker. “The books are too long” we hear, and yet PJ *adds * in a whole segment that simply adds nothing at all to the plot, no character development, nothing. I have no idea what the point of this bit was other than perhaps PJ felt that the movie wasn’t cliched enough.
Other things he fucked up:
Battle one-sidedness - it is a stupid Hollywood cliche that battles must be ridiculously one sided. For some reason Helm’s Deep had to be altered to a boyscout with his pocket knife against a mighty army of millions. The boyscout wins, natch. An orc chieftan in Moria isn’t big enough, it has to be something the size of an elephant otherwise there was some danger that it might be believable that Frodo didn’t have internal injuries from the force of having a spear rammed into his guts. What was the problem? Was there too much of an air of realism? Was there some danger that people were having to exercise too little suspension of disbelief?
Breaching the third wall, cartoonishness etc - one of the reasons LOTR works is that it takes itself so ogdamned seriously. The dark and foreboding seriousness sucks you in to the point where it feels like it all matters. Something like that is like a balloon: it doesn’t take much to puncture it because let’s face it, none of it *does * actually matter but as soon as you allow yourself (or are forced by directorial incompetence) to start thinking that way, the magic is gone. When there are dwarf throwing jokes and cartoonish fight scenes like something out of a Hanna Barbara production it’s all over for me.
I thought it was a (clumsy) attempt at adding nuance to Lecter, to show that he wasn’t a simple sociopath, but rather, possessed a very unconventional morality which included altruism.
FTR, I hated the Hollywood ending of Hannibal. I thought the book’s plot, which contrasted Lecter’s deeds with the institutional injustices committed against Clarice Starling by Krendler and the FBI, provoked thought on what actually constitutes evil. And on how a group can escape responsibility for horrific deeds.
But I understand that such excursions are only interesting to people (like me) who tend towards moral relativism, and that Hollywood doesn’t make many blockbuster pictures for us.
Harris’ brief musings on the similarities between Clarice and Hannibal’s personalities in SOTL make more sense after we learn about the atrocitiies inflicted on Lecter in his childhood. Harris seems to be coming down on the side of ‘nurture’, whereas Will Graham was definitely in the ‘nature’ camp regarding Lecter.
Also, what I came here originally to post was that I was disappointed that the remake of ‘Red Dragon’ removed the use of the ‘Wound Man’ illustration in Graham’s realization that Lecter was the murderer he was hunting. I thought it was a nice touch: that drawing is just the sort of thing Lecter would be inspired by.
The Other Boleyn Girl
The book was great. The movie, to me, was terrible. The only similarities between the two are the names of the characters.