Danny Kaye’s version of The Inspector General.
Wow, no-one has mentioned Forest Gump. I saw the movie, but never read the book, but my wife did, and everything I’ve heard from her, and from things I’ve read on the Dope before, make me surprised it wasn’t brought up earlier.
That’s the classic modern example of a movie that was better than the book, so maybe that would be a movie that got it right the most :).
This version of Black Beauty. I picked it up at Circuit City about ten years ago for five bucks, and I still think I was overcharged.
You’re the first person I’ve heard who’s read the book and seen the movie and like the movie better. Guess there’s a first time for everything :).
I thought the book was ass, and the movie was watchable. So in that respect, the movie is better than the book…I don’t know if that’s saying much, though.
“…based on a novel by Philip K. Dick”
JFK.
Won the thread.
This.
I was in the audience at WorldCon that year when his people were trying to sell the movie to us. They swore up and down that they were being faithful to the book, even without power armor. Liars!
Like Lawnmower Man, BladeRunner had nothing whatsoever to do with the book of the same name. Which would have made a damn good movie.
A perennial mention, Stephen King’s The Shining was badly butchered by that rather forgettable person who tried to make a movie of it, and it was King’s best book ever and once again would have made a hell of a good movie. King himself did a miniseries, which was an improvement but needed serious editing for pace.
Stanley Kubrick? His version is excellent, I think. I know Stephen King has issues with it, but it is a great movie(now matter how different it is from the book).
BladeRunner was based on the non-eponymous book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick. Which is not to say that it was particularly faithful to Dick’s work, not at all.
Well, you just know they must have republished it under that title at some point.
Excellent? :dubious: In what ways?
I don’t see that he added anything whatsoever. Screwed up the plot. Miscast all three main characters. Give him credit for a couple of good indiv scenes, sure, but apart from that?
Even trying to see the movie on its own merits as if I’d never read the book, Wendy is annoying and the entire subplot with the cook, now deprived of relevance, just chews up time, and the end sort of wanders off into the maze and gets lost and leaves you thinking “huh? that was IT?”
Besides, the book DOES matter. See thread title. He got it wrong. It was a spectacularly good book. He fucked it up.
I’ve never heard of anyone liking the book period.
Despite the movie being almost universally hated here at the SDMB, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in real life who didn’t like it. It has an 8.5 on IMDB and makes a lot of “best movies of the '90s” lists.
The main problem with I Am Legend isn’t that it diverges from its source.
I dislike the movie I, Robot because it takes the title of a cool series of stories and uses it for silly pulp sci-fi. With a different title, I, Robot would’ve been a fun mindless action flick, but now that it’s used that title, a real adaptation will never be made.
The thing with I Am Legend though is that even without the title, it’s not consistent in its own universe. It includes numerous set-ups to imply that the zombies are more intelligent than Neville gives them credit for, setting traps and forming social relationships. But it all amounts to nothing, and the movie ends with a big pointless explosion and an overly saccharine voice-over. The alternate ending on the DVD would’ve made it a much better movie, even if it’s still not entirely faithful to its source material, as it was at least consistent with what the movie itself had been building up to.
Wait, Blade Runner? I don’t believe the book is called Blade Runner.
ETA: Whoops! Didn’t realize that I had opened this thread so long ago and see the subject has already come up.
The Sci-Fi channel’s Children of Dune adaptation in 2003.
The first installment covered the book Dune Messiah. They switched some stuff around and left a bunch of other stuff out, but I thought they did OK with the source material given the time and filming constraints.
They basically made the next parts of the series based on the COD book into a new story, and a half-assed one at that. Characters just ran around the stage doing things that didn’t make sense with no reason given. To be fair to the filmmakers
(a) So did the characters in the book
(b) When the book did list a reason, more than half the time the reason didn’t make any sense
© As far as I’m concerned, the entire Dune series is unfilmable. It’s too weird. Too much takes place inside the head in the form of philoso-babble and monologues. I used to think that it might just have worked in anime format, but after rereading the first three books, I can’t even see that working.
Because I just read the reviews over at agonybooth recently: the Neverending Story movies. Michael Ende, the author, was roundly disappointed with the first one and removed his name from the credits; and by stopping the first movie halfway through the book, TPTB turned the whole message of the book around and stomped on it.
I haven’t ready the book, but I understand Breakfast at Tiffany’s diverges from the book in several significant ways.