Trying to get beyond the whole “the book is better than the movie” thing, I’d like to ask what you think works in taking a story presented in print, and then re-presenting that story in a totally different media–film.
**When has it worked really well? What have you liked about the new version? What are your favorites? **
Ive found tons of movies based off of books that were GOOD movies. However when it comes to honoring the book, Id say patriot games. (then again its just my opinion)
Gotta go with Dune. The book (well, series of books) was amazing, and the movie did pretty damn well too. The casting was spot on, IMNSHO.
Silence of the Lambs was a great adaptation of that book with an outstanding cast and great direction.
Emma Thompson’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility is brilliant. The novel had been Jane Austen’s first published work and the weakest of her major novels. On film the story gains an evenness and polish that was characteristic of Austen’s best writing. I’ll stop short of claiming that this improves on the original: there are layers of satire and philosopy that don’t reach the screen. Taking its place is some wry commentary on the status of women.
Yes, it’s a chick flick. Some people consider that a drawback. If your home entertainment system requires an occasional dose of estrogen and you missed this before, then give it a look.
I would have to say Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. It was adapted foe film in 1974, and the movie was almost exactly like the book. The Actors were great, and it worked very well.
LA Confidential has to be mentioned. Great adaptation. A Re-interpretation, really.
Also The Maltase Falcon. The only example I can think of where I really enjoyed the movie more than the book.
Ok, I have two. The first is not a big surprise: Kenneth Branagh’s [bu]Henry V[/bu]was truly amazing, not least of all because, as one reviewer put it, he made it sound like Shakesepearean English could be spoken naturally.
The other I fully expect to get at least a bit of resistance on; I really enjoyed Paul Verhoevens’s [bu] Starship Troopers[/bu]. I know that a lot of people have been saying that it has little to do with the book (which I have also enjoyed greatly over the years) but I think it actually does a good job of presenting Verhoeven’s interpretation of Heinlein’s story and ideas. The whole military basis for citizenship, the idea of making the safety of civilization one’s personal responsibility. I’m pretty sure RAH would have approved of characters like Diz and Carmen, being brilliant, talented, and hypersexed. Yeah, yeah, I know there weren’t any powered suits, etc. but does anybody else think that the story’s core ideas were there?
There’s quite a few films that were better than the literary source materials from which they derived. The Godfather, The Graduate and The Shawshank Redemption are a few that I’ve read and spring to mind as being better films. There’s many others that’s I can’t think of at the moment.
*To Kill A Mickingbird[/], Stand By Me and Malcolm X are a few personal favorites that started out as books.
And I agree with SG, Emma’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility rocked hard.
The Day of the Jackal, the 1972 Fred Zinneman film based on the Frederick Forsyth bestseller. Wonderfully done adaptation, and my all-time favorite thriller.
The Shawshank Redemption and The Dead Zone, two very well done Stephen King books.
The Andromeda Strain. The closest movie adaptation of a book I’ve ever seen. Robert Wise directs th adaptation of a Michael Crichton book.
Goldfiner. As has been noted several times on this board, this is one time the movie improves on the James Bond Book. I also though On Her Majesty’s secret Service was a improvement on the book. (Don’t give me that “But it had George Lazenby” crap! It had Diana Rigg!)
The Day of the Jackal, the 1972 Fred Zinneman film based on the Frederick Forsyth bestseller. Wonderfully done adaptation, and my all-time favorite thriller.
The Shawshank Redemption and The Dead Zone, two very well done Stephen King books.
The Andromeda Strain. The closest movie adaptation of a book I’ve ever seen. Robert Wise directs th adaptation of a Michael Crichton book.
Goldfiner. As has been noted several times on this board, this is one time the movie improves on the James Bond Book. I also though On Her Majesty’s secret Service was a improvement on the book. (Don’t give me that “But it had George Lazenby” crap! It had Diana Rigg!)
Yondan, you called this wrong. You’ll get a lot of resistance here. The movie was philosophically 180 degrees from Henlein. Far from presenting his ideas, it inverted them. To my min, this is one of the worst book-to-move adaptations. Heinlein would’ve hated this on a lot of different levels – in its poor science, in its vastly different mindset from his book, in its so completely Anglo characters, in its different take on sexual relations.
I agree, the science was bad, particularly the space scenes, but I really want to hear why you think the mindset was so different. I don’t see it. Also, I said * interpretation * not adaptation. And as for sexuality, do you * really * think the GM would not have found the women in the movie eminently delectable? Or would have disapproved of their, umm, appetites?
So what do we do now? do we take this “to the pit”? Or can we duke it out here? Would that be highjacking this thread? (can one highjack one’s own thread?) Or has this been done to death already and I missed it? I’m a newbie, here, so be gentle.
The Shawshank Redemption, from the novella, Shawshank Redemption and Rita Hayworth. Morgan Freeman was great casting, although in the book Red wasn’t black. But he’s got a great voice, and that’s important because of the necessary voiceovers. And Andy- Tim Robbins? - was an amazing mesh to neat little man King sketched in. The movie was streamlined nicely, giving us a single warden and guard as a personification of the systems that could be explored in the book.
–John
[sub]I’m not a movie & book type person, so be kind…[/sub]
I just finished reading The Neverending Story. I didn’t know it was a book until about 3 days before I started reading it, and it was one of my all-time favorite movies, since it was one of the first movies I’d ever seen (but seen many times since). I was able to read the book and totally visualise what was going on, using the movie as the basis for all my images. I think it was a great adaptation between book and movie.
I agree completely with this. The book was just about exactly the same as the movie, but the movie was altered just enough to clear up some odd things in the book. This is probably because Dashiell Hammett was the screenwriter??
Hopefully Harry Potter.
I always like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, even though it’s a tad different than the book (the book is in Chief Bromden’s POV for instance). A Clockwork Orange is also another favorite.
The English Patient
Actually preferred the movie to the book. The book was a bit too stream-of-consciousness for me.
**Stand By Me **
from Stephen King’s short story The Body. Perfectly captures King’s coming-of-age tale. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, did you?”
“Smiley’s People” .Not a film but a BBC mini-series. This adaption of the the John Le Carré novel is so true to the book with great chunks of dialogue taken straight from the book. Alec Guinness is the perfect George Smiley. I have the video tape and can watch it over and over again.“Tinker Tailor” is almost as good but the later story is ,I think, the better one.
For S. King, I’ll agree with The Shawshank Redemption, and Stand By Me. Excellent films, both. Also The Green Mile. The Stand was good, but could have been better, I think.
The Princess Bride was very well done.
2001: A Space Odyssey.
The 1984 film of 1984 with John Hurt and Richard Burton was good, and quite close to the book.
Moby Dick with Gregory Peck I enjoyed quite a bit.
It seems like if I’ve read the book first, I always like it better than the movie. If I see the movie first, I tend to like them both equally (that’s assuming I like them at all). I’ve never seen a movie I liked and then read the book and not liked it though.
Has anyone ever seen a movie based on a Dean Koontz book that they liked? All the ones I’ve seen have been uniformly horrible.
No need to take this to the Pit, Yondan, unless that’s what you want. I was intending to engage in an intellectual dicussion.
1.) Sexuality – The big H had no problem with embracing sexuality, or in portraying his characters as sexually active and pro-sex. In fact, I complain in another thread that his female characters are too unbelievable, and it’s partly because of their extremely high and easy sex drive – not that I don’t thoink women are as pro-sex as men, but because his women too often rsemble male sex fantasies rather than real people.
No, the problem is that Heinlein had a very definite sexual structure in mind, and that required a very disciplined sexual separation in the armed forces, with ritualized behavior between the when on active duty that the movie tossed out the window.
2.) Military Stupidity – Heinlein was an active Navy man before WWII and a reservist the rest of his life. His second wife as military, too. Although he clearly thought that there could be stupidity in the military (stupidity is ubiquitous), he didn’t feel the military was inrinsically dumb an made consistently stupid policies. Bt the movies seems to show a military that is consistently and criminally stupid and selfserving. I can understand the movie’s doing away with the body armor (It lets you show the actrs emoting, smething hard to do in a metal can. Aso, it givs you an imression of danger and menace when they’re o the battlefield – if you show the soldiers wrapped up in their own private tanks it’s ard to feel that sense. Finally, they didnt need still more CGI effects hadaches.) But it doesn’t make any sense to then throw such poorly protected, highly trained and expensively equipped soldiers again verwhelming hordes of enemy soldiers th don’t cost the enemy anything at all. That sort of calls for carpet bombing. They d this at one point in the film, but they don’t do it enough. And what was the point of such flimsy, open forts? Or sending more soldiers into them once they fail? Or the lack of aerial support (They don’t have any!) Or the criminl stupidity of that over-crowded space-drop barrage in when they attack the planet?
3.) But the worst offense is Heinlein’s mind-set of the military and the government. They re shown as deliberately choosing to ignore any sort of non-military solution or settlement (this is, in fact, the point of Joe Haldeman’s book The Forever War, which has always seemed to me to be the post-Vietnam answer to Starship Troopers. And if Verhoeven and company wanted to tell that story, they should’ve bought the rights to that book.). The soldiers and the leaders are driven bythoughts of revenge and visceral emotio, rather than rational thought. Read the book again, that’s the diametric opposite of Heinlein’s ideal military. The leadership’s lack of thought for the footsoldier is also directly against sections in the book that explicitly show the leader’s need to consider their soldier’s best interests. Finally, there is a considered and deliberate tendency to assciate the military with the worst sort of fascism – those nazi-like uniforms, attitudes, and grey and black uniforms are very deliberate invocation of the Nazis. If you could ever doubt such a thing (It’s incredibly heavy-handed symbolism), Verhoeven dispels any doubts on the DVD commentary. Yet Heinlein’s political system in the book is neither fascist nr military. It’s ne that has never been tried, ad one which Heinlein depicts as a plausible development from a real historical possibility. Heinlein has “constructed” lots of posible political systems in his books (in most of them, in fact, although they’re uncommonly heavy in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and ** Expanded Universe**), but that doesn’t mean he advocates any of these. Nevertheless, I’ve always felt that thi one was closest to his own feelings. The system shown in the film most certainly would not have been.