Yep, I saw that and that the Abigail Fix character is useless and bad.
It is truly wonderful, a masterpiece.
To me, it is Wicked- at least the book anyway. The Wizard has been changed from a humbug to a Hitler.
If you just pretend it has nothing whatsoever to do with the RAH book, it is entertaining and kinda fun.
Yep it was terrible, and that is one of my fave TA fantasy series.
Now, then they did The House with a Clock in its Walls, but for some reason the kid star wasnt chubby like Lewis was, and that is an important part of the stories. Otherwise it was okay.
Anne Rice wrote a book called Exit to Eden, which is about an S & M island resort, and the plot revolves around one of the visitors developing a relationship with one of the “Mistresses.”
The subsequent movie made that a subplot, with the main thrust of the film being Dan Ackroyd and Rosie O’Donnell as two cops who go undercover at that resort to catch an international jewelry thief.
The 2003 live-action adaptation of The Cat in the Hat, starring Mike Myers. Or as A. O. Scott called it, “a vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy that Universal has the temerity to call ‘Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat.’”
Starship Troopers barely resembles the book except that it’s about vaguely fascist future soldiers fighting giant bugs. AIUI, Paul Veerhoeven had a script that turned out to have some superficial similarities to Heinlein’s novel, so the studio just bought the rights and slapped that title on it.
The tragedy of it is that now we’ll probably never get a faithful adaptation, because so many movies have already done power armor at this point that it’d seem derivative.
Moby Dick (1930) – Opens with page one of the book and “Call me Ishmael” is not the first line. Ishmael isn’t even in the film! Instead we get hammy John Barrymore stuck with a peg-leg, a love interest (Joan Bennett) and a lame kid brother. Egregiously dumbed down, the only things this version has going for it are an awesome performance by Noble Johnson as Queequeg and Barrymore looking mighty silly as a chew-toy for the whale.
Adaptation (2002) – A failed attempt to adapt The Orchid Thief rewritten as a self-indulgent masturbatory story about a screenwriter failing to adapt a book.
Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) – Even beyond its shittiness – some of which admittedly stems from the source material – why adapt the story and not even show Galactus? WTF?
Ghost in the Shell (2017) – Beautiful production design in wretched Americanization of manga/anime/movie series loses much of the flavor and distinction. I found the ending when Scar-Jo visits the grave of Motoko Kusanagi to be quite ironic.
I was so disappointed that both I am Legent and Breakfast at Tiffany’s had a Hollywood happy ending! That completely distorts the originals.
I hated Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits as the worst conceivable plagiarism of One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez. Still hate it when I think of it, which seldom happens.
There’s two I am Legend endings - the main one he dies but finds a cure, the alternate he realizes the MonkeyVampireZombies aren’t mindless beasts and he’s been killing them, so it matches the novella a bit better. But then the problem is it doesn’t make much sense with the title, you don’t become a legend by getting remorse.
The Canadian cartoon Romie-0 and Julie-8 is not the finest adaptation of Shakespeare’s play.
I know some people love the BBC version of Sherlock, but I remember thinking the episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” was stupid, with its secret CIA lab or whatever.
I started watching the Reese Witherspoon version of Vanity Fair, but I gave up pretty quickly when her version of Becky Sharp was too nice.
New Line Cinema had obtained the rights to the Stephen King short story “The Lawnmower Man”, and the producers also had an unrelated script called “Cyber God”. For economical reasons, they simply placed King’s title on the production of “Cyber God”, and early promotional material with that claim even went public. King was furious at this abuse of his name, and he sued the studio to have his name and title removed from the film and promotion. The studio refused, but was eventually ordered to pay ten thousand dollars and full profits to King.
Which is largely what happened with two other mentions in the the thread, “I, Robot” and “Starship Troopers” - both of which had other scripts, and had the title and a minor gloss (character names and a few details) added on to the existing scripts to try to sell the “adaptation”.
Worst for me meant departing substantially from the original in a way that made me cringe. Worse if it happens at the end and spoils everything that came before, including even Audrey Hepburn, and that’s something.
But yes, James Bond comes close, in a different way.
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023). It’s so bad, I blogged about it. Specifically, the utterly nonsensical decision to take a play set in WWII and then lift it into the modern era with only superficial changes to dialogue. Absolutely atrocious.
One of the key sources of tension is the difference in attitudes between the regular Navy (careerists who began their service pre-war) and the draftees/volunteers who made up the bulk of the WWII-era Navy, with the original play (and the novel it was based on) described mostly from the POV of the latter, seeing the regular Navy as fools and petty tyrants, as epitomized by Captain Queeg. But none of that makes any sense when you take the events of the source material and set them in the 2020s: not only is there no draft, there is no sudden influx of volunteers still knocking around from post-9/11. Or at least, if there are any, they are as much regular Navy careerists as anyone by now.
IIRC, that’s also why the Captain America movie serial involved a guy who isn’t named Steve Rogers and doesn’t have a bulletproof shield or a supersoldier serum — or a pal named Bucky, or any connection to the US Army — but is, instead, a prosecutor investigating a string of suicides.
And then there was the live-action “Cats” movie. Its one redeeming factor, from what I have heard, is that it introduced the phrase “CGI buttholes” into the vernacular.
The remake of Stephen King’s “The Stand” that appeared a few years back also got poor reviews. I did see the first episode, and it took a LOT of liberties just in that episode alone.
How about just about any attempt to interpret “Cleopatra” on film?