I'm sure you've all had the movie wasn't as good as the book experience. To be fair, there have been a lot of good movie adaptations of books I love. Here are a few:
- Trainspotting--Caught the spirit of the book.
- 1984--The noirish version with Edmond O'Brien.
- The Big Sleep--The version with Bogart was terrific.
- Farewell, My Lovely--The late 40s version called Murder My Sweet with Dick Powell is a great movie. Powell is unbelievably good as Philip Marlowe.
- The Glass Key--Hammet's novel is well represented with Alan Ladd and Brian Donleavy in the starring roles.
- True Grit--Charles Portis' novel is beautifully rendered. The characters speak in the same language they speak in the book. John Wayne, what can you say?
The object of this game is to name movie or TV adaptations that did more than just a bad job. We're looking for things that totally perverted their source. The source can be most anything, legend, fairy tale, epic poem, novel, short story, TV Show, movie, cartoon (print or animated,) or anything else you can think of that was adapted for movies or TV.
Extra credit for things that have had both movie and TV adaptations that violated the source material in ways that would make Gil Grissom vomit.
Rules: Title and the reason the adaptation redefined vileness. One title per comment. Digressions and thread jacking encouraged.
Heres a starter:
Hans Christian Andersen was a real sicko. I didn't read any of his fairy tales to our daughter because I remembered my own experience reading them to myself when I was seven and eight. I didn't think the unabashedly psychosexual themes were appropriate fare for pre-schoolers. I think Danny Kaye was a great choice to play Andersen in the musical biopic. Since Kaye was bisexual and had some unhappy times in his personal life it added a nice touch of irony.
Disney's version of The Little Mermaid turned it into a happy story with tremendous licensing potential. In doing so they gutted the story and did a total remodel. In the original version the mermaid had to endure excruciating pain to live on land. The prince threw her over for a human woman. There was no singing and dancing, or at least nothing like that in the Disney movie. It was a depressing story about, among other things, knowing your place. Disney's version was a cheery tale of upward mobility.
Let's hear some of your un-favorite adaptations.
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Comments: 37
The 10 Commandments -- Cecil B. DeMille's Version was all the way Hollywood, but nothing like the Bible
What a joke!
I'll be back after I give this some thought.
I so, so, so looked forward to seeing Trainspotting, but when I finally got to watch it I couldn't understand what the heck they were saying. I had the same problem with Waking Ned Devine and The Full Monty.
Other than that - I wondered how Six Days of the Condor ended up as a movie called Three Days of the Condor. They needed a shorter movie, or they knew they were going to do a half-arsed job of it when they named the thing?
I thought the movie Rosemary's Baby was MUCH better than the dry dry dry book. Great performances can do a lot!
The book and movie of Myra Breckenridge were so good but so differnt from each other.
I thought the book and movie of Contact were both good.
I know a woman who hasn't seen Mildred Pierce but thinks that's okay because she's read the book. !!!!!?????
*OK, I didn't even read the book. I liked the movie.
The "Unfortunate Events" movie added entirely new "events" (like the train tracks incident), and reversed the order of some of the others. Count Olaf's attempt to force Violet into marrying him is foiled by her brother, not by Violet herself, as in the book. However, some of these changes were probably necessary and not for the worse....
Few of my therapists ever slept with me.
A great American story, Theophilus North (Thornton Wilder), was made into an unbearably cliched and stupid movie.
I have never forgiven the malefactors who did this - as the inspired book, by Thornton Wilder, was not well-known, and will be forever ignored by those who saw the sappy movie.
I think the movie adaptation of Ron Hubbard's book, Battlefield Earth, starring John Travolta, was a stinker but then I don't know if the book was good to start with. Does anyone here?
Rubicon, The French Lieutenant's Woman made me so angry at the end that I threw the book out the back door (though I did pick it up later). I thought just the opposite, that the movie couldn't possibly be as frustrating as the book.
I loved Anderson's fairy tales and read them as a teen for enjoyment, but I liked the bittersweet statement about true love he made, that love is sacrifice and not about getting everything you dreamed. Modern fairy tales are now much more my preference with their happy Hollywood endings simply because they let me escape my life and feel happy closure for the characters. When I read I want more twisted and informational entertainment that leaves my thinking questioned or altered for the better, I tend to read mostly non-fiction for that reason. So you can see why I have difficulty comparing them, mostly because I like books and movies for different things.
I actually liked Marathon Man, the movie. I think it followed the book pretty closely but I'm really not sure.
Oh, yes. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, that classic book about the schizophrenic girl, played by a young Kathleen Quinlan. Book and movie were vastly different but I thought the movie was well done, although it might be hard for anyone to get into who wasn't versed in theories about schizophrenia, pyschosis and the psychological theories of the day. Now talk therapy seems to be out of fashion (or not reimbursed by insurance) and meds are in, so the movie appears a bit of a dinosaur. I still like it.
Regardless, the bastardization of history is my big issue. All though I loved the Frank Miller comic, 300 fell short for me. I guess as a Greek I'm allowed to be picky about that. They didn't use a single Greek word in the flipping movie. Saying "Thermopylae" is just as easy as saying "hot gates" for goodness sake. I know the comic took the same liberties, but it was just so cool.
The count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas was also a fantastic book and a magnificent disappointment. They ignore more than half of the plot.