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*Cough* Richard Matheson's Somewhere in Time (originally titled "Bid Time Return"). There's some changes but it's still just as beautiful of a story on screen as on film.
Also, if fantasy is on the table- The Wizard of Oz and Return to Oz are, needless to say, awesome adaptations.
Going out on a limb here, but I HATE The Lord of the Rings books. I found them painfully slow and incredibly boring and I quit a quarter-way through Two Towers when I realized I only read LOTR to help me get to sleep. However, I loved the movies. Don't get me wrong, I love to read, but fantasy and I just don't get along. (Let's say I started with Robert Jordan and ended with Robert Jordan; you know what I'm talking about if you got into his craptastic followups to Lord of Chaos.)
LOTR was a casualty of my dislike for the genre, but the movies were so well-made on so many different levels that I gave it a pass and rank them among my favorite movies.
@RexMaximus: I still wonder if Jordan had a stroke after Lord of Chaos or something. The books move along at a fairly decent clip, and then wham! Book seven comes and it slows to a freakin' crawl. The guy literally had to die before we got another decent novel in that series.
@Adah:, @Lloyd: @sakeido: @Fanboy185: I think I remembered something happening to RJ healthwise around the writing of A Crown of Swords, but I could be wrong. That would make sense, or he simply just lost the plot.
I read the Sword of Truth to about Temple of the Winds, but never continued. I liked SoT as a teen, but I even then I found its violence, sex, and violent sex a little disturbing, alongside the Ayn Rand-lite philosophy. I'll give it another go eventually, and dabble with the other recommendations.
As for Peter Jackson's changes/deletions, I would have really liked the Tom Bombadil chapter in Fellowship of the Ring, but everything else just fit like a glove. When I read that part, I kept thinking of that crazy Trumpy flying toys around the kid's bedroom scene from the MST3k episode on "Pod People." It was that weird. If any of you MST fans got that, kudos to you.
I still think Bram Stoker's Dracula is a great adaptation. It's the only movie ever made of the book that includes the American character - and the only one that has the multi-transfusion scene from the novel where Mina gets blood from like five guys at once, and which is so demented and wonderful. So there!
They're fantasy, but Howls' Moving Castle and The Neverending Story are both movies that while they changed a lot of the plots, they stayed true to the real feel and scope of the books, and I think do them great justice.
I haven't read Coraline, but I've heard the same of it.
I know a lot of people disagree, but I feel like Minority Report did a good job with what it had to work with (it's not my favorite of PKD's short stories).
@Mary Ratliff: I felt like the Minority Report film really captured the atmosphere of the original but that is where it ended. However, SS did such a great job of expanding on many of PKD's ideas I still liked it.
Blade Runner is without a doubt a fantastic movie, but I felt like it was pretty loosely based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. There's so much in the book that's not a part of the movie that it almost makes Blade Runner seem empty and bland.
@bookling: it's more of a light adaptation... but it doesn't excuse the thought provocation of the movie in the slightest... so I still think Blade Runner is a good choice here...
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@bookling: I completely agree - Bladerunner and Electric Sheep have very little in common. In fact the Producers of the movie wanted a tie-in book to be released at the same time of the movie that was based on the screenplay and not the book. (It was very common back then. I read several James Bond books based on the movies and not the original Fleming novels.) Philip K. Dick absolutely refused to allow it even when they said he could write it himself and they would pay him for it. The producers had no choice but to release the book as Dick had originally written it. If Philip K. Dick hadn't stuck to his guns then I would have never been introduced to his genius.
@bookling: @Obama takes time to read kotaku's comments...: Yeah, the book is very different, and while the movie is important for its design and creation of a lot of the cyberpunk look, it's definitely inferior.
Definitely LoTR. Left out a lot, even in the 11+ hours of the extended versions. What choice did he have? Still, it really captured all the major themes, mood and everything important.
Take my advice though, don't watch it all in one day. Pick a three day weekend (new years is traditional in the Lizardo household since the sun goes down early and you don't have to deal with glare on the TV) and watch one a day.
Interesting that you included my personal favorite movie of all time, The Lost World (I even has website! [silentmoviemonsters.tripod.com]). While I obviously adore, adore, adore both the book and the silent film, I freely acknowledge that they have next to nothing to do with each other. Yes they maintain the same essential characters and setting of a plateau with dinosaurs, but that's where it ends. What Rothacker, Hoyt and O'Brien put together was a different beast that stands on its own charms and merits.
I always thought "Something Wicked This Way Comes" was a very good adaptation of the novel, and the original PBS movie version of "Lathe of Heaven" (starring Bruce Davison) did a brilliant job of capturing the feel of its source novel as well.
I'm going to have to protest, Bram Stoker's Dracula and the Handmaid's Tale. I mean, Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of my favorite movies, but not because it's an outstanding piece of work. That acting's terrible and melodramatic. Yeesh. And the Handmaid's Tale really just missed the entire point of the book.
1. Bram Stoker's Dracula--Any adaptation which requires Keanu Reeves to play a Victorian Englishman is, de facto, a bad, bad adaptation.
2. Handmaid's Tale. Completely missed the point of the book. Screwed up the ending.
3. Children of Men
An excellent movie, but a terrible adaptation of the book. Completely changed the main character, his relationship with Jasper, his relationship with his cousin, completely changed the nature of the 3 Fishes. Changed the ending. Bad adaptation.
If you completely change the FUNDAMENTAL PREMISE of the book, the main character, the secondary characters, and the relationship between the main and secondary characters, well, you might have a good movie, but you won't have a good adaptation. If you took "Citizen Kane" and made Rosebud his second wife instead of !SPOILER! that other thing, and made Kane an affable hobo instead of The World's Richest Man, you could maybe craft a pretty good movie--hobo-dom is full of dramatic potential, after all--but it would be wrong to call "Charlie Kane: Hobo at Large" a good adaptation of the original "Citizen Kane."
@cletar: Yes, I'd have to say that the only similarities between the book Children of Men and the movie Children of Men was the initial premise. Plus they both were about some people who did some things in England because something else happened. Only keeping it this vague allows the movie's plot to have any resemblance to the book's.
In other words, after seeing he fantastic movie I had to wonder if the maudlin, poorly paced, atrociously written book I'd taken out of the library with its nonsensical and completely unbelievable ending was another book with the Children of Men cover put on it by accident. It really was a let down after such an engaging movie.
A book has to be bad if the movie adaptation is not only superior, but bears almost no resemblance to it.
@Nigerian Business Executive: I really liked the book--I read it when it came out--and I really liked the movie, but I can imagine it would be disorienting to see the movie and then read the book.
@cletar: I haven't seen the Handmaid's Tale, but everyone is mentioning it and I really want to know: what changes did they make to the ending? I liked the book quite a bit (it's probably my favourite Atwood) so it'll probably effect whether or not I rent the movie.
Star wars may be the films that got me into sci-fi, but the Lord of the Rings trilogy will probably still beat it for me. I can't actually find fault with it (bar RotK's too many endings problem). I have to watch them at least once a year.
@Bill-Lee: I agree with what you have here: I also really missed the entire sequence with Tom Bombadil and the Barrow Wights. That was where the Hobbits acquired their swords, which was important, though lost, in the (straight up) novel. You had to read the notes (maybe Silmarilion) to understand that those swords were very powerful artifacts, and one of them would have been powerful enough to "rupture" the protection around "The Witch King" in TRotK. Add to that the whole "No man shall defeat him" prophecy (Merry being "Hobbit", not man, and Eowyn as a female) just adds such nice subtext that the scene in the movie felt "faded" compared to the novel(s).
@DEK46656: The Barrow-Wights scared the crap out of me when I read the books as a child, to the point where I was almost relieved that they weren't included in the movie - I'd probably have had nightmares for weeks.
@LittleDragon: Faithful, yes, but many of them are so very cheesy. I think of Thinner and I cringe at the effects in that one. Ruined the whole movie for me.
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12/01/09
12/02/09
12/02/09
12/01/09
Also, if fantasy is on the table- The Wizard of Oz and Return to Oz are, needless to say, awesome adaptations.
11/30/09
LOTR was a casualty of my dislike for the genre, but the movies were so well-made on so many different levels that I gave it a pass and rank them among my favorite movies.
12/01/09
12/01/09
I read the Sword of Truth to about Temple of the Winds, but never continued. I liked SoT as a teen, but I even then I found its violence, sex, and violent sex a little disturbing, alongside the Ayn Rand-lite philosophy. I'll give it another go eventually, and dabble with the other recommendations.
As for Peter Jackson's changes/deletions, I would have really liked the Tom Bombadil chapter in Fellowship of the Ring, but everything else just fit like a glove. When I read that part, I kept thinking of that crazy Trumpy flying toys around the kid's bedroom scene from the MST3k episode on "Pod People." It was that weird. If any of you MST fans got that, kudos to you.
11/30/09
11/30/09
I haven't read Coraline, but I've heard the same of it.
I know a lot of people disagree, but I feel like Minority Report did a good job with what it had to work with (it's not my favorite of PKD's short stories).
12/01/09
12/01/09
11/30/09
11/30/09
12/01/09
12/01/09
11/30/09
Take my advice though, don't watch it all in one day. Pick a three day weekend (new years is traditional in the Lizardo household since the sun goes down early and you don't have to deal with glare on the TV) and watch one a day.
11/30/09
11/30/09
11/30/09
11/30/09
11/30/09
11/30/09
1. Bram Stoker's Dracula--Any adaptation which requires Keanu Reeves to play a Victorian Englishman is, de facto, a bad, bad adaptation.
2. Handmaid's Tale. Completely missed the point of the book. Screwed up the ending.
3. Children of Men
An excellent movie, but a terrible adaptation of the book. Completely changed the main character, his relationship with Jasper, his relationship with his cousin, completely changed the nature of the 3 Fishes. Changed the ending. Bad adaptation.
If you completely change the FUNDAMENTAL PREMISE of the book, the main character, the secondary characters, and the relationship between the main and secondary characters, well, you might have a good movie, but you won't have a good adaptation. If you took "Citizen Kane" and made Rosebud his second wife instead of !SPOILER! that other thing, and made Kane an affable hobo instead of The World's Richest Man, you could maybe craft a pretty good movie--hobo-dom is full of dramatic potential, after all--but it would be wrong to call "Charlie Kane: Hobo at Large" a good adaptation of the original "Citizen Kane."
11/30/09
In other words, after seeing he fantastic movie I had to wonder if the maudlin, poorly paced, atrociously written book I'd taken out of the library with its nonsensical and completely unbelievable ending was another book with the Children of Men cover put on it by accident. It really was a let down after such an engaging movie.
A book has to be bad if the movie adaptation is not only superior, but bears almost no resemblance to it.
11/30/09
11/30/09
12/01/09
11/30/09
11/30/09
11/30/09
11/30/09
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12/01/09
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11/30/09
Let the Right One In?
11/30/09
11/30/09