Expecting Hollywood to get “I, Robot” right is like hoping your dog will one day learn to make you a sandwich. (Pssssst. They don’t read!)
Check out Tomorrow with Robert Duval. Stunning.
Tim
Every Bond film after From Russia with Love.
OT: tim, how goes it on the battlefront (Think Better)?
I want to come back to Jaysen. I’m a great LotR fan …
I agree basically about having enjoyed them as movies, although for some reason I find I don’t really want to watch them again, which says something. But as adaptations, with them, although there are points where I wonder “Why on earth did they do that?”, e.g. change the character of Faramir, and most particularly adding the totally unnecessary scene of Frodo hanging off the cliff in the cracks of doom … apart from a few points like that, I don’t have the same sense of totally futile changes like I do in The Russia House. And there isn’t the utterly, unbelievably wooden acting and diction of the latter film.
Mark
X,
If you write out a quick index where
1 = bad movie
2 = good movie
a = bad adaptation
b = good adaptation
I would consider LOTR 2a where I think your The Russia House might qualify as a 1a. I think a 2b would approach nirvana for many of us, but 99% of the time we are willing to go for a 2a over a 1b because of the shear pain of enduring a 1. Evidence
Most of my favorite movies that are adaptations fall squarely into the 2a realm. Take The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. One of my all time favorite books/series. The movie was great as long as you were willing to throw out entire sections of the book. Heck, entire sub plots were MISSING from the film.
As I think about this a little, I wonder if it is really possible to make a “good” adaptation. My personal take on LOTR would certainly influence any adaptation I created. While i may see this particular adaptation as perfect you may see it as awful. i would hold the Cruise Vanilla Sky movie up as an example of this. There was an earlier version (name escapes me) from Spain (or was it Mexico but set in Spain) that was much better. Both were derived from the same novel (whose title ALSO escapes me) and neither was really true to original story. While I would not waste 5 more minutes of my life endure VS (very clearly a 1a) many folks I know seemed to think VS was a 2b. They insisted that they were neither high nor drunk so they must just be idiots, or they interpreted the book/movie different than I did.
Of course the fact that the all thought Cruise was a decent actor proves that they were simultaneously drunk and high.
Just my $US0.02 which in today’s economy is of even less value than ever before. 
On the other hand, you have those rare ocassions where the movie far surpasses the book. For example, The Godfather… a mediocre novel made into one of the all time great films. Shawshank Redemption might be another example. I’m sure you can come up with many others.
Steve
Books and movies are different. In my experience, the worse adaptations are the ones that are too faithful to the book, leaving no room for the difference between media.
Katherine
Love in the Time of Cholera
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Oh God, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Nic Cage as a tall, skinny and dashing Italian? Penelope Cruz (Spanish) as the meek, voluptuous and beautiful Pelagia (Greek)? William Hurt as… Oh God. Please make it stop. I’ve never even watched it. Just the “my-a love-a knows-a a-no bounds-a” adverts had me crying into my lovely blue and beige paperback. Just please. Make. It. Stop. What is the point of Nicolas Cage anyway? Brilliant in Raising Arizona, Honeymoon in Vegas etc - i.e. comedy dumb-average man - but Leaving Las Vegas turned him into something he most definitely is not. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Bloody hell.
Ouch. Cage’s performance in “Moonstruck” came to mind, and segued into the twin concepts of miscasting and off-key directing. They’re the reason I wasn’t fond of Hurt in “Jane Eyre,” or Kevin Costner in “Robin Hood.”
KB, Agreed, although I credit Cage with doing all that was required of him in Adaptation (at least up until the last half-hour, which wasn’t his fault anyway).
P.S. And I guess one has to concede that as the nephew of Franicis Ford Coppola and son of August, he must have plenty of Italian genes somewhere. Just nowhere that can convince an audience that he actually is Italian. 
What is the point of him? Anything like Con-Air?
The remake of the Time Machine. A completely wasted opportunity made all the worse by the fact that H.G. Wells’ great-grandson Simon Wells co-produced it. What on earth was Jeremy Irons’ Uber-Morlock all about? It just turned the film into yet another witless Hollywood special effects parade with a cartoon villain at the end. George Pal’s first version was much, much better.
I’m even a Nick Cage fan. Loved him in Raising Arizona and Honeymoon in Vegas. Very good in Guarding Tess and The Grifters. Clearly I should skip this one if I want to continue to be a fan.
Katherine
I recommend you make your own assessment. I suspect there was a degree of chauvinism in the British reception: favourite Brit novel, Brit production company, Brit director with good Brit track record, all rendered sub-prime because of failings of big Hollywood star who - it was speculated, I’ve no idea if it was true - was “only” required to participate by the Hollywood money. But even so, it was wrong for him, and he was all wrong for the movie.
H
I know a lot of people loved the movie, but The English Patient was so much more stunning as a book.
I’m sure, like most readers, we approach a movie with trepidation, but a low water mark was reached when one of Lawrence Block’s Burglar books was made into a movie with Whoopi Goldberg as Bernie Rhodenbarr.
It’s something akin to casting Gwyneth Paltrow as Mohammed Ali.
I love those Bernie Rhodenbarr books. Whoopi Goldberg! What were they thinking?
The Bourne Triliogy
(The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatium).
Two scenes in the first movie followed the books. From then on out the only thing they shared with the books were some of the character names.
The story, the plots, the characters, the roles, and even the scenes were nothing like the books at all. The final outcomes and even the character deaths were completely different.
The movies were so loosely based on the books they just used the main idea and character names and rewrote the hole story from scratch.
Boo
(The Books were so much better)
!! Now hang on a minute, if that were true, everybody would have hated Bridget Jones’ Diary, too, given that it was a favourite British book etc etc and they brought in a big Hollywood start to play the role of Jones. But Renee Zellweger - who up until then had annoyed the heck out of me (her entire acting repertoire in that abysmal “Show me the money” film with Tom Cruise consisted of tilting her head and furrowing her brow) - was (apologies for the long and nested parentheses a moment ago) fantastic in it. It has nothing to do with “British chauvinism”. To cast Nic Cage as Corelli and Penelope Cruz (brilliant in some other things - though mainly her Spanish films) as Pelagia was just a joke. Cage was too old, bald and lacking in the particular type of charisma required for the role, and Cruz was too stick-thin (and it also seems silly having a Spanish actress speaking English pretending to be Greek, but that sort of thing is par for the course).
In cases such as this, I always think of the superb Comic Strip production, Strike!, a mockumentary about the making of a Hollywood film about the eighties’ miners’ strikes across Britain. Arthur Scargill is played by Al Pacino and renamed “Arthur Scarface”, the UK is shown as cobbled streets and buck-toothed idiots, and the whole thing ends with a motorbike chase to the houses of parliament. Brilliant.
What about Gwynneth Paltrow as Emma, too? Everybody liked that (Hollywood actress, British beloved book). I even enjoyed Spielberg’s War of the Worlds despite the fact that it relocated everything to the US etc. Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet? Superb. Etc, etc. See, we’re not chauvinists. We’re just discerning.
Thank God somebody is!