AbeBooks: The Best Movies from Books: I adore movies. It's funny; if I spend two hours watching television, I sometimes feel guilty, as though I’ve wasted my time. But watching a movie rarely leaves me feeling as though I’ve just lost two hours to the brainless abyss (I will be polite and not mention the exceptions that come to mind). So I will almost always choose a movie over a television show. And even better than a movie, of course, is a book, and when comparing the two, the limitations of modern technology (particularly when compared to our own boundless imaginations), mean that books almost always win, for me.
Sunday, February 07, 2016
I'm Sure You'll All Agree
AbeBooks: The Best Movies from Books: I adore movies. It's funny; if I spend two hours watching television, I sometimes feel guilty, as though I’ve wasted my time. But watching a movie rarely leaves me feeling as though I’ve just lost two hours to the brainless abyss (I will be polite and not mention the exceptions that come to mind). So I will almost always choose a movie over a television show. And even better than a movie, of course, is a book, and when comparing the two, the limitations of modern technology (particularly when compared to our own boundless imaginations), mean that books almost always win, for me.
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12 comments:
The Maltese Falcon
Absolutely. The novel was the script.
The worst part about watching a movie based on much-loved book is that the visual medium completely overrides my imagining of how characters and locations looked. I've said before that Margaret Mitchell takes pains in the first page of GONE WITH THE WIND to stress that Scarlett is not beautiful but that the force of her personality makes men forget that. Then the beautiful Vivien Leigh plays her in the adaptation and I can never see Scarlett as anyone but Leigh again. Perhaps that's just a failure of my own imagination.
I know it's all very "meta", but I think "Adaptation"--the film adaptation of THE ORCHID THIEF--is one of the best adaptations, perhaps because it comes at the subject sideways ( not to mention two great roles for Nic Cage). And who could forget Woody Allen's adaptation of EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX?
I loved both those movies, and the scene I find most unforgettable in the last one you mentioned is of Gene Wilder gone to seed and drinking Woolite.
A classic scene.
I agree on Maltese Falcon, of course - the third time they finally got it perfect.
I would have liked to have seen Belushi in A Confederacy of Dunces.
Worst adaptation? Maybe Bonfire of the Vanities.
Many years ago, the rumor was John Candy as Ignatius and Richard Pryor as Burma Jones in the adaptation of CONFEDERACY. Instead they made the umpteenth remake of BREWSTER'S MILLIONS together. Sigh.
/Steven Soderberg had the movie rights, but since he "retired" who knows if it will ever get made. Perhaps that's just as well.
I doubt I would like CONFEDERACY the film, finding as I do the novel perhaps the most overrated of the last half-century that I've read, but Candy, given his head with the role, would've been about the casting imaginable.
Anyone familiar with Spike Milligan's 1958 novel PUCKOON ? Or the film made from it in 2002?
Not I.
I'd definitely throw in Lonesome Dove and Brideshead Revisited (the John Mortimer adaptation, not the other mess!). I don't care from TV mini-series. They were movies as far as I'm concerned 8-)
Not famiar with PUCKDOON, but Spike Milligan (a fixture of my English childhood, although THE GOON SHOW had been on the radio mostly in the fifties, before I was born) wrote the hilarious ADOLF HITLER: MY PART IN HIS DOWNFALL about his WWII experiences. That would make a great film!
Ok--WIKIPEDIA says the Adolf Hitler book was made into a film. I shall have to be on the lookout for it!
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