(no subject)

[skygiants]

LAST ONE. swankyfunk asked me to write about favorite book-to-movie adaptations for the 31st!

Okay, this going to be quick because I'm leaving in half an hour and I want to make sure this gets posted in 2013. But here is an incomplete list of films that I like as well or better than their books:

- Bedknobs and Broomsticks
- the Harry Potter films (yes, I KNOW, but I have my reasons!)
- Sense and Sensibility, the Emma Thompson version
- The Princess Bride

An incomplete list of things that will usually make me love a movie adaptation of a book:

- it is clear throughout that the filmmakers respect and love the source material (i.e. the Les Miserables movie)
- the movie is able to visually construct a fantastical world in a way that makes me believe in it (i.e. the Harry Potter films)
- the movie is completely, amazingly over-the-top and bizarre (i.e. The Revenger's Tragedy)
- I saw the movie when I was young and it was formative for me regardless of its relationship to the book (i.e. Bedknobs and Broomsticks or the Anthony Andrews version of The Scarlet Pimpernel)

I try not to be angry at movie adaptations for diverging from the source material unless it's clear that the filmmakers just did not CARE about the source. I can think of half a dozen film adaptations that would be a lot better if they had just been a little weirder. But you're not getting an incomplete list of those because I'm out of time! THE MEME ENDS HERE, THANKS EVERYONE FOR PLAYING. :D

Comments

[kd7sov]

Personally, my favorite adaptation - indeed, the only one I can recall actually praising - is Going Postal, which I saw just recently. Some of it may have been lowered expectations - the previous Disc adaptation I saw was a severely disappointing animated Soul Music - but I really felt like it... wasn't the book, but it was what the book would have been if it had been born a movie. If that makes sense.

I do wish they'd done more with Sacharissa Cripslock, though.

[skygiants]

I still haven't seen really any of the Discworld adaptations all the way through! I'd like to, and I've seen, like, half-hour snippets of some of them, but somehow fate always intervenes to prevent me.

[mme_hardy]

I love you forever for loving The Revengers Tragedy. That is all.

[skygiants]

BECAUSE IT'S THE GREATEST

[gogollescent]

Totally agreed about the HP films--I can forgive a LOT for that kind of aesthetic fun, particularly when it's kind of missing from the books. Even if it sometimes results in things like papier-mache-darkness-pinata Voldemort.

[skygiants]

Yes! And, like, also the HP films by their design sense make me actually almost believe that this world can actually exist alongside, you know, MODERN-DAY LONDON, which is something I find almost completely impossible in the books.

[izilen]

The ADAPTATIONS OF MY HEART are Northanger Abbey (2007), for ridiculously bringing to life Catherine's Gothic imagination, and Emma (2009) for being really all around excellent and de-centring the narrative from Emma while letting it remain Emma.

I am sitting here trying to think of ANYTHING ELSE and I can't really. OOPS??

[skygiants]

The 2009 Emma is so charming! Definitely my favorite of the Emma adaptations I have seen, although I will always hold a little torch in my heart for Clueless. I do think that Jane Austen film adaptations are one of the easiest to do right, because the books are the right length to reward some creative reworking that keeps all the great things about them while also adding a slightly more modern eye.