Yeah, but for the longest time, it was practically a given that the film adaptation of a King novel was going to be quite different.
As a side note, I can’t believe they tried to film Dreamcatcher. Jesus.
Yeah, but for the longest time, it was practically a given that the film adaptation of a King novel was going to be quite different.
As a side note, I can’t believe they tried to film Dreamcatcher. Jesus.[/quote]
I didn’t read the book, but I actually thought the movie had more of a Stephen King “Book” feeling to it than almost any of his other horror-type movies. The childhood friendships, the little clique-intensive nuances like special phrases and customs, the “memory warehouse,” all these are King trademarks. I also liked the movie. I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it again, but I didn’t feel that I wasted my money watching it. There were some pretty good performances, and the whole thing had a nice flow to it.
Yeah, but for the longest time, it was practically a given that the film adaptation of a King novel was going to be quite different. [/quote]
For the longest time, it was practically a given that any screen adaptation of a King novel would fail miserably. When I was a kid I used to love his novels. It’s odd to me that everyone is in the habit of trashing his work (even King says it’s the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries) as simple and childlike, yet it took years for anyone to successfully translate it into an entertaining movie or miniseries.
There are very few James Bond movies that are faithful to the Fleming novels. Out of all the movies, the ones that are the closes tto the written word are:
Dr. No
From Russia With Love
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
The rest use the names of Fleming novels, but for the most-part, have little to d owiththan other than they happen to star a guy named James Bond.
The WORST adaptation is “You Only Live Twice”.
It’s interesting that Crypt would pick Lolita, because I can’t think of a film that is a worse adaptation. I mean, c’mon. The whole point of the book is changed due to Sue Lyon’s age. Don’t get me wrong, I like the movie just fine. But saying it’s a faithful adaptation is a bit like saying The Shining was a faithful adaptation. It may thematically be in line, but the book is about a dude who leaves a twelve-year old girl tied up in a closet so he can go get drunk in a motel bar. The stunning thing about the book are the occasional moments where we remember that Humbert is a monster. To me, that is completely absent from the film.
Edit: Actually, I can think of worse. Apologies for the hyperbole go to Slapstick of Another Kind and Short Cuts.
Ramains of the Day was a good call,and it also made me think of ‘Room with a View’,which was absolutely dead-on faithful to the book.So much so that if you’ve seen the movie,there’s almost no point in reading the book.
freeman, have you read Lolita? Lolita definitely isn’t “about a dude who leaves a twelve-year old girl tied up in a closet so he can go get drunk in a motel bar”. Actually, I’m not sure what you even mean by that, since Lolita is a book (partly) about pedophillia and statuatory rape, not alcoholism or girls sitting in motel closets. Which might explain why you didn’t like Kubrick’s Lolita - too much statuatory rape, not enough closets!
I think there is a common presumption among people who haven’t read Lolita (or read it badly) that it is sort of a perverted romance for half-assed and repressed pedophiles to vicariously get their jollies. The book doesn’t actually ever have a sex scene between Humbert and Lolita, although it is certainly implied that they are sleeping together. But actual sex isn’t really what is so horrifying about pedophillia. Instead, it is the psychological ramnification of a fatherly figure exerting himself over a child (and, in Lolita’s case, an orphan) just reaching sexual maturity who trusts him and will be guided by him.
I mentioned it in my above post, but Humbert Humbert is such a compelling narrator with a great wit and such devious, subconscious self-delusions eloquently expressed; the real greatness of the novel is in making us sympathize with him. I think James Mason really captures perfectly (without narration!) Humbert’s fascinating personality and psychosis.
As for Lolita’s age - she’s still meant to be 12, as I recall, just played by an older girl. This has never really bothered me, to be honest. If I can accept 40 year old Linnea Quigley still playing teenagers, I can accept a three year age difference in a movie ostensibly about pedophillia, filmed during the early 60’s. I agree she should probably be more awkward, but I always had enough imagination to accept the film’s ruse that she is a pubescent girl. Anyway, again, what happens between Lolita and Humbert isn’t really the point of the book, it is what happens between Lolita and Humbert in his mind that counts.
My only real criticism of the Kubrick version is that it doesn’t redeem Humbert at the end of the film. The novel offers a subtle, realistic and completely human redemption to H.H. the last time he sees Lolita, when he discovers he still loves her even as an adult. They try to get this across, but without inward narration, it pretty much fails.
If you want to see a version of Lolita that emphasizes creepy old men pumping into plausible 12 year old girls on screen, the 1997 version is for you. The film is also completely without a sense of humor and features an entire troupe of bizarrely miscast actors reinterpreting Lolita as basically a soft-core kiddy fuck flick. It does have some lovely cinematography of the American countryside though, which is about the only thing from the novel it gets right.
Carrying on with the King parade: Stand By Me.
I agree with you about the 1997 version, Crypt. I think the two films together are a fine adaptation, but either one on its own misses half of the point. Like Pale Fire, like pretty much every English Nabokov book, Lolita is about narrative deception. There are little asides - such Humbert mentioning that he has tied Lolita up in the motel room - which are there to remind us that everything Humbert is telling us is completely a delusion. I think if you’re sympathizing with Humbert, you are reading the book on a surface level and missing the little moments which allude to the monstrous things he does, and thus throw the entire narration into doubt. I agree that it’s a very funny book, and I like Kubrick’s adaptation, but - again - it omits the very thing that makes the book interesting.
Adaptation.
Wait, maybe not.
Kinda sorta? I barely recognized the movie version of LA Confidential. Aside from the major plot changes and the completely different ending, even the characters were all dramatically altered. James Cromwell doing Dudley Smith was ridiculous, seeing as Dud in the books is a pretty formidable tough guy who does a lot of his killing on his own. And the whole sense of time and place was corrupted for some sort of comic-book bigotry that almost made racism and discrimination seem like quaint artifacts of the 1940s. Mucho inferior to Ellroy’s novel, which really emphasied how nasty cop culture was at the time, especially in regard to dealing with blacks. I’m not surprised that this stuff was cleaned up, though, as if all the racial references were included, the movie would have gotten an NC-17 and Jesse Jackson would have been picketing theatres. Still, makes for a pretty weak picture.
I’ll probably stand alone here, but I was pleasantly surprised by O.
According to IMDB, the screenwriter was Polanski himself, though I’d swear that Ira Levin collaborated with him very closely. Anyhow, the movie follows the novel almost exactly, from first page to last (though it’s been a few years since I last read the book, so I may be off a little bit with some fine details). All of Levin’s books are structured like script adaptations in reverse, by the way. Pretty sparse, clipped dialogue, etc. There’s nothing there that can’t be readily adapted to the screen. Which sort of explains why there are so few changes in the movie adaptations of his work (admittedly, not a lot – Rosemary’s Baby, Stepford Wives, Boys From Brazil, Sliver…that’s all I can think of at the moment, but I know Levin’s never cranked 'em out like King; actually I’m not even certain the guy’s still alive).
That’s interesting. I didn’t know that Polanski himself wrote the screenplay, I just remembered reading the magazines thing in an interview with Levin years ago.
The problem with trying to judge the best adaption is the tendency to name those film who follow the original text closely. Some books work well because they are are books, rather than visual experiences. I thought Fight Club caught the book fairly well, but I read the book after the film, so I might be biased. Films like Naked Lunch had very little in common with the book but tried their damndest to stay true to the spirit of the book, rather than the literal text (which in the case of Naked Lunch would be an exercise in futility).
I liked it too, and if I recall, Tom Chick was a fan as well. But I’m not sure we can count Shakespeare’s stuff in this thread. Those were plays, not books. All you have to do is have a camera running as you stage one of his plays to “faithfully adapt” it. But O was a great modern retelling of the Othello tragedy which captured most of the play’s themes very well.
I liked it too, and if I recall, Tom Chick was a fan as well. But I’m not sure we can count Shakespeare’s stuff in this thread. Those were plays, not books. All you have to do is have a camera running as you stage one of his plays to “faithfully adapt” it. But O was a great modern retelling of the Othello tragedy which captured most of the play’s themes very well.[/quote]
Some of the better movie versions of Shakespeare follow this pattern. I thought Ian McKellan in Richard III was really interesting. So was Brannagh’s Much Ado about Nothing, which used more modern dress but the same basic words as Shakespeare.
Marathon Man.
Strangely enough Goldman’s book is very poorly written. The film version does a much better job.
Hmmm, and now I think of it, Princess Bride too.
Oh, and I thought Goldman et al did an excellent job with Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher. I thought it captured the spirit of the book pretty well - its a shame the book was so poor it wasn’t worth doing.
Industry Dwarf
Great allbum, I wish I still had it. Did you ever hear that song based on The Stand that got a lot of airplay in the 80s? It was pretty good, if I remember right. I can’t remember the name of the band, but the refrain was, “Come on down, and meet your Maker, come on down, and make The Stand… Come on down, come on down… Come on down, and make The Stand.”
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Good lord, I need help for remembering that this was recorded by a band called The Alarm. Good song, although they and their lead singer Mike Peters (get me counseling for remembering his name, even) were a tad too earnest and a tad too much wanting to be the next U2.
BTW–not sure where this fits into the discussion, but the movie WONDER BOYS, while excising some of Chabon’s fantastic book, does a remarkable job in making what I though was an unfilmable story into one that’s very true to the source material. I think Curtis Hanson’s greatest gift might be making solid films out of “unfilmable” books. That LA CONFIDENTIAL isn’t a stinking, quivering shadow of the book is quite a feat. That the movie is actually very good is a remarkable achievement for those involved.
Too bad it had to spring Russell Crowe and his ego onto an unsuspecting larger audience…
I agree. It’s pretty good!