What are your top three film adaptations of a novel?
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@GeePawHill I have a fondness for the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, although I'll take pretty much any adaptation over Jack Finney's novel. The novel isn't bad, but it's not a patch on Time And Again
@GeePawHill Tough one. The ones that jump to mind are the Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me but these work because they were actually just short stories so the film didn’t have to make a lot of choices about what to cut
@GeePawHill I seem to have a lot of fave adaptations in the horror and thriller genres... I'm going to pick:
1. The Haunting (1963)
2. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2009-- the Swedish one)
3. Misery
Honorable mention to Jurassic Park 🦖
@beandreams "Misery" was certainly in my mind when I was thinking about it. Kathy Bates in a *stunning* performance.
@GeePawHill
I know someone said it already but it's gotta be _Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption_
It was the perfect novella. Fucking perfect. I read _Different Seasons_ to tatters, that line about the green milkshakes from McDonalds on St Patricks Day, are you kidding me? Then they go and cast Morgan Freeman as Red and it *works*
And as absurd as this seems, the second pick is from the same fucking book. _Stand By Me_
Third? Probably _To Kill A Mockingbird_
@kims "Stand By Me" is underrated.
There are many others that could make it, but right now:
1. Solaris (Tarkovsky)
2. No Country for Old Men
3. A Clockwork Orange
@ttiurani Interesting time range there.
@GeePawHill can't give you three.
But I'm the top of the list is and always will be: the name of the rose, based on Umberto Eco's.
Cast, Scenery and Cinematography are close to perfect. Eco's novels always explore complex philosophical ideas and the film does a good job of capturing that.
@rhold WOW. That's an interesting choice. I loved the novel. Of course, it had to be very compressed for the film. I think I only saw the film once.
Maybe I should take another swing at it!
@GeePawHill THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD and THE THING count as one entry in my head, both adapting "Who Goes There?" (novellas count, right?)
@SnoopJ Novellas count, for sure. Arguably, my number 1 "A Room With A View" is, well, a very short novel. :)
Somerset Maugham defined a novel as a prose work of a certain length that has something wrong with it.
@GeePawHill Does "The Big Lebowski" count? :)
@recursive I don't *think* that's an adaptation of a novel?
@GeePawHill Well, okay it's a parody of Raymond Chandler's _The Big Sleep_
@recursive The Coens say "-ish". :)
@GeePawHill The Sheltering Sky, Ghost in the Shell, A Clockwork Orange
@dtauvdiodr The first and third are classics, of course. I don't know "Ghost in the Shell".
@GeePawHill It is technically a Manga graphic novel, turned into a full-length feature Anime. Worth checking out, historically significant and highly influential.
For me, it's "A Room With A View", where everything looks and feels and sounds exactly like the (comparatively slim) novel.
Then, mmmm, prolly 'The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter", which is also in the running for top ten saddest movies of all time.
Third, ach, there's the rub, *third*!
Maybe "Remains of the Day"? "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"? "Catch-22"?
I'll tell you one thing, this is not a game for children.
@GeePawHill
The Milagro Beanfield War
Little Women (2019, Greta Gerwig’s version)
The Wings of the Dove (1997)
@bucknam Strong candidates, tho I was excited about and then disappointed in your third.
@GeePawHill you can trade that for 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three if you want a better soundtrack and more Walter Matthau.
I am confident many will mention "The Princess Bride". It's a great adaptation, no doubt, but I bet a great many of the recommenders have never actually read the novel.
Anyway, top ten? Sure. Top three? Nawwww.
@GeePawHill
I can't narrow it down to top 3, but here's 5:
- The Martian
- Shawshank Redemption
- Dune
- Hidden Figures
- Contact
@valthonis @GeePawHill oooo yeah they did good with the Martian
@inherentlee @GeePawHill I was originally miffed about what they left out, but honestly I think the screenplay was better for it. Same justification I use when people complain about Tom Bombadil's omission from the LOTR films: the trimmed fat has to come from somewhere, and the stuff that was left out was the least painful place to cut.
@valthonis @inherentlee My wife, who read LOTR three times out loud to three different generations of children, *always* mentions the missing Tom Bombadil. :)
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@valthonis Which Dune?
"Shawshank" is certainly a great one. Haven't read "The Martian", so can't say. "Contact" seems *very* adapted. :)
@GeePawHill The Villeneuve duology, tbh. The SciFy channel miniseries was quite good, but the newest films are so much more faithful than anything they or Lynch ever did.
This is like playing the "greatest cover" game. One's answer depends on one's definition of "greatest", and there is a tremendous amount of judgment involved in any such act of defining.
First, I spoze, you have to have loved the book. Then, you have to consider the color or flavor of faithfulness you demand.
Look, "Cuckoo's Nest", "Catch-22", "The English Patient", these are fat complicated books, and the films covered somewhere between a quarter and a third of the book.
@GeePawHill Every time you write "I spoze" I hear it like this
The film of "The Princess Bride" covers probably two thirds of the novel _The Princess Bride_. I got spanked the other day for asking people to read the novel, cuz the novel is letter-envelope, and the envelope is *so* important to understanding the meaning of the novel. (It's okay, I was prolly being an asshole, I do that sometimes.)
In the film, the envelope is reduced to Peter Falk the Grandpa.
And look, William Goldman wrote the novel *and* the screenplay.
For me, the point of the question and the joy I derive from the varied answers isn't about some quest for objectivity, or even a survey.
It's that it provokes, from certain ones of us, thoughts, and doubts, and affections, and grousing, and all that.
Cuz those certain ones of us? They're my favorite people. They're the ones I'm always tryna suck into a discourse.
💖
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I mean, Goldman should know what parts of his own novel are the most important parts, right? And I'm certainly incapable of doing *any* of his excellent work.
But, to shift William Gold-X's for a second, William Golding never understood why "Lord of the Flies" was his most famous work. He hated that no one ever read his "better" novels.
Artists don't always know everything about what they make.
@GeePawHill it's a tough one, the back story of "The Spaniard" was one of my highlights in the novel... it felt like a novella hidden in a novel. It was obviously part of the dialogue but nowhere near as finely rendered. What I'd say is that many films from my younger days didn't seem so great when I returned to them, but that one did.
Your discussion points are definitely making me think more deeply on this (though thinking hadn't been invented yet).
@GeePawHill Sometimes A Great Notion