Book v. Movie: Best & Worst YA Adaptations: Best: Bridge to Terabithia

Yes yes yes 100 times YES - my God did they screw this up. And whilst I agree Connery looks great in the Quatermain role he helped contribute to the problems by refusing the play him as per the comic (where Quatermain is down and out and an opium addict - Mina Murray (formerly Harker) is the actual leader of the group).

I do agree with Merlin though about Nemo - great casting there. Not so sold on the Nautilus though - looks nothing like the one in the comic:

[image=http://www.afan.dk/laustsen/dlpic/league_sub_r50_33.jpg]

(for anyone that's wondering - yes, it looks like a squid grappling a whale. The 2 sections can also separate ala. the Enterprise D as well. )

 

It reminded me distinctly of "Van Helsing"; another idea with endless good possibilities that they proceeded to screw up mightily.

They got Nemo's ethnicity right; I can't even remember who played him, so the terrific charisma that James Mason brought to the role was missing.

 

5. The Scarlet Letter (1995)

"Striptease is generally considered the movie that short-circuited Demi Moore's career, but as an act of commercial and aesthetic miscalculation, it has nothing on this misbegotten adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic story of guilt, sin, and betrayal in colonial New England. Casting Moore as a stripper in a light comic caper based on a Carl Hiaasen book makes a certain amount of sense, and its obvious appeals could potentially boost it past the bad press; casting a dubiously accented Moore as Hester Prynne in a "free adaptation" of Hawthorne's book, however, is a recipe for disaster, because a prestige costume drama like this one needs the support of critics who aren't keen on Hollywood-style revisionism. Still, no one could have imagined how poorly The Scarlet Letter would turn out. "Freely adapted" apparently means adding a softcore coupling between Prynne and Gary Oldman's Rev. Dimmesdale that wouldn't be out of place on Cinemax After Dark. There's also some politically correct business involving Prynne's long-lost husband going native with the local Algonquin tribe, a voyeuristic interlude featuring a horny slave girl and Prynne furtively pleasuring herself in a bath, and a widely reviled "happy ending" for a book that pointedly lacks one."


I wonder what Gary Oldman was thinking here.

 

It's one of the great mysteries of Hollywood how Roland Joffé went from The Killing Fields and The Mission to the likes of The Scarlet Letter and Captivity. . .

 

Oh, man, I remember this getting savaged.

 

There's an excellent silent version, starring Lillian Gish and Lars Hansen, and directed by Victor Seastrom (yes, the same man who plays the lead in "Wild Strawberries")

 

6. All The King's Men (2006)

"When this version of Robert Penn Warren's powerful staple about abuse within the American political system was first conceived, it seemed like the stencil-work on its Oscars could safely be done in advance. Warren's thinly veiled take on Huey Long, the charismatic Louisiana populist whose gubernatorial reign was tainted by demagoguery and corruption, has obvious resonances in today's political climate. Add to that a sterling pedigree, including writer-director Steven Zaillian, who won an Oscar for adapting Schindler's List, and a murderer's row of thespians (Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, James Gandolfini, and Patricia Clarkson, among others), and the project seemed like it was in good hands. (And if anyone needed a road map, they could always turn to Robert Rossen's superb 1949 film version with Broderick Crawford.) Yet it would be hard to imagine a more leaden adaptation; the film just sits there like a dead fish that did most of its flapping in pre-production. The cast struggles haplessly with their Louisiana accents (a never-worse Penn and Gandolfini being the most egregious), every scene drags on several beats too long, and James Horner's brutal percussion score (bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum? clang!) makes for an oppressive exclamation point."


Why, why, why would you remake this movie?

 

7. The Human Stain (2003)

"Okay, armchair casting agents: Think of the perfect actor to play a septuagenarian professor who's a half-Jewish, light-skinned African-American. Now think of the perfect actress to play his lover?a dowdy, illiterate, dirt-poor janitor who's half his age. So? were you thinking Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman? No? Because those were the leads selected for The Human Stain, a perversely miscast adaptation of Philip Roth's fiery novel about identity politics and the absurdities of academia. It's easy enough to buy Hopkins as a college professor, but it's the character's fluid, ever-shifting sense of self that's most important, especially once he uses the unfortunate word "spooks" (as in "ghosts") to describe two absent students who turn out to be African-American. Kidman fares better as a janitor, but the world's most glamorous actress can only be de-glammed so much. Together, they're a major distraction in a movie already burdened by the difficult work of adapting Roth's jaundiced vision, which continues to stymie every filmmaker that tries it."

 

Roth is pretty well unadaptable. It's his voice that elevates his books, not his plotting.

 

8. The Hours (2002)

"Michael Cunningham's 1999 novel The Hours weaves together the stories of three women's lives with the care of a fugue. Themes repeat, echo, and get reversed, and the subtlety of his prose only strengthens the book's emotional impact. The inexplicably acclaimed Stephen Daldry adaptation from 2002 knows nothing of subtlety. It pounds the material into powder with over-the-top visuals and overreaching performances. And, in an odd twist, the film's one truly affecting scene?John C. Reilly's quiet monologue about finding a post-war paradise in America?isn't in the book at all. Maybe they should have started with that and thrown out the rest."

 

They're two-thirds right anyway. Frankly, I think the Meryl Streep plot in the movie is up to the standards of the book. Of course, it has all the best performances in it; Streep is great, Harris is exquisite and Jeff Daniels has a fantastic cameo. The Julianne Moore sections are pretty awful; the Nicole Kidman sections are just mostly dull. But, yeah, the book is better.

 

9. Stardust (2007)

"Some book-to-screen adaptations are bad movies, plain and simple. Stardust, however, is a mildly entertaining film that all but falls apart when held up to its source. Where Neil Gaiman's beloved original is a brisk, crystalline fairytale, Matthew Vaughn's version is flabby and plodding; alchemically morphing charm into ham, the director squashes characters to a single dimension and turns Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer loose to swallow scenery whole. Even worse, their gluttonous mugging nulls the spell that Gaiman's story casts, and it overpowers the already anemic chemistry between leads Charlie Cox and Claire Danes. Stardust the novel is richer and darker, but the movie's weakness doesn't boil down to a typical Hollywood sugarcoating. Instead, it feels like an overextended Vaughn?and even Gaiman himself, who suffered years of frustrating development before green-lighting and ultimately blessing the film?simply settled for good enough."

 

yeah that just doesn't ring true. somehow they seem to hold the novel in extremely high regard.

 

I thought Charlie Cox had a lot of charisma, actually. And De Niro hardly mugged; it was an extremely restrained performance, especially given how the character was written. I haven't read the novel, but I really did just totally love the movie. Like The Princess Bride; magical.

 

Haven't read the novel, but I found the movie terrific. So I vote 'nay' on this inclusion.

 

10. Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)

"Throughout his life, beloved children's author Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel was notoriously reluctant to license the contents of his books for movies or toys; aside from a handful of animated cartoons, including the wonderful TV special "How The Grinch Stole Christmas!" by his friend Chuck Jones, the Seuss brand didn't extend that far beyond its original sources. All that changed when Geisel died in 1991 and the licensing went to his widow, who green-lit Ron Howard's feature-length, live-action version starring Jim Carrey in the title role. The concise storytelling and typically delightful rhymes, so well-preserved in Jones' animated short, went out the window, and the exaggerated design of Seuss' book was amplified into a garish nightmare of color and noise. Decked out like a green, feral, pot-bellied dog, Carrey overplays Seuss' diabolical Grinch with his aggressive slapstick, which is separated from his usual rubber-faced yahoo routine only in its mean-spiritedness. And in case our hearts weren't warmed by the decency and resolve of the Whos down in Whoville, there's a sappy ballad by Faith Hill over the end credits. (Shockingly, Mike Myers' take on The Cat In The Hat three years later was even worse, but mainly because it used this film as a template.)"

The good doctor adapts beautifully to animation. So why is live action even necessary?

 

They're dead right about this one. I actually watched the Carrey movie; I don't remember exactly why at the moment. I couldn't have had a good reason, as nothing would justify watching it. They say it all perfectly; Seuss was a whimsical ironist; Howard is a soppy sentimentalist; Carrey is an chaotic anarchist. How could this possibly have worked?

 

I was afraid this was about the animated one. Took me a minute to remember there was a live action version, and I still don't remember a Cat in the Hat movie.

 

That's a good thing, because "The Cat in the Hat" was beyond terrible.

 

11. Portnoy's Complaint (1972)

"In Portnoy's Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus, Richard Benjamin proved a perfect Philip Roth surrogate. Woody Allen even cast Benjamin in his own Roth homage, Deconstructing Harry. Yet not even Benjamin could save 1972's ill-fated adaptation of Portnoy's Complaint, which preserved much of the crudity but little of the wit and deceptive warmth of Roth's groundbreaking exploration of the sexual neuroses of Jewish males. Six-time Oscar nominee Ernest Lehman has an astonishing track record as a screenwriter (West Side Story, Sweet Smell Of Success, North By Northwest, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?) but Portnoy's Complaint snuffed out Lehman's directorial career in its infancy: his first directing job was also his last."

 

But The Grinch did have one great monologue: "The nerve of those Whos. Inviting me down there, on such short notice! Even if I wanted to go, my schedule wouldn't allow it: 4:00, wallow in self-pity; 4:30, stare into the abyss; 5:00, solve world hunger, tell no one; 5:30, jazzercize; 6:30, dinner with me -- I can't cancel that again!; 7:00, wrestle with my self-loathing. . . I'm booked. Of course, if I bump the loathing to 9, I could still be done in time to lay in bed, stare at the ceiling and slip slowly into madness. But what would I wear?"

 

As I said before.

 

12. Tropic Of Cancer (1970)

"According to his autobiography (which, incidentally, everyone on Earth should read) Robert Evans ended up green-lighting 1970's Tropic Of Cancer as part of a bet with good buddy Henry Miller. Yet even in the freewheeling Hollywood of the late '60s and early '70s, the resulting film was self-indulgent and rambling even by the era's exceedingly lenient standards, and its X rating sure didn't do much for its box-office. It could be much worse: Claude Chabrol's Quiet Days In Clichy cast Andrew McCarthy, of all people, as Henry Miller (a big step down from Cancer's ever-dependable Rip Torn), though the casting makes a little more sense in light of the film's subplot about Miller falling in love with a beautiful mannequin come to life."

 

13. Bee Season (2005)

"There might be a terrific, touching movie to be made of Myla Goldberg's terrific, touching debut novel about a champion speller and her unraveling family, but the 2005 film wasn't it. God bless Richard Gere, but he's simply the wrong choice to play an overbearing, academic Jewish dad. More importantly, dual directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel apparently skipped the part of the text that explores this family's motivations for its various obsessions. It's the perfect example of a film draining the life out of a book without really changing a detail, just by missing the heart."

 

Agreed. The live action Grinch was so-so, The Cat in the Hat was apparently a trainwreck, but the animated adaptation of Horton Hears a Who was brilliant.