Shawshank
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“Best” +LOTR
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The worst:
The Dark Tower
Refused to watch it, thankeesai
Also in the best of category:
The Right Stuff
The Princess Bride
ETA - The Last of the Mohicans (1992 version w/ Daniel Day Lewis)
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LA Confidential. The movie is so much better than the book.
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Uh, not really.
[Lights fuse with cigar]
Lord of the Rings.
[Throws hand grenade]
Worst: The Shining
(BTW, LOTR is in best, but Hobbit is in worst)
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You know, as a long time LOTR fan (since 1980!) I feel they got all the visuals perfect, it absolutely looked just like Middle Earth. The story, though, was seriously messed up. I get you can’t fit that entire book into 6 or 7 hours of movie time but to me it wasn’t worth it, especially how they made Aragorn a reasonably weak character in Two Towers. Aragorn in the book had no doubts about his destiny or what he had to do to achieve it and never let anything stand in the way.
And jeebus christmas all the whispering Elves. Not to mention the total miscast of Arwen and Elrond.
I’m glad people like the movies and hope it drives them to read the real thing so there’s always that. But there’s nothing more disappointing than getting into a LOTR conversation with someone and finding out you’re talking about hte book and they’re talking about the movie.
Hard disagree.
Do I miss some things from the books? Sure. Is Liv Tyler bad? Absolutely. But they nailed the heart of the story - Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Gollum. It’s a faithful adaptation, not a note-for-note adaptation. It’s similar to how the latter Harry Potter movies leave out a lot of the books, but still stay faithful to the story, but with one major casting misfire (Dumbledore).
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I thought One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a great book and great movie.
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Same with the Steve McQueen movie version of Papillon and the book.
More worst:
Ender’s Game
Also, are we looking for just the delta in quality? Or do we count shit adaptations of shit books, like Twilight?
I thought the Shining was a fine movie considering the scope of the book. I’m sure with CGI a new version would be quite different.
The John Huston directed Moby Dick was really good, it had so many quotable lines.
Others I liked:
The Color Purple
The Silence of the Lambs
To Kill a Mockingbird
No Country for Old Men
Killers of the Flower Moon
ETA: A Clockwork Orange
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I wonder if someone could recut the three Hobbit movies into one good one, or if they’re just too far gone for that. Just taking out all the extra crap with the master of Lake Town and the shoehorned-in LOTR characters would go a long way.
This is a case where some of the beats are the same but Kubrick misses the whole point of the book. It’s about Jack’s slow descent into madness - with Nicholson, he starts out 95% crazy.