I thought id start this cuz i dont think ive seen it in the forums. There are two that come to my mind immediately:

Harry Potter books-Pretty good representation of the books, but i dont know about the fourth one, from what ive seen in the trailers. And why do they keep switching the directors?

Dreamcatcher-I loved the book, but the movie totally ruined it, especially the ending. It did have a couple redeeming qualities: Jason Lee as Beaver, and the cabin was pretty good

Bad: "The Beach". If you remember this Leonardo DiCaprio movie, you'll remember it sucked. The book however was great.

Also Bad: "The Ninth Gate". Roman Polanski and Johnny Depp are great, but they ruined one of my favorite books in recent times, "The Club Dumas" by Arturo Perez-Reverte. They completely eliminated a major subplot of the book.

Good: "High Fidelity". Though some of the story was reorganized, and they obviously had to relocate it to Chicago, I thought it definitely captured the spirit of Nick Hornby's novel.

Great. Love or hate the movie, I have to say "Fight Club" was a dead-on adaptation of the book, Pehaps one of the best I've seen.

As much as I love "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", Kesey's novel is far superior.

Also, Irvine Welsh's "The Acid House" really wasn't a book that should have been turned into a film.

I thought Smilia's Sense of Snow did a good job of embracing the book. Considering the amount of material and limited film time, it was better than I expected. A cable mini-series might have done it better, or not.

Embraced - P. Jackson, I like to think, did everything good to do the book justice. And I do think it worked for Lord of the Rings, but there is only so much you can do to live up to, what some cosider, the best book of all time.

Disgraced - I Am Legend. Just go read the book.

quote:

Originally posted by Edgy:
As much as I love "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", Kesey's novel is far superior.

No way, the film version is much, much better.

Most comic-based movies completely strip the characters of what made them awesome in the first place, making people think that comics suck or some such garbage.

A comic-based movie that was actually better than its book?
"Blade"- they took a crappy character and made him awesome! Did you know that he wasn't half vampire in the comics? He was basically a black Van Helsing that used 70's slang. Could you imagine if they had stayed "true" to the original work?

As good as their books?
"Sin City"- Almost word-for-word and panel-for-panel!
"Batman Begins"- It was recently voted as The Best comic adaption EVER!
"Hellboy"- Del Toro worked very closely with Mignola (the comic creator) to stay as true to the characters as he could!

Ones that disgraced the books they were based off of?
"Daredevil"- I always have to point out that the director's cut DID improve the story A WHOLE LOT!
"X-Men"- Too many changes from the comics to list here.
"Constantine"- Screwed up his origin and his name!
"Fantastic 4" & "Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer"- They SHOULDA been better!
Bunches and bunches of others.

As for straight films:
"Jaws" was better than the book for me because of the end. I've never been more disappointed in an ending as I was when I read the last few pages of such a wonderful story! (Yes. I know it was a 'Moby Dick' reference or homage or whatever you wanna call it, but DANG! It was just too exciting to have ended the way it did! I actually went back and reread the last coupla pages because I thought I had missed something. )

The Dreamcatcher disappointed
and I was not happy with the result of "The Kite Runner" on film.

American Psycho was a much better movie than book.

"Persepolis" was a very good recent movie that did a fantastic job of embracing and adapting the books. The book version of Persepolis is richer in detail in regards to Satrapis' experiences living in Iran, and offers greater insight into the politics in Iran, but the movie did a better job of showing her life in Europe. The animation was also done beautifully in the movie (Satrapi was a consultant and worked on the animation). For older movies, I've always liked Hitchcock's version of "Rebecca" more than the book. "Rebecca" is a good book, but the drama and suspense from the movie is perfect, and it does help the casting is excellent.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Joan Lindsay's First Edition is now selling for $3500. Peter Weller director with the relatively unknown screenplay by Cliff Green, if I recall correctly, adherely marvelously to the book's storyline. In fact I remember eagerly reading the book to find out more about the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the three girls in the movie and to my dismay found little more to be had. The dialogue is amazingly close, usually word for word from the bookk, amazing in that the transfer to the screen is startlingly powerful, so much so that I continue to rank this movie my top movie of all time.

Great topic.

Reams of words could be written on this topic. Hollywood in particular is oh so fond of taking a novel or short story for source material rather than encouraging original material.
Thus we get the brilliant and the tragic.

Book/Film double bill I adore is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep & Blade Runner.
An excellent example of finding the spirit of a novel rather than literally transcribing it.
The Shining is another tremendous pupil of that school.
Which is not to say I dissaprove of xeroxing a book to the screen. A good example of that is Kes, which pretty much puts the original tale basically untouched on screen.

It rankles me that some books ever get adapted in the first place. What was Kubrick thinking trying to make literal the poetry of Lolita; or Huston attempting to make filmic the dense philosophical Moby Dick.

And then there is the masterpiece made from a very modest or flat out pulpy yarn, such as High Noon, born from a little magazine piece.

The one big disaster I can think of, the one that really got me mad, cause I love the original novel to death, was the recent version of The Island of Doctor Moreau.