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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Fiction Books
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Most of them? Lord of the Rings is the exception not the rule
There's a list of great ones.
Shawshank.
Fight Club.
2001 (kinda cheating tho).
Green Mile.
The Godfather.
American Psycho.
Since you brought up Kubrick I’d say pretty much his whole filmography is better, with the Shining being the lone debatable exception
Oh definitely. These were just of the top of my head, there's plenty of other good book movies.
You mean Stanley "I didn't even read the entirety of A Clockwork Orange" Kubrick? Mister "Actually let's age up the girl in Lolita and spend time focusing on how sexy she is"? That Kubrick? Dude completely ignores the point of both books and does the one thing the authors very specifically do not want you to do
Yeah it seems like he just makes movies to his own crazy standards and doesn’t care too much about the source material.
I should’ve phrased that differently, Kubrick doesn’t adapt the work well but the films he made are, in my opinion, better and more interesting artistically than the work they are based on. And he did read Clockwork but his version didn’t have the last chapter, and having read the full book I still think the film is more compelling. And I’ll cite Dr Strangelove and Paths of Glory as additional evidence, I also prefer his Lolita to Nabokov, even though he aged Dolores up, I’m pretty certain that’s because of standards and practices and he still managed to capture how rotten and disgusting a human Humbert is
Just my opinion but adapting a work of literature perfectly to the screen isn’t always the best choice. Sometimes it is I’ll happily concede that, but they are different mediums so some things are changed out of necessity and others because of differences in artistic perspective or even societal sensibilities
Plus Princess Bride. I actually prefer the film.
The book Jurassic Park is great, I’ll take the movie every time given the choice
But these are all still exceptions, adaptations are usually best when they are either extremely book accurate or handled by a competent artist and not a studio or group of producers