From Booking Through Thursday:

1. In your opinion, what is the best translation of a book to a movie?
2. The worst?
3. Had you read the book before seeing the movie, and did that make a difference?

And, by all means, expand this to as long a list as you like. I’m notoriously awful myself at narrowing down to one favorite ANYTHING. So, feel free to list as many “good” or “bad” movie-from-books as you like.

Hmm. I almost always like the book more, and definitely so if I’ve read it before I see the movie… in that case my decision is almost always based on how close they kept the story.

So… let’s see.

I thought that they did a good job with A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, though I think it suits a book format better than a movie one. I was pleased by the movies from The Lord of the Rings series. Another good one is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I liked the screen adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn too (recently bought it… I hadn’t seen it since I was a child); he wrote the screenplay for it, which helped. And I liked Gone With the Wind better as a movie, but then I saw it long before I read it.

The worst… hmm… I tend to forget the bad ones. I’ve heard such terrible things about the movie based on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea that I’ll never see it, so maybe that doesn’t count. Frank Herbert’s Dune has had some horrible adaptations. I didn’t care for the recent movie of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Except for Marvin. Alan Rickman did a killer Marvin. I’m sure there are others that I have mercifully forgotten.

On a somewhat different note, I recently saw Spam-a-lot, the stage version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I enjoyed it… but the parts I liked best were the parts that were different than the movie version, because I’m so used to the movie actors, and their voices and mannerisms, that any differences jumped out at me. But… “The Song that Goes Like This” had me cracking up for weeks. Heck, I’m laughing now.