It stuck to the text and translated the feelings along with the words. They found actors to embody the characters in a relateable way- and they used visuals to explain things that the book could not make as clear.
It became a pop culture hit and launched careers- that is a testament in its own right!
By LeahV
Raw and stylish, very much like the book.
By cte
It's easy to see that this movie was made by people who absolutely treasured the book and its message. Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch may be the best casting choice in the history of film making.
By deactivated
One of those rare movie adaptations that completely outshines the book to the point that most of us didn't even know there WAS a book. Instantly quotable, funny, sweet, and with an all-star cast of characters. INCONCEIVABLE.
By deactivated
These books are amazing, but so are the films. Great action scenes obviously but the films also stay true to plot line without getting too bogged down in minutia.
By deactivated
Anything by Stanley Kubrick. 2001 goes from a mediocre book about machines gaining power over people and turns it into a psychedelic masterpiece of atmosphere and fundamental human questions. The Shining - same thing. Full Metal Jacket - same thing. Eyes Wide Shut - wait.... Kubrick just knocks it out of the park in the exact same way every time. Damn.
By chrismolnar
Both emanations of this book are excellently done. I chose the John Wayne one because the Duke is inimitable. In this version it was never better to have John Wayne be himself, because the Duke is the Duke, whereas the Dude is a bit more of a chimera. In both the banter with Lebeef is excellently played off and his friendship with Mattie Ross is sweetly familial. Bridges plays the role in as a del... More
True, the Duke is the Duke, but he could only ever be The Duke. That was his one character. The Dude, however...well, Jeff Bridges can be more than The Dude.
By deactivated
While I'm disinclined to put this on here as it's one of Danny Boyle's lesser efforts, and by no means an amazing film, I am quite amazed by how an utterly terrible book was made into a passable film. Essentially, Danny Boyle takes a poorly written fairytale and creates a relatively taut semblance of that fairytale on film.
I haven't read this book, but there's no way it could be better than Danny Boyle's sugar rush of a heroin diary. The pure inventiveness of every scene takes the original's rough, funny story and turns it into a kaleidoscopic adventure that manages to wring all the fun and hijinks out of heroin without ever quite making it seem appealing.
By chrismolnar
I actually enjoyed the book 1000x more, however, this list isn't complete without Kubrick's disturbing masterpiece.
By cte
The Wachowski's take the panels of Alan Moore's anarchist epic to it's kinetic limits, delivering a knockout adaptation of the classic Graphic Novel. Much like their Matrix trilogy, 'V for Vendetta' evidences their mastery of intelligent, if callow, action extravaganzas made for a wide audience. And all over the world fans have been chanting, 'Remember, remember the 5th of November,' ever since.
Jaws takes out all the BS from the book and turns it into a high octane, adventure flick with great characters and amazing scares/humor.
By girlfriday
While Marjane Satrapi has always been a phenomenal storyteller, it's obvious she learned a great deal between publishing "Persoplis," and rendering it as animation. Both the film and the graphic novel relate the same memoir of a girl growing up in Iran during it's Islamic revolution- a war with Iraq- and the subsequent collapse back to religious conservativism. While the graphic novel is... More
The classic interpretation of Carl Sagan's book. This is an excellently acted movie with great twists and turns.
'The Last of the Mohicans,' Michael Mann's paean to the manliest of masculine writers, James Fenimore Cooper, doles out equal parts violence and romance in this macho ode to the dying Mohican race. Nathaniel Poe aka Hawkeye (Daniel Day Lewis), a white man adopted by the Mohican tribe, is on a quest to save his love, a British officer's daughter, Cora Munro (Madeline Stowe). Through the wilderness,... More
In our era, in our world, dinosaurs roamed. Our seats were quietly plucked from the theater and placed gently into wild orange, green, and yellow Range Rovers. We rode passenger behind Attenborough and Goldblum. Passive observers on safari through dinoland. And who better to resurrect those primordial beasts than Spielberg? No other director (besides, perhaps, Cameron) could have rendered the dino... More
Cormac McCarthy's favorite device is to create characters who are not so much characters, but forces of nature. Unrelenting vectors of violence. Unappeasable by any human standard. Monsters. Fate-mongers. Anton Chigur (Javier Bardem) is one such force. An ungodly flipper of coins who gambles with other people's lives. As with many Coen Bros films, nihilism abounds, but there chameleon genre hoppin... More
Walter Hill took an average gangland odyssey and turned it into a Technicolor dreamworld, as brutally real as late 70's NYC really was, and yet so much more surreal and colorful. Great action, themed gangs... fun.
By chrismolnar
'Adaptation' is both a meditation on the process of adapting a book to film and the process of evolution. The character in the film is adapting 'The Orchid Thief' into a screenplay, and as he writes the plot of the screenplay unfolds. In harried voice-over's we follow the screen writer, Charlie Kaufman, through the process of adapting the book as his neuroses get the better of him - in turn, the p... More
I'd say this one (almost) ties its source material. I usually cringe at voiceover, but the Joanne Woodward's voiceover captures the past/present time-split of the novel. DDL to boot!
By girlfriday
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