Bitten by Books
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The worst in my opinion were the John Carpenter movies - awful!
The Percy Jackson adaptations were just cringe worthy.
The John Carpenter movies were pretty bad…
Percy Jackson and John Carter movies were really not worth watching, PJ movie was totally forgettable. I also was disappointed by Eragon, the only thing that was really close to the book was the dragon.
Bleh, the movie made Eragon’s pacing issues so much worse.
I felt let down by SMOKE SIGNALS, the film adaptation of Sherman Alexie’s THE LONE RANGER AND TONTO FISTFIGHT IN HEAVEN, although it is a pretty difficult book to adapt. The same could be said for the adaptations of Marc Behm’s EYE OF THE BEHOLDER and either film version of Scott Spencer’s ENDLESS LOVE. I was surprised at how inept Jerusha Hess’s film version of Shannon Hale’s AUSTENLAND was, too.
I had to vote “Other” because, to be honestly, I never read the books to any of these to form a usable opinion.
Ella Enchanted - so forgettable it didn’t make the list. Read the book by Gail Carson Levine, watch the movie on DVD, and weep, y’all.
John Carpenter’s Vampires and other for Eragon…
I have to agree about Vampires/Vampire$. Carpenter took a brilliant book and ignored all of the best parts.
This is an unfair question for me since I very , very rarely see a movie version of a book that I have read. My imagination as I picture the characters, action and dialogue is so much more vivid and colorful than could be done on the silver screen”. I did see Interview With ?the Vampire and thought it was not too bad. Snippets of I, robot and Queen of the Damned convinced me not to waste my time seeing them. Again, I have not seen Tru Blood, but I cannot imagine how to get across Sookie’s abilities is way beyond my comprehension. I saw Total Recall before reading the story and thought the movie was good on its own. Starship Troopers did not flow as the book did, even though the heroine was way hotter than I imagined as a youngster when I read the book. But, in its own way, it also was good movie and can be watched again. I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also back when I was going through my Philip K Dick reading phase. Overall, Blade Runner is a pretty good adaption of the novel, but it also can stand as a good movie by itself. And, yes I have watched it several times.
I basically judge the quality of a book or movie by a somewhat simple criteria: do I want to read this again or would I read this again and not get tired of it. Case in point - Chushingura sub-titled the 47 Ronin, a Japanese move from the Toho studios. I first saw in the 60′s and have watched about 12 times since then - all the way through - about 3.5 hours each time.
Enough ranting. Good poll.
There are quite a few that made me cringe but the one that killed me recently was Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. I thought the book was kind of smart but the movie was one huge action scene after another and the end made me slap my forehead.
Steven Gould’s “Jumper” is one of my favorite books. I only made it through the entire movie by convincing myself that it would get better any minute.
Can I vote 3 time for Queen of the Damned, because that is how much I loathe that movie. Percy Jackson was pretty bad too…but Queen of the Damned is just so truly awful I could not even enjoy it in its own right (which I could for several of the other movies on the list…)
I will also admit that I actually liked True Blood (well at least the first season…) better than the books. I just never got into those….
I voted for The Golden Compass and other. The Golden Compass was super boring. My other was for the movie version of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Wonderful book. Horrible movie.
There are some pretty horrible ones there.
Starship Troopers - SocioPolitical Commentary becomes B rated adventure flick w/ gratuitous T&A (you know it’s bad when the English Professors you saw it with list the T&A as one of the few things they could give a thumbs up to, even if Dina Meyer’s character was supposed to be a *guy…)
John Carpenter’s Vampires - all that really carried over from the original _Vampire$_ were Jack Crow was a bad-ass vampire hunter w/ a team, the name of the team’s priest, the name of the head vampire & there were vampires. The 2 spin-off movies had jack all to do w/ it other than there were vampires.
Portrait of A Lady - For the love of Unholy & Dread Cthulhu, who starts a movie adaptation 1/3 of the way through the bloody book?!?! I mean holy Fraggles, what a mess. *No-one left the theatre w/out a totally perplexed look on their face, including the 30 or so of us that I knew *read the book.
The Dresden Files - What could have been a good adaptation suffered at the hands of SyFy’s corner-cutting, short-cut taking *nitwits. They cheaped out on the props, the SFX & then bent, mutilated & spindled Jim Butcher’s creation to sort-of fit.
John Carter - They cut back on story & bulked up of SFX, but still better than the Asylum version that reset the story to modern days & cast an ex porn star as Dejah Thoris…
I, Robot -The only links between that movie & Asimov’s original short story anthology were robots (like duh) and the 3 Laws of Robotics.
Enough complaining for now…
While I loved the Sookie books the TV version made me cringe
As an avid book reader, I hate seeing movie adaptions that totally deviate from the storyline of the books. e.g. Sookie Stackhouse novels versus True Blood. The good thing about True Blood was the eye candy for us women. I wanted to add Game of Thrones to this list because from this present season forward the TV series is not following the storyline anymore and characters stories changed. I can only hope that the Outlander story follows the layout set by author. I understand there needs to be certain changes made from book to screen e.g.The Walking Dead Show versus the Graphic novels, but the main story should remain the same.
John Carpenter’s Vampires gets my top vote
John Carpenter’s Vampires, Percy Jackson movies, and Queen of the Damned were my choices.
I chose Other because I was disappointed with the Twilight movie. I did not like the casting and I’m personally not a fan of Catherine Hardwicke’s directing choices, mainly the blue film over much of the movie.
I said Queen of the Damned, because while I really liked the movie, I liked the book far, far better. I also choose other because I haven’t seen many of those adaptations, and of the ones I saw, I thought they were good. I even thought Queen was pretty good, considering. The worst that I can think of were a made for TV edition of The Wizard of Earthsea, and I also really didn’t like the movie version of Eragon.
I picked 2
1. John Carpenter one
and 2 The Percy Jackson Movie
The Golden Compass. I did other because to a certain degree almost every book to movie adaptation is a total fail if I read the book 1st. Some of the TV ones are not so bad, even when they digress into a different enough story to make it it’s own thing like True Blood did.