Friday Poll!

[trinityvixen]

This week's theme is nothing related to Robin Hood, with which feiran and I have fallen ever more steadily in love, but it is in a way.

[Poll #1048258]

Because I'm curious as to what adaptations y'all have seen and liked, so please add that in comments if you will. See you on Monday with discusion, shall I?

Comments

[viridian.livejournal.com]

Man, what adaptations haven't I seen? Okay, not She's The Man, the modernized Twelfth Night, because Twelfth Night is untouchable to me (even if I did want to buy the Illyria Prep t-shirt prop they had up on ebay!) But I probably WOULD watch it if I caught it on tv or something.

But yeah, I'm sort of a whore for these things. I really like the modernized Great Expectations, not because it was actually good, but because it was PRETTY and had awesome music. I also like The Prestige movie a thousand times better than the book, even though the book is cool in its own way. I love the miniseries P&P after I finally saw it, but the Kiera Knightley movie looks hideous and I can't even bring myself to rent it after you and others have told me all that's shit about it. So it's a tossup. I'll usually watch anything and rate them all as I please.

I really, really enjoyed Stardust, most recently. Just as enjoyable as the book, and I was prepared for a letdown, there.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I certainly watch every adaptation ever made, so it would seem, but I don't usually like them. It's the rare thing made so well I prefer it to the original. Or, I guess I should say, the first thing I saw. I've liked adaptations better than original works for not having seen/read the original prior to the adaptation.

But I'm not about to watch She's the Man, no matter how much Devin seems to think it's the greatest thing ever.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

I put other--movies to plays or plays to movies work best, I think. The most successful anachronistic adaptations tend to be Shakespeare to movies (because Shakespeare's stories are powerful, but lose a lot when read in the original because of our ignorance of Victorian English puns.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It depends, I think, on the play. Some Shakespearean works don't translate when they depend on certain circumstances existing that wouldn't at later/earlier dates.

I think, actually, the best modernizable works are those of Jane Austen. Because her stories seem even more universal (and less dependent on accident and cross-dressing) than Shakespeare's.

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

I actually liked the film versions of The Prestige, Jurassic Park, and V for Vendetta better than the book. JP was the only one of those I read after seeing the movie though. I'm sure I could think of more if I weren't so tired.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Can't speak about The Prestige, but I would agree with those other two. The film adaptations of Jurassic Park and V for Vendetta managed to cut through a lot of the blather and bullshit of the novels. There's something to be said for adaptations on film streamlining the written word, even as a lot of filmic adaptations egregiously abbreviate complexity and nuance in written works.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

For my money, the best adaptations are Stephen King short stories to movies.

Or maybe just Stephen King is brilliant.

But the short story is really about the right length for what you can do in a movie without it being LONG AS DEATH. The P&P miniseries is brilliant, but that's because a book's length of material is spread out over like seven hours of film. You need that to do a novel justice.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

You have a good point there. Of course, the density of the material would determine how hard it was to make a movie out of it. A short story like "The Lottery" wouldn't make for a full movie, for example.

I agree with you about Stephen King. His short stories do make for good movies. Even the horror-schlock staple of the haunted house/room/cemetery that was "1408" made a full-length movie. I guess you get out of it what you put into it, and he does his leg work in that respect.