"The NeverEnding Story" should never have been made into a movie. It's almost ironic. Every time a child watches the movie instead of reading the book, that's an opportunity lost.
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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The two adaptations of Watchmen have both missed the point. The Zack Snyder movie treats the characters like gods rather than deeply flawed losers and weirdos.
The HBO series is better, and does get very close, but collapses from a meandering plot and glorifying cops
Did it glorify cops? It's been a few years but I seem to remember the Chief of police being a literal Klansman and chips beating the shit out of people all the time
The show plays into several right wing fears, like widespread gun control (cops need permission over radio to unlock their guns), black people getting paid reparations, white people living in shantytowns (nixonville), cigarettes are illegal, religious people becoming a persecuted minority, stuff like that. The first few episodes play up an angle of "what if cops mainly profiled poor white people." That's because the premise is that there's been an uninterrupted 30 year liberal hegemony under president Robert Redford, similar to how the 1980s Watchmen comic took place during an uninterrupted conservative domination with Nixon.
The glorifying cops part is because it dips into the idea there are some good cops who are struggling against an entrenched structure of bad cops. That's the whole arc of the show, the main character Angela is a "good cop" who is routing out the "bad cops" in order to repair the structure. It's the liberal nonsense idea that putting oppressed minorities into positions of power like wealth, the cops, politicians, etc will correct the structure, since the problem is presented as individuals within that structure rather than the thing itself. In the show's attempts to subvert/criticize corporate liberal dystopia, it still presents the same conclusions.
Although another way of reading it is that it's a criticism of how generic American liberals, even when granted full control over society, still manage to recreate the same conditions. That's a better and more interesting reading honestly. But I'm stuck because I know that Damon Lindelof (the writer) is himself a generic rich Hollywood liberal type.
I actually like the show by the way. Jeremy Irons was good. The Trent Reznor soundtrack is beautiful too.
The good thing about the Watchmen movie was that the ads and hype were the first time I'd heard about it, so it got me to read the Watchmen which is an amazing work.
The bad thing about the Watchmen movie is everything else
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Hunger games.
I should really read those, as I really enjoyed those movies (the earliest ones more than the later ones, admittedly). What's so different about the movies?
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I'm sure it's not the worst but I felt like the adaptation of Watership Down changed the tone/message compared to the book. Now granted the infamous violence is present in the book (though seeing it is more visceral than reading about it). But in the book there's a nice story at the end where Hazel is injured (iirc) and is taken in by a little girl and her parents who take care of him while he recovers before releasing him back to the wild (which only adds to his legend, of course).
Removing this bit, the only positive interaction with a human, makes the message feel more like, "Humans are bastards and inherently anethma to the natural world, which is also a brutal war of all against all even down to the cutest softest creatures." It just makes you feel bad, whereas the book might make you feel bad at times but it also offers an example of what you can do right. It's kind of a pet peeve when a work with environmentalist themes falls into that line of "Humans are the problem and there's nothing you can do but feel bad about it."
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Well. It's clearly not a book, but Disney's Hercules was the first time I really felt disappointed about going to the cinema. My ten year old brain was having none of it. I wanted the adultery, the murder, the dirty stuff the story was supposed to have and I think it's the Disney film (that I've watched) I hate the most up to date.
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A Wrinkle In Time was fucking insulting.
I think it was much worse for people that actually liked the book.
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Inkheart by Cornelia Funke is one of my most beloved series
read that series several times and when they announced a movie I was so hyped!
and the movie was just ok :C
I haven't seen any movies based on books since then unless it receives high praises which I haven't seen much
If TV shows count: Earthsea.
It was such a poor adaptation that Ursula Le Guin wrote an article denouncing it.
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Queen of the Damned was pretty awful and threw out the majority of the storyline.
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Don't know if it counts as "classic", but Mortal Engines comes to mind. The film cut out over half the book. I loved the book and got really excited for the film, but it was a massive let-down. They could've easily made the film twice as long, maybe more.
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The vampiers assistent, bases on the Darren Shan series. The tried to fit the first 3 books and the last one in one movie, and skipping over the other 8 books.... And who is Rebecca the monkey girl.... I wand Debbie and Sam....
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I know its not a classic, but Dan Brown's inferno the book and the movie have two different endings and it angers me every time.
Not a book and not a movie, but that Cabinet of Curiosities series adapted a couple of HP Lovecraft stories and it was fucking terrible. There were a couple of beats that were interesting, but generally it was very faithless and the changes were for the worse. There were some excellent episodes otherwise, but I can't help but feel that they are just butcherings of much better stories that I haven't read.
Politically, it's way less bad than you'd expect, I'd recommend watching it. One of the best episodes had -- to someone as brainrotted as me -- an incredible hybridization of classic horror and battle anime logic. That one was probably my favorite one, though there was one where the protagonist looks just like the Disco Elysium guy and kind of acts like him too, and it was fun.
P.S. did you know that there are movie adaptations of Ayn Rand's drivel? If you are masochistic, they might be fun to watch
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