I agree with Beverly--The Last Starfighter is nothing without Robert Preston.

"You're walking away from history--history, Alex! Did Chris Columbus stay home? Nooo. What if the Wright Brothers thought that only birds should fly? And did Galoka think that the Ulus were too ugly to save?"

Love that movie. ("Terrific. I'm about to get killed a million miles from nowhere, and a gung-ho iguana is telling me to relax!")

Then if/when they read, say, LOTR, they'll be seeing Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom instead of Aragorn and Legolas. They've had their imaginations hijacked, essentially. It makes me sad because I can read the books and still see the images I conjured when I was eight, ten years old.

I saw the movies first, then read the books. (Well, some of them. I got bogged down about 3/4 of the way through reading The Two Towers a few months ago, and kind of lost interest.) For the most part, the world I'm seeing when I read the books is not the same as the world in the movies. There are a few exceptions -- Gollum being the major one -- but mostly, all the characters and places look different.

I liked the book of Gone with the Wind better than the movie.

The second half of Two Towers (the book) didn't really interest me until I was somewhere in my 20s--that's when the whole Frodo/Sam storyline really started to resonate with me. Before then, my favorite part of the whole trilogy was the first half of TTT; I loved the Ents and the whole royal intrigue at Edoras (I was also a complete Eomer fangirl at the age of 15, whereas Aragorn was a real bore, IMO).

The best book-to-movie adaptations usually take the framework of the book for the plot, but concentrate on the more cinematic aspects instead (The Black Stallion comes to mind--love that book, but the best parts of it are barely in the movie, which I loved for a completely different reason).

Stoppard's Dark Materials script was reportedly scrapped. (Alliteration!) Chris Weitz is directing and, it sounds like, writing.

Though it's entirely possible he'll incorporate Stoppard's script into whatever he's doing.

The second half of Two Towers (the book) didn't really interest me until I was somewhere in my 20s--that's when the whole Frodo/Sam storyline really started to resonate with me. Before then, my favorite part of the whole trilogy was the first half of TTT; I loved the Ents and the whole royal intrigue at Edoras (I was also a complete Eomer fangirl at the age of 15, whereas Aragorn was a real bore, IMO).

Ha! Kathy is me. Except I didn't feel strongly about Eomer vs. Aragorn.

ETA: Oh, and I have to admit my very favorite part was Moria, with the Barrow-Downs coming in a close second. But for multiple chapters, the first half of TTT was it.

Great movies from great books: David Lean's Great Expectations, Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, really there are plenty.

That Jane Campion Portrait of a Lady certainly is excrutiatingly bad, although I don't loathe it quite as much as The Piano which could possibly be my least favourite film of all time.

A great movie from a decent novella--The Shawshank Redemption. Although I do think that, since they have less plot that have to be stripped away for the film version, short stories and novellas probably have an edge when it comes to adaptation.

Name-calling is so for the non-LOTR enhanced. Just cast gentle aspersions at upbringing and sensibility, and smile sadly.

Hah! I bow to your greater wisdom, JS.

But--but--The Last Starfighter as a musical? Without Robert Preston? How cruel.

I know. The irony is particularly cruel.

So I've been told. Doesn't make the LoTR books any less boring to me. But I do appreciate that other people, people who's taste I completely respect, view them as classics. There's plenty of other great books out there for me to read and love.

Okay, so I drop you down a notch to slightly loony. I wouldn't go so far as to call the books great literature but I enjoyed them enough that I've read them over a dozen times and will read them again before I die (unless I'm hit by a bus on the way to work tonight). My problem with the movies is that I found all the pre- and post-release hype to be specious. The moment I saw that Jackson had turned Merry and Pippin into bumbling fools, I realised that the truth was the opposite of the hype. Jackson showed a total disrespect for the source material and had redefined the meaning of "faithful".

Yeah, I know, what more could I expect from Hollywood. I guess Merry and Pippin were Jackson's "wise retard" and "magical negro".

I guess Merry and Pippin were Jackson's "wise retard" and "magical negro".

Magical Negroes don't get redeemed. Merry and Pippin managed to pull that off.

The bumbling part was to show character growth; by the end of the trilogy they're both seasoned warriors, confident and strong. They're bumbling at first, maybe a little, but brave. They just don't know how to fight. I thought the way he handled that was particularly inspired.