Best Movies Based on Books

This is the second post in a series we’ll call “The Best and Worst,” in which, you know, I talk about the best and worst of book related things. The first post is The Best Books I’ve Ever Read, and I’m going to do one about really horrible books as soon as I figure out if it’s worth picking on Twilight or if that ship has already sailed.

Now, books based on movies can be a touchy subject for some people, especially people who have had beloved classics from their childhood destroyed by Hollywood (makers of Ella Enchanted, I’m looking at you right now), but I believe that good movies can be made from books. I don’t consider a good movie-based-on-a-book to be one that follows the source material absolutely, but one that maintains the core theme of the work in question, and represents that work the best it can in a cinematic way.

This list might be a little wonky, because I’ve limited it to movies based on books I’ve actually read.

Angels & Demons

I know that this might not be what people think of when they think of a great movie, and it didn’t follow the original source material too closely, but it took the basic idea – a symbologist uncovers a plot to gain power in the Catholic church while helping a physicist find the antimatter she mislaid – and made it look rather pretty on screen.  I’m giving this movie a hell of a lot of credit because it made me actually like something Dan Brown had his hands on. I despise Dan Brown, because he’s a horrible writer and mixes fact and fiction with no regard to either, but this was a decent movie.

The Hours

I loved the movie, I loved the book. Both are the story of three women – Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Woolf (like, THE Virginia Woolf), and Mrs. Brown – as they go about their normal every day life. That doesn’t sound very exciting, but it’s a beautiful, heartbreaking story, and the movie captured the feeling of the book. Some of the moments in the book that were sad were even more gut wrenching in the movie, like Virginia Woolf’s suicide at the beginning of the movie. Mostly, I love this book (and this movie) because of the way the three women are intertwined, the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.   Virginia is writing it while the action of the book takes place, Mrs. Brown is reading it, and Mrs. Dalloway (whose real name is Clarissa Vaughn),  is the embodiment of Virginia Woolf’s character. If you haven’t seen either of these, I suggest you give them a try.

Lord of the Rings

I’m not the biggest Lord of the Rings fan, mostly because the movies came out when I was a wee bit too young for them, and then I tried reading the books, which are a little daunting for someone in elementary school.  I mean, I got through them, but I had to skip a lot of the songs and speeches and use the indexes and appendices in the back a lot.  The Lord of the Rings movies, I feel, condensed all that was good about the books, and took out the boring, kind of extraneous bits, leaving fast paced, action filled, suspense ridden films.  Well done, Peter Jackson, well done.

Fight Club

Come on, I had to put this on here. I’m probably one of the few people my age who read the book before they watched the movie.  Fight Club, as a book, is kind of a trippy experience, since Chuck Palahniuk seems dedicated to making sure that you feel as disjointed from time as his main character, and I really did not notice for the first half of the book that the main character didn’t have a name. Since I read the book and already knew what happened, the twist in the story in the movie didn’t have much of an impact, but the way they demonstrated it was quite clever. But the fact that I already knew what was going to happen in the movie didn’t spoil my enjoyment of it at all, which I think is one of those things that makes a good film. Helena Bonham Carter, Brad Pitt, and Edward Norton (does anyone else think Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Edward Norton look a lot alike?) all give exemplary performances, and the movie’s just really nice to look at. The filmmakers really got down the grittiness of what Palahiniuk wrote.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I know that the movie of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy pissed off some longtime Hitchhiker’s fans because it veered wildly around the original plot, but whatever. Douglas Adams helped write the script! Douglas! So, any changes are okay with me. Plus, they kept in the important things – Zaphod’s second head, Trillian (man, I love Trillian), Marvin, Deep Thought, and the handy excerpts from the Guide itself. The little bits from the Guide are probably my favorite part about this movie, since they’re voiced by Stephen Fry, and have little illustrations to go along with them. The only thing I didn’t like about the movie was the weird romance between Arthur Dent and Trillian.  I guess it kind of makes sense because they’re the only two humans left in the universe, and Trillian’s played by Zooey Deschanel who is just a romance subplot kind of girl, but I missed Fenchurch.

Coraline

Coraline is kind of a special book for me for one reason – it’s the first book I remember reading that actually scared me. Like, can’t sleep at night, go sleep in your mother’s room scared. I picked it up in one of those Scholastic Book Fairs our school had (man, I wish they had those for colleges, they were totally awesome), and read it the next day, and then buried it deep in my shelves.  It took me about a year after I’d burned through most of Neil Gaiman’s bibliography – Sandman, Good Omens, American Gods, etc. – to realize that terrifying little book from my past was written by him. And then the movie came out, and it was awesome.  I cannot tell you how much I love stop motion animation, and how much I hate the 3D cartoons that are quickly becoming industry standard.  The makers of Coraline took Gaiman’s book and crafted a beautiful little world around it, that still remained precisely as scary as that book was for little nine-year old me – my littlest sister, who was around the same age I was when I read the book, watched the movie and thought it was great, but covered her eyes six or seven times. That’s the sign of a good kid’s movie. They need something that scares them a little bit, that challenges them.

That’s all I got. I feel like the Harry Potter movies should maybe be on here, but I can’t really connect Harry Potter the books with Harry Potter the movies in my mind because they’ve ended up being so different in so many ways, so I left them off.  What movies based on books did you like? Did you like the movie or the book better?