November 6th, 2007
16. The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy (2005)
Similarly, Douglas Adams just doesn't read as a good film source; his Hitchhiker novels are preposterously dense for comic novels, and they play with context, rhythm, and above all, ridiculous, extended narrative diversions into the past, present, and future. The lines that the characters actually speak are easiest part to get across on film, but also the least funny part of his humor. The 1981 BBC miniseries managed the tone fairly well by giving over large parts of the story to little animated interludes following some of those rabbit trails with narration taking directly from Adams' book, but the low budget just wasn't up to dealing with two-headed, three-armed Zaphod Beeblebrox. The tech had caught up to the story by the time of 2005's film adaptation (though it still cheated on Zaphod's second head), but that version was straining far too hard to be wacky. With so much Adams hilarious material available, why discard so much of it in favor of dumb slapstick and lumpy, overstretched comedy? And the ill-advised tacked-on ending, which attempted to bring a sort of fakey closure to an open-ended story, was irritatingly at odds with the rest of the material.
17. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising (2007)
The idea of a film adaptation of Susan Cooper's Newbery-winning children's classic The Dark Is Rising was odd in the first place; it's the second book in a five-book series, it's more about atmosphere than action, and it feels more than a little like Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time, in that the story's child protagonist is in the midst of a battle far larger than he can comprehend, and his place in it is more observer and student than hero. In part a primer in Celtic lore and old tradition, it's a slow and thoughtful book, full of allusion and description. The badly botched film version changes the protagonist into a teenager, makes him American instead of English for no good reason (the story's still based in a small English town), and puts him at the center of an action-oriented, video-game-like plot where he has to collect power-ups, one of which turns out to be himself. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising isn't just a mishandling of the book, it's a loud, clumsy, shallow insult to the author.
18. The Black Cauldron (1985)
Similarly, Disney's animated take on the second book in Lloyd Alexander's five-book children's epic (also a Newbery winner) attempts to simplify matters for the kids by stripping out all the depth and half the characters, and Disney-fying the rest. Disney films have always had a glancing relationship with their book sources, at best—Bambi the film and Bambi the book pretty much share a title and the idea of a deer named Bambi, while Mary Poppins the movie turns a bitter, shrewish, preposterously vain nanny into a big ball of singing, dancing Julie Andrews sweetness. But both those films get away with it by being gorgeous, magical fun; even Disney's Hunchback Of Notre Dame, with its tacked-on happy ending, managed some breathtaking scenes. But The Black Cauldron—Disney's first PG animated movie, and reportedly nearly its first R film, before some gruesome killings were excised—was a muddled, uninspired mess, critically panned and a wash at the box office.
19. Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961)
Sure, there's plenty to recommend Blake Edwards' lively adaptation of Breakfast At Tiffany's, the novel that made Truman Capote's name. Audrey Hepburn's sparky performance as Holly Golightly is perfect, and while George Peppard makes for a lumpen, leaden protagonist, he's a reasonable interpretation of the book's all-but-absent narrator, seen more as a camera lens than an onscreen presence. Far less perfect: Mickey Rooney's embarrassing mugging as a buck-toothed, squint-eyed, fake-accented Japanese neighbor. But mostly, Edwards' film version is infuriating for its butchered "happy" ending, surely one of the biggest copouts in film history.
20. Stephen King's The Shining (1997)
Goodness knows this entire list could be composed of botched adaptations of Stephen King books, and certainly there are plenty of films lousier than the ABC miniseries version of his 1977 novel. But for irony alone, Stephen King's The Shining can't be beat: Long rankled by Stanley Kubrick's loose adaptation of his book, King wrote the teleplay as a corrective to the great director's creative butchering, but the new version is vastly inferior in every conceivable regard. King never cared for Jack Nicholson's iconic performance in the earlier film, which he felt tipped off the character's descent into madness too plainly, but Steven Weber (a.k.a. that guy from Wings) was no one's idea of an upgrade. So too Courtland Mead (a.k.a. that annoying dough-faced kid from the Disneyworld commercials), who stepped into the pivotal—and here, much more substantial—role of a boy touched by ESP. But the made-for-TV format wreaks the most havoc: Sustaining tension, much less delivering scares, over a squeaky-clean 273-minute sprawl isn't really possible, and King and director Mick Garris don't help their cause with action-halting flashbacks, reams of expository dialogue, and cheesy effects sequences. Stephen King's The Shining is proof that movies aren't marriages, at least in the sense that fidelity isn't always a virtue.
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