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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Poll: Best Movie Adaptation

Oh yeah, also staring that protagonist guy.
What is the best movie adaptation of a book? 

Please take a moment to vote for the best movie adaptation of a book.

You may use whatever criteria you wish. (The tricky stuff about staying true to the source material was mostly part of the nomination process.) You can pick the closest adaptation or the movies you thought made changes that ended up working. Or just a book you loved and were dying to see turned into a movie, and then it did and you weren't disappointed.

My only request is that you are rating the adaptations, not just the movies. This isn't a BEST MOVIE poll. If you haven't read the accompanying book, please don't assume the adaptation is a good one. There are lots of places you can vote for your favorite movie.

No movies that didn't have a second went on to the poll. It would have been more like twenty if not. That's why it's really important to check back on the nomination posts and second the choices you like.

Everyone gets three (3) votes.  The poll itself is in its usual place at the bottom of the left hand side widgets. It is long and black.

22 comments:

  1. Wow, that was a tough one! To Kill a Mockingbird was a no-brainer because both the book and the movie (and the local repertory theater's production) blew me away. Some of the books I hated and refused to see the movie (I'm looking at you Twilight) or mini-series (there's something about Martin's writing that just works my nerves). I know I risk getting banned for admitting I've neither read nor watched Stardust. In my defense, it's on my list!! (Said list is now so long that I'm going to need to live forever to read all the books on it. Horrors.)

    The other two took longer to pick. In fact, I think I stared at the poll for so long, I'd have been better off just voting once... except that I wanted to vote for all the others for varying reasons.

    You're definitely evil, dude. :-)

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    1. I like the nomination process because really good stuff ends up on the polls that isn't always so cookie cutter with every other poll.

      I'm sort of glad you had a hard time given the context. ~wink~ I have never read or seen Twilight myself (other than like two chapters of giving it a try to see if it was as bad as everyone said--yes it was), and I'm trying to work my way through the second book of Game of Thrones before I watch season 2.

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    2. A coworker lent me the Twilight book, and would not stop talking about how great it was. I figured I should finish the book so I could honestly tell him he was full of crap. I wanted to stab myself in the eyes with a spork by the end, though. I feel the same way about Martin's writing as I do Herbert's... it took me eight years to read Dune. I will credit it with "saving my life," however. Since so many of my friends thought Dune was Teh Awesome, at a particularly low point in my life I decided I should read it before I went off to kill myself. Thanks to it being SO DIFFICULT TO READ, I had six months of therapy under my belt when I finished it, and realized things weren't quite as bad as I'd made them out to be. Now that I think about it, the mini-series was WAY better than the book... so if I ever have time to watch TV, I might check out GoT. Or not... I'm still trying to catch up on Season 3 of NCIS. The stories in my head are always so much more interesting than the ones on TV... especially when I start casting the stories that are playing in my head. Mmmmmm...

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    3. Wow, that sounds like....quite the story.

      My appreciation for Dune is for its story/content. I wasn't blown away by F.H.'s writing either. I think I came to appreciate it when I was a little older. But in your case, I think I'm rather glad that it was a tough read for you.

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    4. In retrospect, I certainly appreciate the book for that reason. I still think it was an awful book. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately for the people around me), I've learned to cope differently when life throws IEDs at me. I get full on Rage Face. A lot of that gets channeled into my writing... it feels refreshing to kill people who've done me dirty, as Grandma used to say. Or I rant and rave about the chunks of fecal matter known as "reporters" on Facebook. Ah, if every word of it wasn't the truth, I'd probably have lawyers babbling at me about libel. And then I kill them in a story. Two down, one to go. The Evil DBA is also dead. Two more coworkers are on The List. Bwahahaha.

      (I do have another List of people, but that's the Good List. I stick my best pals into stories... so far, they've all turned out to be cops, which is interesting. Five of them now... hmmm. That actually makes sense.)

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  2. Disgruntled Jurassic Park fan.February 8, 2014 at 3:49 PM

    They all lose because... Jurassic Park.

    Yeah yeah, I should have been there for the nomination process, so I shouldn't complain. :) But seriously, guys?

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    1. In the nomination process I put an emphasis on trying to stay as true as possible to source material. Perhaps the monumental changes made to the movie were the reason folks didn't nominate it.

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    2. Disgruntled Pride and Prejudice fan.February 20, 2014 at 3:33 PM

      Well with that caveat... A&E's Pride and Prejudice was robbed. :P

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    3. I just realized what you did with the names here and laughed out loud.

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  3. I would have liked to see Neverending Story on this list. That was pretty damned close to the book, given the economies of scale. And it was a beautiful, brilliant film.

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    1. You know, I don't think I even knew there was a book for The Neverending Story.

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    2. Yeah, there was a book for it, but you'd never believe how long it takes to finish it.

      ...

      ...

      Oh c'mon, just a little rimshot, please?

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    3. Let's give it up for Amy Echeverri ladies and gentlemen. She'll be here all week. Come on back for the ten o'clock set--it's all new jokes. Tip your cocktails.

      ~drops mic~

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  4. I thought of Game of Thrones but didn't nominate it because you said MINI series and that is a full on series. Was I just too literal?

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    1. Yeah. I guess so. I've probably got the wrong working definition of miniseries. I always thought it was a show with a planned end. Like a show that doesn't just go on until it jumps the shark and stops making money.

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  5. I was just glad that I, Robot was not nominated :-)

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  6. The adaptation of the Princess Bride, frankly, is not good. Please don't get me wrong, folks - it's a fun movie! But it's a totally different story than the book. The book has a whole back story that's nearly completely ignored, and there's a framework for the adventure that the adapter totally skipped. To be honest, if they'd been true to the book it would not have been a good movie.

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    1. I agree. I was a little surprised to see it get nominated and more so to see how well it's done. I'm not sure how many people giving it love have actually read the book and how many are just giving the movie some love. But I don't even know HOW I would go about policing that, even if I wanted to.

      I did like all the lists though--I thought they were funny.

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  7. Pretty sure no-one who votes for the Princess Bride actually read the book. Whatevs... I'm only voting for one of these. Go back to book polls please Chris.

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    1. I'll probably go back to some of the very original polls we ran years ago now that we have ten or twenty times as many regular readers.

      However, this poll has been extraordinarily popular already.

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