Let’s Talk About Movies (Part 2 of 2)

So last week I started talking about movies. More specifically, the prevalence of sequels and remakes and “reimaginings” and the utter dearth of truly original movie content. That led me to a top ten list all about the worst book-to-movie translations I have seen. I promised that it wasn’t all gloom-and-doom though, and so I am now pleased to bring you today’s portion of the books-to-movies list game: books that were good as movies AND as books.

Woohoo, she said!

This is a much more enjoyable a list – although it was also, admittedly, a much more difficult one to come up with… When I stopped to think about it, I realized that there is a startlingly small number of book-to-movie deals that I’ve enjoyed. I usually have a rule – if it’s a book I like, I will intentionally NOT go to see it in a movie theater because I hate when you have a fantastic story in your head and then the movie version screws it all up. I have found it is difficult for me to even reread those books after, if the screwed up-ness was particularly offensive to my brain…

The huge exception here is the Twilight , Harry Potter type of book – I have generally been willing to see those in theaters in violation of my personal rule (after all, it’s the exceptions that make the rules, or so I’ve heard)… And I don’t know why exactly this is an exception, because I’ve occasionally been very disappointed by a movie translation – and of course here I’m referring to the last two Harry Potters and the last Twilight – but I think that is as much because I’m irked that they chopped the books into bits to maximize their marketing abilities as anything else… I mean seriously – if Peter Jackson could take the Lord of the Rings books and make single movies out of each of those, there’s no reason on EARTH the same couldn’t have been done with HP and Twilight.

Grr, she said.

Anyway, all that negativity aside, I have on occasion been either pleasantly surprised by a book-to-movie that I ended up watching at home/on DVD OR by a movie version of a book I haven’t read yet that was so enjoyable that I ended up reading the book afterwards just to see if it would be even better (NB: it usually was). It is rare that it happens, but so cool that I just felt compelled to share my list of the top ten of these.

Again, please do take a minute to comment if you particularly agree/disagree – I really do like gathering other opinions, especially when they are dramatically different than mine… I don’t always (or, teehee, even often) agree, mind you, but I do genuinely enjoy reading them! 😉

Without further ado, here goes:
Top 10 Books that Are Worth Reading Even Though They Were Made Into Really Good Movies (it does, sometimes, happen)

1. The Princess Bride – William Golding
2. Pride and Prejudice (especially the 2001 Colin Firth version!!) – Jane Austen
3. The House of Mirth (2001 version of the movie) – Edith Wharton
4. A Little Princess – Frances Hodgson Burnett
5. The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
6. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
7. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
8. The Shining (Jack Nicholson’s 1980 version of the movie of course!) – Stephen King
9. High Fidelity – Nick Hornby
10. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson