Top 5 Adaptations

Adaptations are a tricky thing. More and more you see anything that was remotely popular as a novel making the jump to the silver screen, and it's sometimes completely unwarranted. I'm sure this is related to the recent flood of remakes; apparently people will pay to see anything that's familiar to them, and Hollywood has picked up on this fact. Oh franchising. You suck so hard and are a topic that deserves its own post.

As I was saying, adaptations are a tricky thing. On the one hand you get stuff like The Lord of the Rings triology that takes a fairly cinematic story and delivers a beautiful projection of it in movie form. On the other hand you get stuff like the Harry Potter movies. (That's code for absolute trash for those of you that don't know my opinion of that series.) Even those aren't two ends of one spectrum since the HP films look so great and just suffer from "too much material to fit into 3 hours" syndrome. There's also stuff out there that was just adapted horribly, stuff where very important details were changed, and then stuff like Adaptation. Seriously, that movie is theoretically based on The Orchid Thief. No matter how much content may come from The Orchid Thief, Adaptation is not about its source material in the slightest.

On top of quality, you get a big problem with any novel-movie adaptation. That is, what you imagine it looked like when you read it is not going to be what it looks like on screen. This will make you upset, and you may never be able to experience the novel the same way again. It sucks, I know. This and TMMTFI3H syndrome are the big problems with the book to movie transition, though that's assuming the writers are respectful of the original material.

What are some great adaptations? In no particular order,

Lord of the Rings
The Shining
The Shawshank Redemption
No Country For Old Men
Chicago (though this came from the stage... still a difficult jump)
Big Fish
High Fidelity
About A Boy
The Princess Bride
The Maltese Falcon
Pretty much every old-school Disney movie (assuming you count adaptation from classic fairy tales)
Fight Club

...and that's just off the top of my head! I forgot how many movies these days are based on another source, and also how not all movies based on something are bad. It might be more entertaining to do a worst adaptations list. That one would have a lot of competition.

When making a Top 5 adaptations list, how much should one take into account faithfulness to the original material? For example, I hear Fight Club the movie is very different from Fight Club the book, but both are widely loved. I can't speak on this example directly having not read the book, but it's an important question. In my list above, I've only read 2 of the books those movies are based one (counting Lotr as 1 book). If faithfulness is an important quality, I have some serious work to do before I can make my list here.

Whatever. Let's see what comes up.

Top 5 adaptations from a book:
High Fidelity
The Maltese Falcon
Big Fish
No Country For Old Men
The Shining

Those are all from my above list, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some that should be on here. I wish there was room for stuff like Fight Club and The Shawshank Redemption, but the faithfulness factor knocks the first down a peg and the 5 on my list I like better than Shawshank. The Shining just does such a good job with atmosphere and pacing, it's easy to imagine getting that down in the book but doing an even better job in the movie. Considering that's what the story is all about, I think that should give it a spot. The first 3 on my list are just some of my favorite movies that happen to be books, too. Then No Country For Old Men is just... ridiculous. I guess. I dunno, it feels like it should be up there.

Now to work on a worst adaptations list. Consider that one in the making. Also, please remind me what obvious movies I'm missing for either list. Yes, I know about Catch-22; it's my favorite book but the movie is just alright.