Telly/film adaptations of books that made you fart with rage

[solidgoldbrass]

I will never forget the outrageous horror that was the TV adaptation of Christopher Brookmyre's Quite Ugly One Morning - not only do they cast an irishman as the glaswegian hero but they give it this absolute sexist mullering by totally changing the two heroines (from sorted dyke and feisty single woman to frisky single and desperate ex-wife) and fuck it up COMPLETELY...

Maybe that's why my baby has clolic. I caught it from that adaption.

Damn Them!!

Memoirs of a Geisha - very disappointing....

Love the idea of something called 'clolic'.
Sounds very Victorian.

Beats colic anyway. People seem to start talking about horses and their treatment when I try to tell them [in RL]. Most odd.

I really enjoyed the Andromeda Strain in a trashy daft way.

I read several books as a child about people walking horses that had colic: I remember having absolutely no idea what it meant at the time.

Message withdrawn

Ha! Malory Towers! Remember when Bill's horse was ill and Miss Walker [?] walked it for hours and they were great friends after that.....or am I alone here?

Solent Green....it's made of people...of people!!!

Oh yes - that was one! I'm sure there were loads though.

Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula - look, there wans;t a big dog's cock in the book, get over it...

Oh yes and Polanski's Macbeth with the mooning witches and the ridiculous bleeping dagger.

I wasn't around here at the time of any discussion - what was the take on the Lord of the Rings. Did mn say yay or nay?

Charlie & the chocolate Factory - the original film seriously upset me as a child. Charlie was GOOD - he never stole anything, so the whole he-stole-fizzy-lifting-drink-then-proved-himself-by-not-giving-away-secrets was just WRONG. Still rankles as you can tell...

Flowers in the Attic - glad I never watched the film, would ave been so disappointed. Definitely 80's teen-reading - am I a bad parent as I gave my teenage DD a copy recently? She couldn't put it down. (My own mother would have been horrified at what I read as a teenager...)

Was there a Malory Towers film or was the comment above sidetracking? Remember Bill's horse though, and the whole colic's not just a tummyache the horse could die thing. Loved those books...

Can i also bring the conversation down to my intellectual level - Charlie & Lola I will not ever eat a tomato - the whole point at the end of the book is that she asks for a moonsquirter and eats it, joking that it's not a tomato - she doesn't squirt tomato everywhere with Charlie like the TV version shows. Who thought that was a smart idea for pre-schoolers?

Jurassic Park.

Loved the book it was thrilling and interesting and everything you'd expect from a Michael Crichton

The film was the first couple of chapters and then cut to the last one!!!

The Beach, I actually loved the book but the film was dire.

Re: LOTR - some bits brilliant but way too long and Liv Tyler was crap.

Just about every film I have seen that I have read the book beforehand - dh hates it when I sit there saying - 'that wasn't in the book'

I made the mistake of watching the DVD of Brideshead Revisited yesterday. Oh dear God. I sat with my head in my hands at certain points!

Am talking film not 80s TV dramatisation, just to be clear!

What they did to the Dark is Rising brings tears to my eyes. They books are so brilliant and all the tampering just ripped the soul out of the story.

I never like watching films when I've already read the book - its almost always a big disappointment.
Two that spring to mind are Captain Corellis Mandolin and more recently PS I Love You.
Both times I came out of the cinema spitting

Larkrise to Candleford. WTF?

All the E. Nesbit adaptations done in the last few years have been weak - in the Treasure Seekers IIRC they added a load of daft subplots about their dad being an inventor or something, and in Five Children And It they made the Psammead a cute little creature with great big eyes, nothing like the illustrations. The whole point of his character is he is ugly, not cute.

Oh but now I remember the worst ever: Little House on the Praire. And interestingly in Backlash by Susan Faludi she reports that basically Michael Landon who played Pa took over the direction and deliberately made it more about his character instead of about the (very feisty) Laura.

The Other Boelyn Girl - they may as well have just omitted any relation to the book oher than the protagonists. Passable film but not a film of the book.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It turned up on the big screen as "The Unbearable Tedium of Bonking" (to quote DH)

Hitch hikers Guide to the Galaxy did not even stand up top the fantastic TV series (sad 80's nostaliga emoticom)