As we’ve established elsewhere, I don’t much like tricksters, and The Odyssey is the story of the trickster Odysseus. But I would much have preferred the actual story of the trickster Odysseus to whatever you want to say Christopher Nolan gave us instead.
Tag: films based on a book
Bambi (1942)
One of my favorite movies ever is Disney’s Lion King (1994). I know the music and the script inside out. So when I watched Bambi in 2021, and again when I watched it recently, I was struck by how similar Bambi is to The Lion King. Both movies follow a princely main character through the major stages of his life.
The BBC Jane Austen Collection (1972–1995)
Between June 2024 and June 2026, I watched all six of the Jane Austen adaptations in this particular box set, which includes:
- Emma (1972)
- Sense and Sensibility (1981)
- Mansfield Park (1983)
- Northanger Abbey (1987)
- Pride and Prejudice (1995)
- Persuasion (1995)
Most of these adaptations struck me as boring, fussy and strident like a stage performance, or terribly incomplete.
More on various other adaptations below.
Project Hail Mary (2026)
I don’t think there was *anything* I didn’t like about Project Hail Mary.
It was a grand, beautiful, mysterious, high-stakes sci-fi adventure, with a lot of comedy and drama and symbolism. Really the best new movie I’ve seen in a long while. 100% recommend.
King Solomon’s Mines (book vs. 1950 movie)
Mainly the difference is that the book has a big battle in the middle that the movie doesn’t have at all, and the movie has a love story that’s nowhere in the book. See below for complete plot summaries of the book and movie.
Continue reading King Solomon’s Mines (book vs. 1950 movie)
When and Why I Read King Solomon's Mines
The "lost world" novel that inspired Michael Crichton's Congo.
Genre: adventure
Date started / date finished: 22-Feb-25 to 27-Feb-25
Length: 270 pages
ISBN: na
Originally published in: 1885/2000/2018
Source link: King Solomon's Mines
Movies watched in 2021
Apparently I watched 88 movies in 2021. They’re listed in my movie log.
- 39 were movies I was rewatching.
- 34 were in a series.
- 16 were animated.
- 9 were book adaptations that I watched because I read the book.
- 6 were starring Keanu Reeves.
- 5 were starring Tom Cruise.
- 2 were live-action with animated characters.
- 2 were Chinese.
- 2 were in theaters.
- 1 was a musical.
- 1 was a documentary.
War Horse (2011)
Next time someone says to me, “The book is always better than the movie,” I can say: “Hah! You have not seen War Horse!”
Stories evolve. Later versions are not necessarily better, and stories told using different media have different strengths and different constraints. Nevertheless, though the movie owes much to both its predecessors—the children’s novel written by Michael Morpurgo and the stage play that uses puppets by Handspring—the movie is hands down the best version.
Why?
The relationships between the characters have been tweaked to support the story better. The story itself has been tweaked to smooth the pacing and heighten the drama. Moreover, the settings shine. A book can describe a setting evocatively, but not every book does. Spielberg’s pictures are worth many more thousands of words than Morpurgo gave us. Meanwhile, the anti-war didacticism, which sometimes upstaged Handspring’s puppets in the play, is toned down to the point that it’s almost absent from the dialog of the movie. After all, on the big screen, the horror of war speaks for itself, and anyway, there are other stories that better show its terrible cost. This is not the story of the lives and deaths of human soldiers, nor even the story of a boy who loved his horse. This is the story of a horse that went to war.
It’s beautiful, and so absorbing that I didn’t realize until after I’d watched it twice that it’s two and a half hours long!
According to the reviews, not everyone likes the old-fashioned “honest, emotionally direct” storytelling, calling it overly sentimental, and some deride it as mere family-friendly entertainment, too clean to be serious about its ostensibly grim subject matter.
I refuse to dislike the movie on those grounds. Is it calculated to be emotionally satisfying? Maybe. But it satisfies, which is more than I can say for a lot of movies.
See below for a short summary, a very very detailed summary (with SPOILERS), a list of the changes I liked in the movie, a list of some of the movie reviews, and a few other thoughts.
Little Women (1933)
Why do I feel like there was too much shouting? (Also, too much crying? Sheesh, Kathy, calm the heck down.)
The 1933 Katharine Hepburn film is an unsubtle adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic American novel Little Women. Then again, the book at times is less than subtle in its advocacy of Christian selflessness. Moreover, I get the sense that compared to the films of the day, Little Women represented a victory for realism: it was a departure from overblown, melodramatic, stereotyped adventures.
I decided to watch Little Women (1933) after the Hungry Hundred Book Club meetup, when I saw three classic film adaptations—Little Women 1933, Little Women 1949, and Little Women 1994—listed in a friend’s copy of the book. Many critics seem to consider the 1933 adaptation the best of the bunch.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/little-women-1933/id298739825
See below for more of what I thought of it, as well as a plot summary in the form of a list of incidents included in the movie.
City of Ember (2008)
Never judge a book by its movie. City of Ember (the movie) is only okay, but City of Ember (the book) is fantastic.
Deep underground, the people of Ember have never seen the sun and don’t even know it exists. The builders of their city planned for them to emerge, but that plan was lost and forgotten, and now Ember is running out of supplies, and its generator, without which there is no light, is breaking down. Will the builders return to save the people of Ember, as some believe? Will the mayor come up with a plan for his people? Or will it be up to Lina and Doon to rediscover the lost exit to the surface?
The premise is great. However, the movie lacks the focus of the book because some added elements don’t quite fit, some of the positive thematic messages are missing, and some of the action shots were created with awkward CGI. Also, personally, I’m not fond of Bill Murray.
I think The City of Ember would be great as a television series, because a TV show could spend a lot more time developing the characters and exploring the unique underground world.
See below for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
The Darkest Minds (2018)
Starring the actress who played Rue in The Hunger Games (2012), The Darkest Minds was like Wrinkle in Time (2018) plus X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), but better in some ways than either one.
I wish I’d known it was based on the first book in a series and not a standalone story; then the pacing would have made more sense.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-darkest-minds/id1412296702
The reviews reflect a general consensus that though the cast was good, the movie feels like a timid, bland echo of other dystopian stories. I dunno, sweet and safe isn’t necessarily bad. Here’s a representative “meh” kind of review, from IGN.
