Blogging Challenge: Books Into Film

As you probably already know, I'm participating in the Weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. This week's challenge is "Books I love that became movies or TV Shows".

This one is tricky, because the very first one that comes to mind is a book that I loved in my youth, but find highly problematic now:

Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein) was made into a fairly terrible movie -- deliberately, I think, as a rebuke to the book. My thoughts on the book itself are... complicated. If you just read it as a military adventure, then it works pretty well - solid opening, great prose, plenty of action -- except that Heinlein's welded on a bit too much of his political views to dismiss them as mere flavor in the setting for the adventure. It's more the reverse: the adventure story is basically a vehicle for those views, and the views themselves are... based on some very questionable premises.

I have somewhat similar feelings about the Jurassic Park books - I enjoyed the first books, and the first movie, but -- unusually -- for the sequel I actually felt that the movie was far better than the book. Like, that almost never happens to me, but here we are.

Do comic books count? Because those have been the source of an awful lot of movies that I've enjoyed, and/or had issues with, and/or been deeply disappointed by. But if I was going to pick a comic-book-based movie that I really, really adore, it's Blade. Why? It's the way they handled his superhero origin: it's not the first third of the film, it's three lines exposition worked into a fairly natural bit of dialogue. ("Blade's mother was attacked by a vampire. She died but he lived. He's got all of their strengths, none of their weaknesses.") By contrast, I'm pretty sure I've seen Peter Parker get bitten by a radioactive spider in film six different times now. For the love of God, in this one case, please tell -- don't show.

I feel compelled to mention Harry Potter again, because of course I do. Those are awesome, as either books or movies.

Neil Gaiman's Stardust is a good read and a fun movie as well.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and its sequels have been made into at least one movie, but honestly the old BBC TV series version came much closer to doing them justice. Still: completely awesome.

But if you really want the One True King of Books That Were Made Into movies?

I'd have to go with The Princess Bride.