Fox12 said:
Johnny Novgorod said:
Fox12 said:
Also, anything by Stanley Kubrick. Almost all of his films are lesser adaptations of better novels. A Clockwork Orange missed the point of the book entirely. Same thing with the Shining. He was also a huge ass hole of a director. In the end, even his best films were usually descent films and terrible adaptations.
Fortunately, this is a thread about overrated movies, and not about personal appreciations of people we've never met and books we've never read (or did you read Red Alert, the source for Dr. Strangelove? Because that's one mediocre Cold War thriller. You also read Schnitzler's Traumnovelle? Eyes Wide Shut goes in another direction but I still find it a good adaptation). Descent (sic) films are good enough for me, if they can hold themselves on their own. I don't think a movie "owes" the book it's based on, and vice versa.
If it was an improvement then maybe I could agree with you. My issue isn't that Kubrick was a sadist, though he was, it's that his films were all lesser re-tellings of other stories. I consider that a completely valid criticism, especially when the depth and themes of a good story are completely betrayed by a poorer adaptation. Furthermore, I do consider these films overrated, as his movies are held up as the gold standard of cinema, and yet they're mostly average. A Clockwork Orange is not nearly as good as some will claim. It was overflowing with superfluous detail, characters, and nudity that not only detracted from the film, but also hurt the pacing. Parts of it were cringe worthy. He also has a tendency to make the characters FAR less complex than their literary counterparts. He's a great technical director, a perfectionist, and he's great at lining up a shot. The man knows how to frame a movie. Unfortunately none of this matters when he's producing a work that is more narratively shallow than the source material. If you haven't read the books in question then I don't know what to say.
The best film I've seen by him was 2001 a Space Odyssey. I haven't read the book in question, so I can't judge whether it was a great adaptation. It was a good movie. Maybe even a great one. That was the exception though.
From what I've read, Clarke's Odyssey novel was spun from his and Kubrick's script, and published at around the time of 2001's release. So it's not exactly an adaptation, but rather, the book is a novelization of the script that became the movie more or less at the same time. I also hear that the book is much clearer and less vague around stuff, but I wouldn't know.
Regarding the adaptation thing, I find it's the same case with Hitchcock - he was more interested in what he could do with a book than with the book's "greatness" on its own. Red Alert is your average best-selling commie thriller, outdated 10 years into its publication. Gustav Hasford's "The Short-Timers", which provided the source for Full Metal Jacket, and which I've read, is also a pretty mediocre novel. The film takes a massive downturn halfway through, but I still find it better than the book. The "bathroom scene" is so much more haunting in the film. The book is so... matter of fact.
The most criticism I've heard regarding Kubrick was that he was cold and wasn't much in touch with the human element in his movies (i.e. Jack Torrance is an asshole whose true evil is just waiting to be untapped, as opposed to being "possessed" by an outer presence). To that I can only recommend they watch Paths of Glory, which is probably his most passionate and humane film. He may not be very "viewer-friendly" on a number of counts, but I don't think it's because he wasn't able to - that's just not what he was going for most of the time.
