I’ve come to the conclusion that the outside is overrated. There, I said it. I know it’s June and I know summer is just getting started, but why spend your days sweating it out in the humid, hazy outdoors when you can be inside with the A/C pumping? I’m a homebody, so maybe that’s what’s underlying my opinion here.
The Mitchum version of The Big Sleep is on Prime if you can abide watching a film directed by Death Wish’s Michael Winner. I prefer the book, myself (pace @GeneralSternwood).
I totally agree with that verdict about the 1946 version too.
Speaking as a character in the movie, I can only say that while it has some great lines, Bogie and Bacall, and a superbly acted scene in an overheated greenhouse, from a narrative standpoint it is an incoherent mess. Far better to read Chandler’s spare, jaded, and atmospheric prose, especially at a point in the pandemic where we are realizing that the most dangerous virus seems to be ourselves.
“Master and Commander” was a great movie (Peter Weir was robbed), but it was a conglomeration of a couple of Patrick O’Brien’s 20 novels about Aubrey/Maturin.
These books, in my opinion, are some of the best books written. The whole series is truly magnificent. The book is definitely better.
The Lord of the Rings: the books, no contest.
Others’ MMV, but here’s my quick take: Peter Jackson ruins the key moment in the first book and arguably in the entire trilogy (where Frodo says into the silence that he will take the Ring, though he doesn’t know the way), and completely skips past the key moment of the second book (Gandalf’s confrontation with Saruman at Isengard). And one of the key moments in the last book - where Gandalf awaits the King of the Nazgul at the gate of Minas Tirith - makes no sense because some of Sauron’s monsters at the siege were big enough to step right over the city’s walls the way you or I would step over a curb.
If you blow that many key moments, getting the rest right doesn’t save you.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: the book is better, but the movie comes closer than I’d have expected.
Slaughterhouse Five: the movie.
Dune: neither one. Doon, the Harvard Lampoon parody, has them both beat. The overseriousness of Dune was just begging to be parodied, and Doon comes through.
Directed by John Huston: The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
Three plus Sci-Fi’s:
Films:
Solaris–Lem/Tarkovsky (The Stalker and The Mirror are great too)
Fahrenheit (451)–Bradburry/Truffault
Amazon Prime:
The Man in the High Castle–Dick
Campion
The famous story about Huston has it that he handed a copy of The Maltese Falcon to a studio secretary with the instruction to type it up in screenplay format: very basic descriptions of settings and movement, with full dialogue. He would then go through it and edit it into a final draft. But Hal Wallis saw the typescript and told Huston–to his delight–to shoot that.
From what I know of both men, it sounds right.
Only regret is that the Flitcraft story was cut. I would have loved hearing Bogart deliver it.
There’s a 1945 version which was recut and reshot to make the better known version. It makes more sense, but it’s a lot less fun.
Both are available on recent DVD’s.