Adaptation

So the Guardian list of best 50 book-to-movie adaptations (as well as the subsequent blogosphere parsing of the list) has finally filtered through my brain, helped along by a viewing of The Chronicles of Narnia this weekend. Let me start by saying that I'm going to have to give the movie a thumbs-down, seeing how it's getting sourer and sourer in my memory as time goes on. It's not that it was bad, exactly, and I'm certainly not one to turn up my nose at CGI-heavy fantasy epics. Actually, for me (and is this blasphemy?) I think the problem lies in the source material. Y'all, those books just aren't that good! And it's not even having a problem with the whole Christian allegory thing, or the whole "always winter and never Christmas thing," which I had actually forgotten about. It's that those kids are such a bunch of boring prigs, except for Edmund, who experiences a brief period of de-prigification when betraying them to the White Witch and then quickly re-prigifies. (And they all forgive him so quickly--yet when Susan wants to wear pantyhose in a later volume, she's dead to them?) The movie doesn't help matters, certainly, by tightening up the progress of the plot; as a viewer, I simply did not care if Narnia was destroyed because nobody took the time to set up what was interesting or good or valuable about it. This supposed country is inside a wardrobe, and we're supposed to believe that within seconds the Pevensies would be all "We must give our lives to rescue the creepy talking animals that we've met five seconds ago with the help of an even creepier lion that talks like Liam Neeson?" Maybe it's because I coupled the Narnia movie with an episode of the Wire, but I'm inclined to believe even six-year-olds have more self-preservation instinct than that.
Obviously, I won't be including this movie on my list of great adaptations. In fact I started thinking about what my list would be like, and intially only came up with Howl's Moving Castle, which I partly think is great because it is nothing at all like the source material, and partly because it's Miyazaki, who currently can do no wrong for me. Then I got sidetracked thinking about a possible course on film adaptions that wildly diverged from their original nineteenth-century novel source. This yielded up the now-somewhat tired pairing of Emma and Clueless, and the possibly inappropriate for a Midwest campus duo of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Fight Club. (Yes, I know that Fight Club is really adapted from Fight Club.) Then I remembered the odd Western The Claim that I saw riding on a bus from Caracas to Barquisimeto, which I really didn't understand because it might have been dubbed in Spanish, I might have been hungover and the country might have been in the throes of a failed coup attempt at the time (I guess that's another story), but isn't that based on the Mayor of Casterbridge? And there my ideas ran out.

Which means, I guess all this post ends up saying is, I'm not very good at coming up with best-of lists. But I sure do love to watch movies. Also, I'd like to qualify my dislike of C.S. Lewis by saying that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader's creepiness still haunts my memory twenty years after my last reading of it, and I guess that's a good thing.