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A non-exhaustive list of books that no one can seem to visually adapt correctly¹:
+ Dracula. A zillion different movies and TV shows and not ONE of them is a faithful adaption. I deserve Jonathan and his wife Mina and her girlfriend Lucy and Lucy's harem and their Dutch thesis advisor. I deserve paprika and Dracula crawling down the wall like a lizard and all of the nuns giving Jonathan good grades. It does not seem like it would be difficult to do this, and yet it has never once happened.
+ Any Anne book besides Anne of Green Gables. Literally what are the Sullivan sequels? It is so weird that the first sequel decided to adapt Windy Poplars (kind of--where is Little Elizabeth????), objectively one of the worst Anne books, and give her a random love interest. And then the second one just made up the story entirely! It has nothing to do with anything and Gilbert did not fight in WWI, his sons did!!!
And then Anne with an E just started making shit up, which is fine, except it's not what I wanted! Imagine that cast actually doing the canonical story!
The entire Maud Squad is sitting over here begging for a faithful Anne of the Island adaptation and it will never happen. At the very least, someone should give us a good adaptation of Rilla--you'd think that someone up in the Great White North would be interested in adapting the first (and for a long time only) book about the Canadian home front experience during WWI.
+ Mansfield Park. I just haven't ever seen one where I went, "Yes, this gets the book." (Which reminds me: I need to reread this one. It's been years and years.)
+ Wuthering Heights. I suspect this book is unadaptable², I really do. Frankly, I kind of wish people would stop trying to adapt it because I always end up more frustrated than anything.
+ Faulkner. Just...all of it. Stop trying to adapt Faulkner. It's impossible.
Feel free to add on!
¹ By this I mean that there have been at least two attempts to adapt it for either film or television.
² The framing story is so important, but it would be so hard to do it! This is one of those books where perspective is everything.
+ Dracula. A zillion different movies and TV shows and not ONE of them is a faithful adaption. I deserve Jonathan and his wife Mina and her girlfriend Lucy and Lucy's harem and their Dutch thesis advisor. I deserve paprika and Dracula crawling down the wall like a lizard and all of the nuns giving Jonathan good grades. It does not seem like it would be difficult to do this, and yet it has never once happened.
+ Any Anne book besides Anne of Green Gables. Literally what are the Sullivan sequels? It is so weird that the first sequel decided to adapt Windy Poplars (kind of--where is Little Elizabeth????), objectively one of the worst Anne books, and give her a random love interest. And then the second one just made up the story entirely! It has nothing to do with anything and Gilbert did not fight in WWI, his sons did!!!
And then Anne with an E just started making shit up, which is fine, except it's not what I wanted! Imagine that cast actually doing the canonical story!
The entire Maud Squad is sitting over here begging for a faithful Anne of the Island adaptation and it will never happen. At the very least, someone should give us a good adaptation of Rilla--you'd think that someone up in the Great White North would be interested in adapting the first (and for a long time only) book about the Canadian home front experience during WWI.
+ Mansfield Park. I just haven't ever seen one where I went, "Yes, this gets the book." (Which reminds me: I need to reread this one. It's been years and years.)
+ Wuthering Heights. I suspect this book is unadaptable², I really do. Frankly, I kind of wish people would stop trying to adapt it because I always end up more frustrated than anything.
+ Faulkner. Just...all of it. Stop trying to adapt Faulkner. It's impossible.
Feel free to add on!
¹ By this I mean that there have been at least two attempts to adapt it for either film or television.
² The framing story is so important, but it would be so hard to do it! This is one of those books where perspective is everything.
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In particular, I've always found it interesting that Fanny and Mary are both charity cases (and family rejects) in different ways, though Mary has money, but the parallels between them fall apart in adaptation. The basic structure that makes them such glaring foils for each other (underscored by Fanny's antipathy-attraction towards Mary, since Mary is probably the most complex and structurally tragic of any of the female rival-figures in Austen) fails if they're just not that different.
And I'm honestly just sort of baffled by the apparent difficulty of recognizable LM Montgomery. One of the benefits of a shift to a visual medium is that narrative or descriptive passages that feel inappropriate to 2024 can quite naturally not show up in a cinematic adaptation, and dialogue shifted where necessary, since shifts to dialogue always need to happen regardless. (I also feel this way about Tolkien's painfully colonialist descriptions of his few heroic dark-skinned characters—you can still allow those characters to exist in a meaningful way, and drop the awful descriptions that would be weird and forced to include in cinematic form anyway). My favorite Montgomery books were the Emily books and A Tangled Web (the latter of which would probably benefit from a TV show rather than trying to pack all the drama into a feature film, lol), and it's difficult to see an industry that can't handle Anne doing right by either.