Movies and Books

Movie watching is in full swing as we watched Meet Me in St Louis (still love that Trolley song), Wait Until Dark (terrifyingly good) and A Mighty Wind (hilariously, embarassingly awful). Tonight it's The Maltese Falcon and Singing in the Rain. And tomorrow night it's Fahrenheit 9/11, though that will be too new to make the list.

In looking at my top 100 movies, I realized that I often avoided movies made from books that I loved. In some cases, I saw the movie first, so I fell in love with it as a movie. This goes for The Shining, The Princess Bride and Jaws. In the case of Bridget Jones' Diary, I thought that the book was obsessive and annoying, but as a movie, it was brilliantly played. And a few I haven't read (imagine that!) like The Wizard of Oz and About a Boy. Here and there both the book and the movie are lovely in their own right - Out of Africa, The English Patient, Gone With the Wind, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Out of 100 movies I consider my favorites, only 18 were adapted from books and 2 from short stories. I have no idea where I am going with this, but it is an interesting observation. I will be curious to see how many other people included movies adapted from books.