Pride and Prejudice is 360 degrees of boring. How one manages to sit through that from beginning to end...well, I have respect for them.

And, oh yeah, Passage To India just happens to be totally one of the five best flicks of the last quarter-century. (The Kingdom I & II, My Life As A Dog, and Yi Yi would be three of the others...not sure about the fourth. Brazil, probably?)

I feel sorry for all you Keira haters. She's not the prettiest person ever, but she has an awesome face for the movies, and she's perfect for Cecelia in Atonement.

For example: I'm about half-way through "The Children Of Men", and although I enjoyed the film version, clearly it's NOTHING like the book, and I probably would have been greatly disappointed had I read it before seeing the adaptation.

Granted, they're completely different mediums, but it seems the degree to which film adaptations diverge from, or in many cases, completely disregard, key elements from the literary version should be of some concern, since presumably many people go explicitly to see the story with which they're already familiar. However, the studios seem less interested in fidelity to the source, than they are (apparently) in capitalizing on the source to get readers' butts into the seats; how they respond after they've purchased the ticket would appear to be practically irrelevent.

Thanks! Saw that at the Neptune many years ago. How's the print, do you know?

Trivia: a shot of the marquee from the Neptune's weeklong run appears in the opening credits to Singles.

Apropos: in his Criterion commentary, Gilliam says that while it's his interpretation of 1984, he's never read the novel.

True story: I detest Fight Club like none other.

@14: Fair enough, but despite his rhetorical dedication to the individual artist, Eliot is really talking about the influence of new literary movements on the established canon. He's paying himself a not-so-subtle compliment, claiming that modernism has diminished the reputation of romanticism etc. In any case, clearly new versions of a work of literature (mostly good or at least compelling ones) can inflect the original; I just don't think a robust original can be completely destroyed by its descendants.

@11: That example is no good. Huge populations are obsessed with the actual text of the Bible, and this will persist long after people quit watching DeMille (a process that has already started).

One is borne of words that swirl around the reader's brain conjuring up all sorts of imaginary images. The other is story-telling given to you visually through the eyes of a director and cinematographer where characters are personified by actors.

It's almost like eating butter pecan ice cream and bitching about it not tasting like a hot fudge sundae.

That being said, there will always be those who will never believe a movie can or will ever do justice to a book. Don't believe their self serving prose, no matter how right they think they are because in the end it's fiction, get it???

Bravo to those who will always lend their artistic vision to a story and stick to their guns for bringing it to the fore. Pride was a fantastic and masterful piece of film making by Joe Wright and it was HIS vision that brought many to the world of Jane Austen...I bet not one critic or naysayer of that film has had the artistic vision to do something like that.

Joe Wright for your consideration!!!;-)

So pretty much you have to treat them as two separate stories.