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Mortdecai opens on Friday, January 23. Evidence—the absence of a preview screening, the fact that Johnny Depp is the star—indicates that David Koepp's film is unlikely to do justice to Kyril Bonfiglioli's brilliant P. G. Wodehouse–meets–Elmore Leonard novels, from which it is adapted. But there's always hope. Or maybe there never is. Regardless, some film adaptations wind up being better than the novels that inspired them. Just like some lists are better than full articles, don't you find?

The Color Purple: The poetry entirely missing in the epistolary novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker is found in Steven Spielberg's masterful adaptation, which stars Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, and Oprah Winfrey. In fact, it's fair to place the film in the canon of serious black cinema—up there with To Sleep with Anger and Daughters of the Dust. The novel cannot be compared with the great works of black American literature—Another Country, Song of Solomon, and so on. Walker writes with hands not made of flesh and bone (that's James Baldwin) but of solid rock. Nietzsche once described the bite of conscience as a dog biting into a stone. One can imagine a dog biting Alice Walker's fingers and getting nowhere. In the movie, her moral heaviness is gently lifted, and what we see and feel is a beautiful and bluesy pastoral. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

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