Becky Flade, Author

Some time ago I ran post titled Movie Adaptations: It was the Best of Times listing my favorite adaptations with the promise of the companion piece. I submit for your enjoyment It was the Worst of Times We all know the movie never does the book any justice. Here are the ones I think sucked big time: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,  do I need to explain WHY this one made the cut?  Ender's Game ; Flowers in the Attic  - no. Just no. Hell no; and  The Last Airbender.  Okay, yeah, I know Nickelodeon's Avatar was a cartoon and not a book. But flying hog monkeys it was deep, an excellent display of storytelling, and the live action movie was crap.  Nearly any feature film length adaptation of a Stephen King horror novel (not the adaptations of his dramatic short stories I praised in Best), to be fair, I haven't seen nor will I see the new It cause, ya know, clowns; and The Dark Tower would've been a fun/exciting movie if I hadn't read th...

I'm not just a compulsive reader, I'm a fan of the screen both big and small. And let's face it - Hollywood starting running out of original ideas years ago. I'd rant about the gross plagiarism running rampant in the movie industry right now but will save my disgust over the current influx of remakes for another day. What does Hollywood do best? It adapts bestselling books into bestselling movies, of course. And today I'm talking about my favorites. Even the well done adaptations leave something to be desired; movies just cannot recreate the emotional bond a reader develops with the characters in a book. But these few, in my opinion, came damn close:   The Princess Bride movie pulls dialogue directly from the book by William Goldman. But some stuff had to go for time: the chapters detailing the back stories of Inigo and Fezzik; along with the Zoo of Death (their rescue of the Dread Pirate Roberts involved more daring do than simply knocking the ...

I call bullshit. First, you see Jack & his friend win tickets at a poker game minutes before the Titanic launches. You see him board the ship, etc. If he was a figment of Rose’s imagination or a symptom of a psychotic break, we wouldn’t have seen him – on screen – until his first interaction with Rose when he convinces her not to kill herself. Further, no one else would address him in the remainder of the film, make eye contact, have a conversation like his private conversation with Molly Brown regarding his tux size, or any of a number of interactions between Jack and other persons on board the ship: Cal, Cal’s majordomo, the ship’s porter, and on. ♪ My heart will go on… sorry I digress. As I was saying, bullshit called. The only recent movie theory to annoy me more is the one claiming Sandy from Grease was dead or dying the whole time!  I mean come on. Really?   I figured out more than twenty years ago that the car flying off into the clouds while Sandy waved g...