Happy Tuesday everyone! Welcome to my favorite blogging day of the week!

Kicking things off with Teaser Tuesday, hosted by MizB at “Should Be Reading.” Here’s how to play:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

He was suddenly so tired that he was tempted to sink back into his armchair and sleep there, but instead he got to his feet and followed Ron upstairs. His restless night was punctuated once more by dreams of long corridors and locked doors, and he awoke the next day with his scar prickling again.

– Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling

Yes, I’m still on my Harry Potter kick. I haven’t had much time to read anything else. Bibliophiles Anonymous just started our Harry Potter-palooza this past weekend, so please come check it out! We’re having fun with it.

Next up is Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by “The Broke and the Bookish.” This week we’re talking about book-to-movie adaptations. The good ones, and the not-so-good ones. Now, I understand that it is incredibly hard turning a book into a movie, especially if it is a large book. Something always has to be cut. However, there are good ways to do it and bad ways to do it.

Top Ten Best/Worst Movie Adaptations

The Good

1. The Lord of the Rings trilogy – Yes, I’m talking about the Peter Jackson versions. I love these movies so much. They took a really difficult and beloved book series and made it into something that was magical. Quite simply, we were in Middle Earth. I wanted to single out one movie out of the three, but they were all so well done, I couldn’t choose.

2. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – I had to have one of the Harry Potter movies on here, and it was a really hard choice. I know a lot of people dismiss the early Chris Columbus directed Harry Potter films as being a bit more childish, and to be honest, I also enjoyed the darker feel of the later films, but this first film was my introduction to Harry Potter as a whole. I think it stayed very true to the book and completely captured what it felt like to enter the wizarding world for the first time.

3. The Perks of Being a Wallflower – I loved this movie so much. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me feel the same way I felt when I read the book. Part of it, I’m sure, was having the author, Stephen Chbosky, write the screen play. The cast was perfect as well.

4. The Hunger Games – Again, perfect casting and an author who was closely involved with the making of the film, in this case as producer. I thought the movie fully captured the feeling of the book. I especially liked the contrast between the gritty, downtrodden people of District 12 and the ridiculously overblown couture of the Capitol.

5. The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – I loved this movie so much when it came out! The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was a favorite of mine growing up and I thought they captured that sense of childlike wonder perfectly. I got a little shiver up my spine the first time Lucy saw the Lamppost.

The Bad

6. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – Okay, as much as I loved this book, the movie was not good. Not good at all. I know things had to be left out, but the wrong things were cut, making the movie very difficult to follow, and in places, not make any sense. I was particularly upset that the explanation about who the Marauders were was completely left out, and don’t even get me started with the in-continuity of the patronus charm at the end.

7. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – It’s funny how in a movie franchise they will get some movies right, and some movies completely wrong. While I did enjoy this movie, it only bears a passing resemblance to the book. They threw in a whole bunch of subplots (Lucy being jealous of her older sister, Edmund wanting to be better than his older brother) that weren’t in the book at all and didn’t really add much to the story. Also – big water serpent/dragon/thingy? What?

8. The DaVinci Code – I wanted this movie to be good, I really did. I loved the book. But I have to say, as much as I like Tom Hanks (and who doesn’t), he wasn’t Robert Langdon to me. The story was cut down so badly, it made the ending seem really obvious and kind of ridiculous. Which is not how a Dan Brown book should be read.

9. Twilight – I will confess that I haven’t seen this movie all the way through, and haven’t seen any of the other Twilight films. Now, I am not a Twilight hater. I’ve read all the books and enjoyed them, although I’m not a huge fan. But the movie took what little character development the books had and basically did nothing with it. I’ve also heard that there was a complete character assassination done on Jacob in the later films, which was not cool.

10. The Golden Compass – Let’s put aside the fact that they LEFT OUT THE LAST THIRD OF THE BOOK. It’s unfortunate, because I think they had a real opportunity to do something great here. The casting was good, the CGI was good, I liked the visuals. But this went above and beyond cutting out the wrong things. The movie basically went nowhere. The ending of the book had such a strong impact, seeing it left out was just sad.

Don’t forget to vote on the main character and the opening setting for the new story that I will be writing! Voting closes on Friday and the first excerpt will be posted on Monday. The post to vote can be found here (or just click back to yesterday’s post). 🙂

Categories: Teaser Tuesday, Top Ten Tuesdays

Tags: books, teaser tuesday, top ten tuesday