In the past, when a film was released based on the great success of the novel from which it started, the smart guys would come out of theaters crying out loud for the loss of charm of the movie in front of the book. That later, because during the exhibition they did not stop with their warnings about what was going to happen. What is now called a spoiler was always a full-fledged ballplayer.
What happens is that currently between streaming platforms, series more to use and movies, it is not easy to cope with so much novel adaptation to the world of screens. And the matter even loses charm due to overexposure. At least the smartass who have read the books previously are left with hardly any options, except to give the turra to their long-suffering brothers-in-law when they get ready to watch a movie on the channel on duty ...
Maybe that's why my opinion about it the best books made movies be a little affected by that glorious time of communion between paper and celluloid extended until the turn of the millennium even. In addition, in the case of a personal blog, you could not expect anything other than to make an opinion explicit. So here we go, put another way:
The 10 best films based on novels
The perfume
AVAILABLE ON ANY OF THESE PLATFORMS:I had to read this masterpiece of Patrick Süskind during the first courses of the institute. And it was one of those novels that brought me closer to literature with different eyes. Because you can enjoy a more profound literature, the most opportune realism in maturity, the existentialist, the sobriety of certain authors and the most transcendent approaches in substance and beautiful in form. But as a kid, above all, you want to read with a fancy tinge.
The much later viewing of the film was that discovery at the same level as youth reading. A fascinating result in which that ideal of aroma as essence seems to flow from the screen, with its ecstatic aroma or its stench capable of nausea.
Rediscovering the world under the nose of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille seems essential to understand the balance between good and evil in our instincts. Searching for essences with his privileged nose, the unfortunate and disowned Grenouille feels capable of synthesizing with his alchemy the fascinating aroma of God himself. He dreams that one day, those who ignore him today will end up prostrate before him.
The price to pay for finding the irresistible essence of the Creator, which resides in each beautiful woman, in their wombs where life germinates, can be more or less expensive, depending on the final effect of the aroma achieved ...
Sleepers
AVAILABLE ON ANY OF THESE PLATFORMS:I was freaked out by this movie because it seemed that any of us could have been exposed to that tragic turning point that changes everything in life. Because you are a child and you do not weigh the consequences. One lives childhood as if there were no beyond with that magical way of exploiting the present. The author of the novel, Lorenzo CarcaterraHe could not even remotely imagine the push that the film had on his writing profession when his second novel was rediscovered.
It is true that some of the protagonists in the film have that special gift, that ability to immortalize a simple gesture in our retina. From Brad Pitt to Kevin Bacon or De Niro when he was still De Niro. And although reading is more plot than characters, it is more interpretation than facts, the film complements the book with greater introspection in the characters, in the contrasts, in that fateful point of no return that is sometimes chance turned fatal.
One trigger leads to another. The darkest and narrowest corridors of perdition are a labyrinth in which the soul is easily lost. At best it remains mutilated for life, at worst you end up selling it to bear the pain ...
Cadena perpetua
AVAILABLE ON ANY OF THESE PLATFORMS:Argumentally, the film is 10, surpassing even the short novel from which everything starts. The volume of the four seasons, a set that Stephen King it was taken off the fly as a complementary work to its narrative evolution, it contains for each season an introspection on fears from different sources. It is not a horror narrative but an approach to fear as a motor, despite everything. The original novel was called "Spring, Eternal Hope" or "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank's Redemption«
Feelings of frustration due to the punishment imputed without guilt, the hope for a later revenge, the plot that advances with more and more reasons to yearn for that explosive ending that finally ends up exploding us in a plane of indescribable literary joy ...
And then it turns out that the movie Perpetual Chain is made, and it happens that as an exception to the rule that movie manages to catch up with the novel or even surpass it ...
A story told by a fascinating character like Red. From the future of the events related to the confinement of Andy Dufresne for the murder of his wife, we are getting to know this unforgettable character whose time in prison seems the emblem of injustice, of the passion for freedom, of the need for revenge, of that redemption that the title announces and that addresses everything.
A great little masterpiece that fades, as I say, in that literary production overflowing with ingenuity, sometimes from the fantastic, sometimes from the terror, also even from the existential without more, but always with the mystery, a mystery that analyzes the interstices of the human soul exposed to all its limits and its own edges ...
blade runner
AVAILABLE ON ANY OF THESE PLATFORMS:The good of Philip K. Dick It may have become the Nostradamus of the century when, in 2021, we find a world as dark as the one he described in his story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" for that same 2021.
Although the film takes off from this story, the thing takes different directions in one and another plot. And it is that scripting Dick must be quite difficult. His metaphysical literature within the most absolute fiction misplaces anyone. Speaking of «locating» we only have to go into his novel «Ubik»To discover how fantastic and at the same time raucous this genius of the cifi is.
In the year 2021 the world war has exterminated millions of people. Survivors covet any living creature, and those who can't afford to pay for them are forced to acquire incredibly realistic replicas. Companies even manufacture human beings. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter whose job it is to find rogue androids and remove them, but the task will not be so easy when he has to face the new Nexus-6 models, practically indistinguishable from humans.
Mystic River,
AVAILABLE ON ANY OF THESE PLATFORMS:Dennis Lehane is a disconcerting writer, determined to delve into the personality of his characters to strip them from the inside out, to offer them as ecce homos of our time. Guilt, frustrations, dreams, contradictions, desires and a stubborn aroma of immortality only achievable, unfortunately for its characters, in the worst memories.
In the movie Sean Penn or Tim Robbins perfectly transmit that overload of such human sensations taken to the maximum exponent. There are trips that never have a return ticket. The effort to row upstream of the course of life precipitates an unsuspected punishment of pending issues looming like new shadows.
That day in 1975, when a car pulls up next to them, Dave Boyle, Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are too young to imagine that their destiny is going to change irretrievably. Two men pretending to be police force Dave into the vehicle on the pretext of taking him home. The baby will appear four days later, but it will never be known what happened during that time.
Twenty-five years later, Sean works as a homicide detective, Jimmy is an ex-con who runs a small business, and Dave is trying to save his marriage while keeping his demons at bay, which drive him to do horrible things. When Jimmy's daughter Katie is horribly murdered, echoes of Dave's abduction return to their lives.
The green Mile
AVAILABLE ON ANY OF THESE PLATFORMS:There are already two novels by Stephen King. And there is certainly so much to choose from with the genius of Maine ... One of those stories that undo the stereotype of the author of horrors hung like a sanbenito despite everything for King. Tom Hanks in the movie beats the protagonist of the story in the novel by a landslide. Although it is true that the film gave a more fantastic touch with a touch of a parable about good and evil that perhaps does not appear so much in the novel.
That most sinister side of death row is parked in the film to give life to the essences, appearances and paradoxes that so often expose the human being as condemnation and guilt in a blurry, confused way, driven by the evil that inhabits other congeners ...
October 1932, Cold Mountain Penitentiary. Those sentenced to death await the moment to be led to the electric chair. The heinous crimes they have committed make them the bait of a legal system that feeds on a cycle of madness, death and revenge.
Fight club
AVAILABLE ON ANY OF THESE PLATFORMS:The poor gray office guy, crushed by a management that only seeks bomb-proof productivity from him. The feeling of depersonalization and satiety, job alienation. All this in a wonderful cocktail capable of shaping a story in which disappointment and frustration unleash a bipolar plot of good old Edward Norton mutating into that Brad Pitt capable of materializing all his desires for blood and violence.
Chuck Palahniuk he continues to delight us with irreverent novels, with wild sides of a world that tames us, half social necessity half inertia that is perfectly suited to the soul-chewing machine ...
An unusual therapy for stockbrokers, financiers and any other human beasts who wasted their lives between desks, files, job layoffs, emotional separations or insurmountable losses.
Fight club meetings are not dedicated to brainstorming…, as the name suggests, they go there to smash their faces with other guys like you, frustrated souls who gather hatred for their gray lives and They face the struggle for survival with a clenched fist and dog face.
But the fight club really was born in a more random way, in a simple fight between the protagonist and the flamboyant Tyler Durden, just at the moment in which the desperation of the protagonist has driven him through therapies, sleepless nights, stormy relationships and a whole sum of circumstances that have him on the verge of insanity.
And so a therapy is spreading to face self-destruction from self-destruction itself. Each therapy talks about facing the problem that cancels you and they do the maximum in the club, establishing their mythical eight rules that give them reasons to continue living around hatred, fear or whatever it is that has become the engine of the ominous life of each one ...
The Name of the Rose
AVAILABLE ON ANY OF THESE PLATFORMS:Umberto Eco Umberto Eco was a lot. And although in later works such as "Foucault's Pendulum" he ended up "esbarrando" (said in Aragonese fable), it must be understood that he was, after all, a philosopher. His novel "The Name of the Rose" could not be constructed in a less sophisticated and at the same time so fascinating way, which ended up reaching the cinema with the same intensity. Probably because the director on duty was not squeamish and drew a dark and dirty scenery like that world ...
Then came the part of maximum tension, of suggestion, of deduction. It is a novel that has just the right point of sophistication, one that makes the reader feel intelligent in understanding and unraveling the case, a tricky case that affects a community of clergy in which many of them are gradually succumbing to a serious condition ...
Surely you remember a lot from the book or the movie: the library, the occult, false morality, punishment, guilt, death, and some blued tongues as the only common mark in all the deaths that follow one another ...
The silence of the lambs
AVAILABLE ON ANY OF THESE PLATFORMS:The idea of ​​suspense in this novel took on a dimension between the psychic, terror and the paranormal. And is that the friend Lecter was capable of making us believe in almost anything. The movie was pretty good, but being a bit that old ballplayer who went to the movies to disenchant people, the book conveys much more.
And it is that in literature, understood as the creation of an author and recreation of a reader, that the image is worth a thousand words is left with feet of clay. Because the thing is more about imagination than direct visualization. Even more so in a novel of great psychological depth such as this one. To name Clarice Starling is to evoke the role of Jodie Foster turned FBI psychiatrist.
And yet the relationship between his colleague, in a criminal version, and Clarice herself becomes much more fertile in the novel. It is in this story where the unequal combat between the mind of the murderer and that of the doctor facing evil in all its depth is best developed, from the generalized conception of psychopathy to the introspection in the atavistic fears of our species with which Hannibal seems to play.
The case advances in the novel with the same and intense inertia as the strange relationship between the destructive and the morbid, from a doctor and a particular patient to probe even the blackest of the well.
The Lord of the Rings
AVAILABLE ON ANY OF THESE PLATFORMS:It happens to me quite often that remote or epic fantasy movies invite me into a comforting sleep. But in the case of the great work of Tolkien the emotion got the better of me. That huge series whose readings he shared with an old friend during evenings that should have been study, finally reached the big screen. The fidelity, the good script, the painstaking effort to adjust to the world created by Tolkien made the film more than just a worthy translation to the image.
Not because it is too hackneyed or because it is commercially overexploited, this novel detracts from its essence. The discovery of this book in my young years supposed a special encounter with friends embarked on the same reading. The most fascinating thing about reading Tolkien may be that level of rapport that can occur with other readers.
But come on, reading The Lord of the Rings, even for free, becomes one of those trips that no electronic game or 3D magic can match. We are in the Third Age of Middle Earth. The antecedents of this novel are The Hobbit and indirectly The Silmarillion. But the reading of the novel can be independent.
We soon discover the grim power of the Dark Lord of Mordor, with whose ring he hopes to project evil beyond his realm. The inhabitants of the middle earth conspire so that the Dark Lord does not manage to seize all the power. To do this they must destroy the ring.
On a riveting journey, an adventure that appeals to the will for good, elves, hobbits, humans and dwarves head to the domains of the dark realm to eliminate the ring and its growing hold over all of Middle-earth. It is about the inexhaustible theme of good and evil, of David against Goliath, of the people against tyrannical power. A giant allegory that brings literary brilliance in form and substance.
