What's the best movie ever made from a book? The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. convened a panel of experts and came up with 50, in no particular order. It includes my favorite, the only movie I've seen after reading the book that I thought did the book justice and was entertaining on its own terms -- "To Kill a Mockingbird." But it also includes the one that most disappointed me -- "Catch 22." That's one of my favorite books of all time, and I'd already gone through it twice when I saw the movie. I could barely follow it and thought I would have been completely lost if I hadn't read the book first. Maybe now that I've read it five times, I ought to go back and give the movie another chance. Couldn't hurt. I hated "Fargo" the first time I saw it, but it grew on me with subsequent viewings, and now it's one of my favorite movies.
Books and movies are such different art forms that it's amazing any movie adaption ever works. Books have to spend pages and pages exploring a character's inner motivations or explaining the chronological narrative. Movies have to project the mood or underscore the context of something in a few seconds and then move on.
