Perfume. The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind.
Surprisingly, I liked the film more than the book. That's a first. Ben Whishaw was able to convey the incredible talent of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille - the power of smell - in a convincing and beautiful way I didn't think anyone capable of. The whole film is beautifully made.
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting is the first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh. It is written in the form of short chapters narrated in the first person by various residents of Leith, Edinburgh who either use heroin, are friends of the core group of heroin users, or engage in destructive activities that are implicitly portrayed as addictions that serve the same function as heroin addiction. The novel is set in the mid to late 1980s.
The novel has since achieved a cult status, added to by the global success of the film based on it, Trainspotting (1996), directed by Danny Boyle.[1] Welsh later wrote a sequel, Porno, in 2002. Skagboys, a novella that will serve as a prequel, was expected for publication in 2009.
Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby, Jr.
Requiem for a Dream is a 1978 novel by Hubert Selby, Jr., that concerns four New York individuals whose lives spiral out of control as they succumb to their addictions. It's written without quotation marks or apostrophes, and some of the characters have heavy accents.
This story follows the lives of four people: Harry, Marion, Tyrone, and Sara. Harry and Marion are in love and Tyrone is their friend. Sara is Harry’s lonely, widowed mother. They are all searching for the key to their dreams, and in the process, they get flung into a devastating life of addiction. Sara’s dream is to be on television, and when a phone call from a television casting company gets her hopes up, she spends the next months of her life binging on diet pills to lose weight. She becomes delirious and ends up in the hospital, but it only gets worse from there. Harry, Marion and Tyrone decide that they want to make money by buying some uncut heroin and selling it.
The novel was later adapted into the critically-acclaimed film of the same name.
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
The book follows the experiences of an unnamed protagonist struggling with insomnia. Inspired by his doctor's exasperated remark that insomnia is not suffering, he finds relief by impersonating a seriously ill person in several support groups. An encounter with a fellow "tourist" Marla drives him back into insomnia until he meets a mysterious man named Tyler Durden and establishes an underground fighting club as radical psychotherapy.[1]
In 1999, director David Fincher adapted the novel into a film of the same name, which received positive critical response and acquired a cult following despite lower than expected box-office results.The film's notoriety heightened the profile of the novel and that of its author. This feature film was rated "R" by the America Film Association for disturbing images, language, violence and alcohol references.
Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
And I don't mean that eyerape with Robert Downey Jr. Dear God that movie is an embarrassment. I'm talking about the Russian adaptations with Vasily Livanov as Holmes (universally acknowledged as the best on-screen Holmes) and Vitaly Solomin as Watson.
From Wiki:
Between 1979 and 1986, Soviet television produced a series of five films at the Lenfilm movie studio, split into eleven episodes, starring Vasily Livanov as Sherlock Holmes and Vitaly Solomin as Dr. Watson. Later, a cinematic adaptation was made based on the 1986 episodes. This film was called The Twentieth Century Approaches. The series ran as follows:
1979 Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson
1st episode: "Acquaintance" (based on A Study in Scarlet and The Adventure of the Speckled Band).
2nd episode: "Bloody Inscription" (based on A Study in Scarlet, with a scene from The Sign of the Four at the beginning).
1980 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson
1st episode: "The Master-Blackmailer" (based on The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton)
2nd episode: "Deadly Fight" (based on The Adventure of the Final Problem)
3rd episode: "Hunt for the Tiger" (based on The Adventure of the Empty House)
1981 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: The Hound of the Baskervilles. Two episodes based on The Hound of the Baskervilles.
1983 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: The Treasures of Agra. Two episodes based on The Sign of the Four and A Scandal in Bohemia.
1986 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: The Twentieth Century Approaches. Two episodes based on The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb, The Adventure of the Second Stain, His Last Bow and The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Once again, I'm talking about the Soviet adaptation. This one will be hard for foreigners to digest because it's a musical. However, it's stay s very true to the original story, and, damnit, the Soviet Union had some amazing actors! I grew up watching the film, and it's hard for me to imagine any other adaptation work quite as well.
The film starred Mikhail Boyarsky as d'Artagnan, Veniamin Smekhov as Athos, Igor Starygin as Aramis, Valentin Smirnitsky as Porthos, Margarita Terekhova as Milady de Winter, Oleg Tabakov as King Louis XIII, Alisa Freindlich as Anne of Austria, and Alexander Trofimov as Cardinal Richelieu. The film, and its numerous songs became extremely popular in the Soviet Union throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, and are now considered a classic.
Three sequels were made: Musketeers Twenty Years After (1992), The Secret of Queen Anne or Musketeers Thirty Years After (1993) and The Return of the Musketeers, or The Treasures of Cardinal Mazarin (2007). The latter is a piece of shit that should never have been allowed to see the light of day.
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Let's face it, Peter Jackson went all out on this one. The sheer scale of the movies is incredible, the great effort behind them is obvious, and the casting is close to perfect. There will always be the rabid fans dissatisfied with the adaptation, but I believe the movies as worthy of the title "The Lord of the Rings".
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