Movie Adaptations

Once I again, I have found something to ponder and bore you with my opinion of. Today, after several hours of hard revision, I rewarded myself by watching "Starter for Ten" — a film based on the book by David Nicholls. It's very good. Possibly better than the book, which was annoying.

For those of you who don't know, "Starter for Ten" is about a boy called Brian who's struggling through his first year at a University (which we're assured isn't Oxford or Cambridge). His life's dream is to appear on University Challenge, hence the name of the book / film. It's an interesting story and the characters are so believable you actually don't like them at times. The book was interesting and included such gems as "Enough of this Shelley, I'm off to tarmac something" and "The ironic thing is, I actually AM a vicar", which continue to make me smile. And the film... Well, like I said, in some ways the film was better than the book, but in some ways it was worse, as is always the case with films. Which made me wonder whether we could ever really have a perfect adaptation of a book to film. I understand that they are clearly two different genres of expression (or whatever), but surely there has to be some overlap?

The film, as a piece of cinematography, is very good; there are some good actors and actresses in it, including Catherine Tate, Benedict Cumberbatch, James Corden, that guy from "Mamma Mia!" and (for about five seconds, being shouty at the end) David Tennant, and the camera work and special effects (of which there admittedly weren't many) were clever and believable. And compared to the novel, the script was pretty accurate. Well, accurate apart from the fact that one of the main characters was meant to be Glaswegian and appeared to be from Bedfordshire, and that chunks of the story line were left out of the film which (while most of them weren't integral) were really funny (like the Shelley quote). So maybe this is as good as it gets? A good film which portrays the story in an accurate way (without making you hate the central character) which stars good actor? There should be more to life, surely?

Any better book/film combos? Let me know.