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What about Green Knight? I read the original for fun in high school, and I enjoyed it as a film despite it not being a very faithful adaptation.
I have more mixed feelings about them but Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio and Frankenstein were at least interesting films, even if some of the changes were quite baffling.
I absolutely hated the Green Knight, and felt it was just another example of Hollywood thinking "If we subvert the original that makes it deep and interesting!"
I loved his Frankenstein actually, my favorite adaptation of any I've seen. It's like he saw the midwit meme about Frankenstein being the name of the doctor, not the name of the monster, and leaned into it 100%.
https://i.redd.it/9wxxw22oqis91.jpg
I was personally pretty lukewarm on Frankenstein. (Spoilers below for GDT's adaptation.)
I feel like making the monster immortal undermined the way Frankenstein actually overcame death (by animating a creature made out of dead people), and while I thought it did a good job highlighting parts of the original novel I hadn't picked up on the first time I read it (such as the implicit comparison between the polar expedition and Frankenstein's experiments), I also just think it made a lot of del-Toro-esque changes that actually undermined many strengths of the original story.
Having no aborted female creature, and making Frankenstein kill his fiancee instead of the monster, actually felt like weird attempts by del Toro to minimize some of the worst things the monster does in the story, but it makes the monster less human not more. In the original story, the monster is a true tabula rasa, and it is because he is treated like a monster by most of the world that he lashes out and kills people around Frankenstein. But in del Toro's telling, the monster is a sort of living embodiment of the trauma of the war that killed the people he is a composite of, and not truly a blank slate. And he doesn't do bad things like kill Frankenstein's relatives, because del Toro thinks monsters shouldn't do bad things or something.
Like I get it, this is the guy who saw Creature from the Black Lagoon, and sympathised with the woman-kidnapping creature instead of the woman, but does he not see how Frankenstein's monster is actually more compellingly human if he does horrible things?
I feel like the magic started to wear off around the fifth or sixth time GDT turned a fantasy story into a metaphor for the Spanish Civil War. Dude needs to read another history book.
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No adaptation (used loosely) can ever beat Young Frankenstein for me.
Speaking of adaptations starring Gene Wilder, didn't Roald Dahl take issue with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?
Yes, and I feel like that rather poisoned the well for that type of criticism, as Roald Dahl is indeed a great children's author, but also, Willy Wonka is just about a perfect movie.
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Young Frankenstein is in second place for me after del Toro's
Can’t say fairer than that :)
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