So I take it you're firmly against Wodehouse on the screen as well?

I've always thought Jeeves & Wooster was pretty wretched. Fry and Laurie are good in their roles, but you just can't successfully transpose Bertie's first person narrative from print to screen.

I DO have to confess that I enjoy the old Wodehouse Playhouse series, which dramatized some of the Mulliner stories. Then again, Plum himself introduced these, so I would assume they met with his approval.

(Other examples of this principle include the tee-vee dramatizations of "Piece of Cake" by Derek Robinson - a great Battle of Britan novel, btw - and "The Irish R.M." by Somerville and Ross. In each case, the screen version can't hold a candle to the text.)

My rule of thumb in movie adaptation is this: if it makes the story suck and detracts from your enjoyment of the originals, then it is a bad adaptation; if it doesn't detract but doesn't enhance your enjoyment, then it is an okay adaptation; if it enhances your enjoyment it is a great adaptation. LOTR, to me, made me remember how much I loved the books and I loved it. Plus it introduced and spurred many, many people to read the books who otherwise would not have. That alone makes it a great adaptation.

Also, to a certain extent, we should not look to movie adaptations of books to replace or stand equal to the original. They are two different media. LOTR stands alone as a movie, without any knowledge of the book and does so as a fantastic movie.

All this pooh-poohing of movie adaptations can sometimes be a bit absurd. To take the extreme end of this logic, whenever da Vinci painted a horse it was crap because, well, the cavemen at Lascaux painted them thousands of thousands of years ago. Grump, grump.

Except that the cavemen and Da Vinci were doing their separate takes on a real object - the horse. Aragorn doesn't exist outside the pages of Tolkien's books. I have no problem with a movie as a movie, but when it expropriates the characters and plots of an author's books - and even uses that author's name to sell itself - it better maintain a very high standard of adherence to the book. Which, as the quote says, is usually close to impossible.

Grump, grump, I know. But that's what I'm all about!