Congratulations, You've Pissed Off Scores of Well-Read Fanboys

Branching off of our watching Mira Nair's film adaptation of The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (You may have heard of the book, we kinda spent a month reading it) brings to mind a slew of unfortunately poor novel-to-film adaptations (Not that I don't like Nair's film, I actually like it a lot, but I enjoy focusing on negative things...it makes life more fun).
1.The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-A great first example (if I may say so myself) of why sometimes books...should just stay books.  Douglas Adams used humor through a dry, witty narrator and putting normal characters in wacky situations (He then goes into great literary depth for a genre-novel, but I'm just pointing out the obvious here), the movie seemed to interpret "dry, witty narrator" as "delete the narrator almost entirely" and "wacky situations" as "Mos Def".  This, coupled with lame special effects and an even more lame tacked-on ending about how mice rock or something stupid like that don't exactly help this film's cause.
2.How the Grinch Stole Christmas- These first two movies share only a few things in common: They suck, and their author's were both lucky enough to not witness their beloved literary creations of all charm and replaced with Jim Carrey.  Obviously I am not referring to the brilliant animated movie starring Boris Karloff and featuring this handsome devil (http://simplyxmas.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/grinch.jpg) because this list focuses on movies that ruined my childhood, not movies that brightened my heart and changed my perspective on animation (that would be a far more boring and less relevant use of your time). I'm sorry Jim, but angry slapstick isn't as funny as you probably hoped it would be.  It also doesn't help that I hate Faith Hill...hate
3.The League of Extremely Ordinary Gentlemen- Yes, I know what you're thinking, "Wow Dom, this list is soooooo interesting! I love reading you mock children's movies! You're so strong and manly!" Well, thank you.  But, for your information Little Miss Sarcasm, this film was based off a very well-researched comic series, the gimmick being a collection of public access literary heroes and villains combining into one fighting force.  "That...sounds...awesome!", cried the director and so he cast Sean Connery as Allan Quartermain: "That...sounds...awesome!", cried optimists everywhere, "I see no way this could terribly wrong!".   Whoops.  Turns out adding a slew of new characters to an already-filled cast (Wait, Tom Sawyer is the son of Allan Quartermain?) in addition to not being Alan Moore can really sink a promising ship like this one.  Also, killing Connery's career puts this movie on my bad side for the rest of eternity.
4.I, Robot- I, Robot, the book, redefined everything about robots and basically laid down the foundation for every robot movie, book, radio serial, and T.V. show afterwards.  It introduced the concept of robotic  psychological complexity (following a series of three rules summed up as don't hurt humans, obey humans, protect yourself).  Unlike the preceding three films, I, Robot the movie does not make me want to walk on broken glass while drinking a fine bleach cocktail.  But it just seems like the screenwriters went, "OK, we have to keep the three rules, but all that psycho-barble-jarble can easily be replaced by some good old-fashioned Will Smith one-liners! I loved The Fresh Prince!"... To be fair, I also love The Fresh Prince, but I also love intellectual depth (as referenced by my apparent need to mock films aimed at children), this filmed lacked both.
5.You're welcome