Film Adaptations...

...are not always a good idea. Some are awful, some mediocre but a few are good and even fewer great. I'm hoping the adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline is as good as promised, it's a good book, dark and strange like all his others and I don't want to be disappointed. Stardust (another Gaiman novel) was good, (except for Ricky Gervais' appearance, but then he annoys me) so hopefully Gaiman has kept an eye on the production of Coraline and it'll be worth seeing.
I'm having a bit of a problem thinking of any other adaptations I actually liked, I suppose the Sky One films of Terry Pratchett's Hogfather and Colour of Magic count, one was good and the other not so much. The most recent Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a good attempt to catch Douglas Adams brilliance on screen but while bits of it were funny, it didn't really work. Other than that I tend to avoid film adaptations of books I enjoyed, it's so easy to be disappointed and feel like the screenwriter and director can't have been reading the same novel that I was.