>>27613
Stanley Kubrick's 1962 version was as close as you can get.
Lyne's version is overly melodramatic and the performances from Irons and Swain fucking suck. The photography is cool and the Morricone score, I guess. But that's about it. He doesn't "get it." Lyne never made another picture for the next 20 years after making his Lolita adaptation, and only like last year did he attempt to direct a feature.
Stanley's version not only "gets" the fact that the novel is meant to be a black comedy. It's "the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America"
Vladimir Nabokov also wrote the screenplay for Stanley's film, you know the guy who wrote it. Sue Lyon was 14 to Swain's like, 17... But originally, Nabokov wanted to make the character of Delores Haze 9 - though his American publisher wasn't having it. She's, of course 12, in the novel.
You can't accurately adapt all of the inner mania, with Humbert's neurotic monologues, really. A voice over will end up sounding like Blade Runner or a detective noir monologue, you know.
But yeah, Jeremy Irons fucking sucks, and the fact that they got him to read the audible audio book version was all the more gay - and disrespect to Vladimir Nabokov and his great American novel.
The Nelson Riddle bass or baritone guitar theme is really cool in the '62 film, as are those heart-shaped "lolita" shades Lyon sports in all of the promotional/press material.
But yeah, Vladimir Nabokov literally adapted it himself for the screen... and this is the script that Kubrick used, albeit edited, for Lolita (1962).
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