Your answer might depend on your audience.

I find cliches boring, but most mainstream "hit" movies are predictable and cliche-riddled. See: any of the Rocky films, Terminator, or big budget Hollywood blockbuster / hit comedy type films for a wealth of examples of stuff I roll my eyes at. But daggone, do they sell. And I'm not even immune, I mean for chrissake, I *own* a copy of Starship Troopers, on DVD even!

I don't like pedantic, pedestrian movies that do mostly nothing (see: Lost in Translation) but those often sell well to the indie critic art snob crowd.

Good dialogue is really crucial to me. The characters have to relate to each other. "No Country for Old Men" had excellent dialogue, even though it could be counted as slow, and the subject matter is difficult, and a lot of people hated the ending. (why? why does a movie HAVE to have an 'ending'? that was the whole fucking POINT of the film, I mean just read the damn title... anyway I'm ranting, I'll stop now).

Someone way more perceptive than me who actually knows what they're talking about will likely weigh in with a better answer, but I will say there are a LOT of books out there that would translate terribly to screenplays without heavy revision / editing / rewrite (er, Lord of the Rings, anyone?).

I don't have an answer to that, but I would say that in some ways it's terribly relative. I was watching "The French Connection" last night, and felt quite bored with the pacing of the film - which I immediately understood was a reaction based on the tempo of current Hollywood films, that are like comic book cels (whatever they're called for comic books - I'm having a brain fart right now).

I've been very programmed to expect action/emotion every second, and any film that doesn't deliver that seems slow-paced and boring. Why do we have all these seconds watching these guys do nothing? Why so much concentration on the mundane? But that's the very point in this well-crafted film - and I mourn my own apparent inability to appreciate something that doesn't deliver that bam!bam!bam! action storyline. I need to get out of the Hollywood mindset. I don't have this problem with literature, and I need to escape it with regard to moving pictures.

Pacing is very important, in a movie. Movies like No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood pay special attention to how the cinematography, editing, sound track, etc. contribute to building tension, climax, and release. This is in contrast to more boring action movies, that don't build tension but instead continually peak over-and-over with no release between fight scenes.

Dramas and good comedies have to do this too. For example, Gosford Park is called "boring" because the dialogue is quiet and sometimes difficult to hear. But the technique actually builds tension. The veiwer's interest is captured by revealing tidbits of information here and there.

Like writing a book: show, don't tell. Exposition is the death of a movie. For example: The difference between Men in Black (funny comedy) and Men in Black II (boring comedy) is that MiB:II relied on lots of exposition throughout the movie to explain what had happened since MiB:I, what was currently happening, and what was going to happen. Don't reveal something in dialogue that you could reveal with a prop, a glance, a flashback, or a much shorter bit of dialogue.

Reading what I just wrote: scratch the flashback idea. That's another great device that's been cliche'd.

I had a theater instructor who used to insist that the idea of "boring" is very interesting, because it's so subjective. He was of the opinion that if something is boring you, you shouldn't immediately assume that it is the fault of whatever you are watching.

For me, there has to be some character within the first few minutes who raises questions in my mind and makes me care what happens to them. The few times I've stopped watching a movie in the middle of it, it's because I realized I didn't care one way or another what happened to the characters.

This Elsewhere?

Part of what makes books so wonderful is the narrative voice. Elsewhere had a particularly strong one- inward, thoughtful, with beautiful, honest transitions from place to place in the story. It was touching and intimate and personal and...

None of that can be in the screenplay.

Film and fiction can take from the same well, but they're two entirely different media. To make a great film, you have to present a visual story, one that fills time organically, and naturally, one that has strong, evocative dialogue to draw the characters out of the page.

An entire page on the shades of the sunset in a novel is a two-second establishing shot in a movie. Movies that refuse to admit they are not the same as a book, which linger overlong on every aspect to fill the time, which rely overmuch on montage and narrative VO, tend to be really boring.

Taking a book to film means taking the same idea and writing it again. Not merely transposing. Translating. Really effective examples of this include "Dances with Wolves," which I'm willing to go out and say was even better as a film than it was as a book, and "Brokeback Mountain," which went farther than the story did, timewise, but still told the same, essential story.

The Harry Potter series is actually an exciting way to approach the problem of adaptation- same author, same series , same screenwriter - but different directors. Chris Columbus' Sorcerer's Stone was probably the most faithful to the book, but kind of boring. Alfonse Cuaron's Prisoner of Azkaban was the least true to the book, but probably the best as an independent film. What's important is to cut out the essence of a book, and embroider it with the same, to make a good movie of it.

Really ineffective examples of this include "Adaptation," which tells you a lot about Hollywood, screenwriting and how hard it is to adapt a book into a film, but as an adaptation of The Orchid Thief, pretty much fails. Another poor adaptation, IMHO, was "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," because some of the adapted choices didn't make any kind of screenwriting-need sense, and they undermined some of the strong, positive messages in the book, and ruined some of the lovely parallelism.

So this is why an adaptation fails:

1) It doesn't consider that literature and film are different media
2) It tries to force a book onto the screen in its original form.
3) It tries to force a book to only be a movie and ignores the underlying strength of the story.

If your adaptation is boring, it's because you had to cut out all the really wonderful imagery that holds the action and dialogue together in the book. No doubt, you've found yourself with a sparsely inhabited script. Too short. Wrong rhythm. No pay off. Those elements have to be crafted and seamlessly applied to the existing story, because that which you cannot see in the book, cannot be included in the movie.

So with that in mind, why don't you page one it and try again, given that perspective. Adaptation is an exciting way to learn the fundamentals of screenwriting; it can be wonderfully satisfying to succeed. Good luck!

If the movie's rate of variation/revelation lags behind the audience's decoding of information and expectation of development, the movie is boring (individually determinant upon patience and/or identification).

I was going to try and make a complicated equation, but it ended up being too complicated.

Ooh, that's a good simple way to put it, pokermonk.

The problem is, generally, that different people have different rates for decoding information and expectation of development. That's why the genre matters.

Hook me in the first fifteen minutes or you've lost me. I don't mean you have to blow stuff up or anything, but set up an interesting premise, introduce me to someone either extremely likable or despicable (or both!), make me wonder what the hell is going on...just give me a reason to keep watching. If I start out bored, you're going to have to spend the rest of the movie winning me over--and that's tough to do.

Don't insult my intelligence. Don't telegraph. I absolutely hated Forrest Gump and one of the main reasons is that it would do things like have FG witness a break-in at his hotel in DC, then feel the need to pan to hotel stationery that said, "The Watergate Hotel." Ugh.

"I've been very programmed to expect action/emotion every second, and any film that doesn't deliver that seems slow-paced and boring."

I'm the exact opposite taz. The something happening every moment action thing bores me to death. It's a lot of movement with no real purpose and action is never as good on film as it is in my head when I read a book.

Knowing what will happen next.

Don't telegraph.

Bingo. The most egregious example of this IMO, in any novel-scripted-for-movie was The DaVinci Code. ARRRRGH!! Don't ask why I sat through that entire mess, I have no clue... actually, no wait, I do. It was so incredibly terrible, the mister and I actually both lost interest about 30 minutes in, only to see it sitting on the HT set 2 days later and think... meh, we should finish watching that before we return it to [well-intentioned neighbour]. Only movie I've ever in my whole entire life watched that actually did make me wish for that 3 hours back. I mean ffs, even *cringe* Caddyshack made me want to finish watching it (jesus, did I just admit that in public?).

I mean, while we're in the mood for bashing Tom Hanks movies, that is...

Caddyshack is one of the great comedies of all time, lfr! I don't think a day goes by that I don't drop a Caddyshack reference. I can't hear "Anyway You Want It" without involuntarily dancing like Rodney Dangerfield.

All night
All night
Oooooh EVERY NIGHT!!!

"great comedies"

this does not compute... is that an oxymoron you've got there, or are you just happy to see me?

/loathes Rodney Dangerfield

grudgingly admits to laughing like a loon at both "Wayne's World and "Harry and Kumar"

headspace, yes that Elsewhere, I was reading somewhere that she tried to make it into a screenplay but she failed.. I started writing this and it seemed to me like it would be boring to some people, I guess you should be able to trust you're own thought.

I don't know quite what I was thinking, but you're post made me think of what a fool I was.

Elsewhere, is a perfectly good book, and like all good things,


Should be left alone..

So it will be,and I will go on to try to find a good book that I csn take up my time and make a movie..

Just to reiterate what headspace and lfr have written.

Screenplays from books, unless the books are written in the style of scripts themselves, need serious work - translation as headspace put it. Two examples immediately spring to mind, one good film, one bad film (imo obviously). First, The Shipping News, cut one of the daughters from the film entirely. To be honest it didnt really make much of a difference to the tone of the film, and having the younger daughter present in the film wouldve probably distracting in the long run. It was a shame that the film itself didn't excite me as much as the book.

Second, Solaris. Despite taking out the peripheral, but still important, story of the planet (the monitoring station is above an ever changing morphing sea that the lead character could stride around on), Soderberg kept (translated) the human elements of the book to my great statisfaction, and edited beautifully. (Actually, originally, I read the screenplay before i'd seen the film and was cross at what had been left out, until I was berated by a friend for hanging on to the book so religeously).

Cliches, too, are getting very dull. See John August's The Nines that I watched the other night. I have a lot of respect for JA as a screenwriter, but The Nines was a bollocksing mess. Rather, it started off well meaning and looked to be turning into a nice little thriller, but the further it went on the more flat the concept became until the, frankly, preposterously ugly conceit at the end. It left me hugely baffled that someone who wrote Go and Big Fish (amongst others) could (without trying to spoil the film for those that want to go and see it) resort to a pseudo-Deus Ex Machina ending. I was ANGRY.

It might also to read William Goldman's Which Lie Did I Tell?, particularly the chapter on Absolute Power, and how he translated the mammoth list of characters to something a film would be capable of using.

That's why the genre matters.

Yes. And I'm not sure how to break that down. I think it relates to expectation in some way. You anticipate a certain element (THE MONSTER!) or genre-specific plot development (THE MONSTER KILLS!), so you are more willing to wait so long as there's some type of payoff (although not necessarily what you've anticipated).

It depends what I'm in the mood for, but there are some constants. Looking at Louis Malle's 'My Dinner with Andre' or Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' - they could be boring, as nothing much really happens visually, but the dialogue is so well written that I find myself gripped by it.
Soderberg's 'Solaris', and the original version of the film, again by Tarkovsky I really liked, though I'll admit to not having read the book as I haven't found it yet.

The Bourne... what's the latest one? Supremacy? Thing? I saw, and was so annoyed by the terrible editing that I just wanted to leave and forget about the whole thing. Seriously, how many fast cuts does one movie need, anyway? It's my peeve of not holding the camera still or relying too much on a gimmick that makes me look at the plot. If it's not at least halfway to amazing, then I'm bored with the whole thing as soon as I guess where the plot's going to end up.
I found with some of the Bond movies with Brosnan boring as the plots don't do much outside of the whole "holding the world for ransom" thing, except add some neat gadgets and explosions. I suppose that's why I was very impressed with the Daniel Craig/Casino Royale flick, as there's some interesting character development and situations in there.

I liked "No Country..." A nice little southern goth tale. No, you don't need to know all the ins-and-outs of these characters displayed for you as a handy voice-over. Things happen, these people are involved, and you can draw your own conclusions on their deeper motivations from the way the actors portray their characters. Also, I loved the ending, which to me felt like it ended on an emotion, rather than a word an action, or a picture. Well done.
That reason is why I'm looking forward to seeing 'Sleuth'. Well, the main reason is because I really like Howard Pinter, who did the screenplay. If there's anyone who can draw tension out of a situation, it's him. (If anyone's seen it - critique?). Pinter also wrote 'The Room', as short film directed by Robert Altman. There's no "action" as it were, but the acting and dialogue is tense and difficult and loaded.

Harry Potter and the side Order of the Toast. Boring. Annoying. These kids are being dumped on and tortured and demeaned. Why didn't one of them just chuck everything down and go "Fuck it all and fuck you. I'm going to go listen to some Sex Pistols and then come back and wreak havoc on this place." They're teenagers! They should get pissed off! No, they don't - they fall into line with the whole "quiet frustration" thing. That annoyance made me look at the plot and it just seemed to me a bridge between the last film and the final one.... so I was bored. There you go.