Can we think of any example where the movie was better than the book? I qualify this by saying that the book still had to come out before the movie. Not fair to include books that are adaptations of movies and come after the movie is released.
I will submit the three 'Lord of the Rings' movies. I found LOTR as books to be a tough slog to get through when I read them in high school. The movies brilliantly created the world of Middle Earth and did such a good job with character development that all the major themes got the screen time that they needed to tell the tale.
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13 comments:
"The Invisible Man". I thought the book was okay, but I really love the 1933 movie.
Claude Rains...yes...one of my favorites too that I first saw late one night in the age before infomercials came to TV. They used to show all those great old movies in the wee hours after midnight like Frankenstien and the Wolf Man along with this one.
Gotta off-handedly disagree about LOTR. I loved the movies. I read LOTR for the first time in '63 when I was 13. I always thought a movie would be the greatest, but they never got it even really right till the latest Jackson ones. They left a lot out but I own all the extended versions. It's awesome (and I don't use that word much). But the book is what got me started reading Sci-fi and all kinds of other stuff. It's a complete world all laid out for you, even the history and future of it. It's truly a masterpiece.
I completely agree with you about LOTR. Those books are a slog and a half. But, as DrG says, they inspired others, and we have all benefited from that, so...I guess I'm just glad somebody else did the slogging and I got the benefits...
Oh, Gone With the Wind is WAY better than the book...
This is good. This is what I wanted to hear. I was always told that Dune was a tough nut to crack but I found it very accessible but that has alot to do with seeing he movie in 1984 first (which totally blew me away) Reading the book afterwards with those visuals in my mind made it twice as cool because I had voices and images in my head. The book is of course better but Lynch did a good job I thought. The sci/fi channels miniseries were great too and there is a new production in the words now of the book so I look forward to that.
Two books that, for me, never lived up to the subsequent movies are Jaws and The Exorcist, the one being kinda trashy and the other strangely uninvolving.
The original Rescuers series by Sharp was quite good, actually. But Disney did his thing with it like he had done with Grimm, Collodi, Dodge, et. al. all the way down the line. Not that I'm mad at him. I am so not mad!
But it's kinda fun to know that in the original story, Bernard and Bianca were only friends...
:)
"Shawshank Redemption".
The Poseidon Adventure. Was probably the only book I ever gave up on reading.
I to respectfully disagree about LOTR. The book, mammoth as it is, is magical, particularly when you share it with your child -- I read each book to my daughter before the movies came out. Same with Harry Potter.
I do agree about The Shawshank Redemption as well as The Green Mile and STand By Me. As much as I like Stephen King I thought those three movies brought something extra to the adaptations that made the story resonate more strongly.
I also include The Witches of Eastwick. Updike's book was uninteresting and turgid, but the movie was fun and sexy. And it had Jack Nicholson. What more do you want?
As much as I adore the LOTR movies, the books really are better. For one thing, there's all that glorious Tolkien language. For another, character motivations are really better handled in the books; there are some things that the characters do in the movies that make a lot more sense in the books.
The James Bond film of Goldfinger improves on the book in some ways. And the film of The Bridges of Madison County is a beautiful love story, where the book is...not so much.
Any Jane Austen novel.
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