I’ll agree with you. I don’t think Tolkein wrote anything well except for pilling pages with long, boring details.
Humorously enough, I think the OP had one, too, even though he didn’t make it a candidate. I thought “Jurassic Park” was an infinitely better movie than book. The book was just silly half the time (“The Raptors might have bad eyesight in the dark so I’m going to hide in this corner and they probably ate eggs, too, so I’m going to pump poison into these eggs and roll them down the hallway and maybe they’ll eat them and die”). The movie was a good “the monsters are gonna eat us! Run!” movie.
Worst thing about the movie was that John Williams totally just phoned in the music.
I thought the movie Gorky Park was significantly better than the book, which had a murky, rambling plot.
Another is Bridge On The River Kwai. The book was pretty good, but the film in addition to fantastic performances had, shall we say, a somewhat snappier ending.
I’d give the movie Red Dragon a slight edge over the book. It would have been a bigger margin except for the casting of Edward Norton. Let’s face it, he was all wrong for the tormented Will Graham character.
I’ll add “The Shining.” It’s a great book but what Kubrick did with it is just fantastic. (What is it with King anyway? He always gets a lot of mention in these threads.)
Also, “Atonement.” I slogged through that book because I wanted to read it before watching the movie. I loved the first part but the rest just dragged on and on. I enjoyed the movie (which cut out a lot of the crap I struggled with) much more.
The Hunt for Red October. The book is good, but still gets a bit bogged down in subplots. The movie is outstanding and very few things are changed from the book.
It’s a matter of taste, of course, but I enjoyed Bram Stoker’s Dracula rather better than Bram Stoker’s Dracula, even though Coppola sadly yielded the temptation to throw in the now hackneyed vampire-searching-for-his-reincarnated-lost-love plot.
He also gets a lot of mention in threads about movies that were WORST than the book. I guess movies based on King’s works are either really really great or really really bad.
I know it was a mini-series rather than a movie, but I enjoyed HBO’s Band of Brothers much more than I enjoyed the book (although, the book wasn’t bad). There’s just something much more viscereal about seeing the combat rather than reading the veteran’s recollections of it.
Quick Change the movie is a great little comedy flick. Quick Change the book is unreadable.
Sideways: In the book, one of the characters does something that’s completely shocking and, well, highly out of character. Kudos to the screenwriter who reworked the story and made a great film.
One that gets mentioned quite a bit is Jaws. The movie is a masterpiece, well done from start to finish, and remains one of Spielberg’s best. The Peter Benchley book, however, has a long and irritating subplot about a romance between Sheriff Brody’s wife and marine biologist Matt Hooper, which takes up nearly a third of the book, during which the shark doesn’t appear once. Fortunately, they dropped all that nonsense from the movie.
Good point. I think the reason I often like the movies based on King’s books better than the books themselves is because they trim the fat, so to speak. I’ve read many a King book that starts out great, loses steam about a third of the way through when he gets bogged down in too many details, and then picks up again at the end. YMMV, of course.
Both Jurassic Park and the first Star Trek movie novel were, in my opinion, terrible books. At that, the first Star Trek movie was only nominally better than the book. The writing in the Star Wars books (the first trilogy written) was awful.
I think that The Day the Earth Stood Still is far superior to the Harry Bates short story it’s based on, “Farewell to the Master” (although that was a short story, not a book)
It’s kind of hard to compare ** They Live** to its inspiration, Ray Nelsin’s “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” – there’s no there there! The movie’s a much fuller and more enjoyable experience.
For what it’s worth, I prefer the movie ** Spartacus** to Howard Fast’s novel. I’m not sure it’s better.
As to why I expected to be flamed: the LOTR books (and “The Hobbit”) have been, hands down, THE most recommended books to me. Over the years, I have received 3 (different) sets of the books, and have had countless friends tell me that I “must” read them.
I started with “The Hobbit”…twice. And couldn’t make it through. It sat on the shelf for years. Then a friend asked “did you ever read the LOTR books ?” And I told him about the troubles I’d had getting into “The Hobbit”. After discussing it, he explained the secret: skip over the songs. I think the songs were killing me - I kept trying to “get” them thinking they were an integral part of the story. But my friend assures me that they are not necessary. So I followed his advice, and slogged my way through on attempt 3. I did enjoy it. But not enough to jump into “Fellowship”.
Fast forward years later and the announcement of the Peter Jackson movies (all my friends saw the Bakshi animated version and were so disgusted that it didn’t finish). So I decide to try “Fellowship”. Painful. I’m thinking the movie for this first book alone could be 6 hours !
Then I saw the movie of “Fellowship” and said “WOW !!!” But when I talked to all my friends who’d read the books, their reaction was “it was good, but they left out this, and this, and this…” So the general feel was that as entertaining as the movies were, they weren’t “true” (or “true enough”) to the books that those who loved the books were somewhat disappointed.
My take is that most of my friends read the books when they were in high school or there-abouts. And the receptiveness of such imaginative creatures, kingdoms, history, and characters was much greater at that age. So the books open up this whole universe - escapism (from the humdrum of high school, no less) at its finest. I had a similar experience with some science fiction at that age (most notably “Dune”). So the impact these books had is also tied into just when these friends had read them. And as mentioned previously, they are held in as high esteem as the Bible or the Torah - not to be questioned, altered, etc…
susan, I think that there’s a vast difference between comparing a movie based on a book, where the book had an independent existence from the movie, and talking about novelizations of a movie. There are a number of reasons this might be true, but I think that a large part of is that normally novelizations are being done my mid-range authors (Or even lower) who are just punching a ticket. The only novelization I can think of that I have read which made for an excellent book was the novelization of The Abyss, and that was an outlier in so many respects. Orson Scott Card is not a mid-range author, and at the time he was at the top of his game, I think. He was invited to the set, and became intimately familiar with how the script was being put into film, and that dramatically affected his descriptions of the characters and situations. And it was a story he became excited about.
I just have trouble seeing the relationship of the film and novel Jurassic Park as being comparable to the film and novel of any of the Star Wars or Star Trek movie novels. Obviously MMV.