Remains of the Day.
Thought of a couple of others.
Sharky’s Machine: Pretty much for the same reasons as L.A. Confidential. Too much, too quickly, too unbelievably. The movie rocked!
The Dirty Dozen wasn’t a bad novel, but it was mediocre, and the movie rocked even more than Sharky’s Machine.
The Thing was quite a bit better than Who Goes There.
I have to disagee with A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick did a fine job with the movie, but Burgess’s invented language and how he incorporated it into the novel was genius. Also, the movie left off the book’s original ending, which to me was the most poignant part of the story. Granted, Kubrick might have just read the old American version without the ending, but it still automatically places the movie below the book.
And I agree with whoever said that Kubrick’s Shining and King’s Shining were both great for different reasons.
Basically everything Jay Cronley writes is unreadable.
No. As noted above, it seems to have first come from the old Universal The Mummy. But it was first used in a Dracula film by Richard Matheson’s screenplay for the Jack Palance TV version of Dracula.
Jackie Brown is much better than Rum Punch. Much, much better.
I’ll second Hannibal; the movie improved on the ending, and trimmed some not-very-interesting subplots. I loved Harris’s prior novels, but this one sucked so bad I didn’t even check out Hannibal Rising in either form.
Regarding V For Vendetta: Things that looked profound and heavy on the comics page just didn’t work in live action (the most obvious example being V’s penchant for alliteration).
I read the book Stardust years before the movie came out and loved it, but the movie is my favorite. I know there are people who did prefer the book over the movie, though, and so I think it depends in large part on a person’s preferences. The book is more of a tragic fairy tale with a beautiful and bittersweet ending, while the movie is closer to the heir apparent to The Princess Bride (film version, that is).
The film adaptation of Fight Club was hands down, flat out better than the book, IMHO, though.
Oh, same. I loved the movie–I thought it was hilarious and entertaining…always try to watch if I see it on TV. So I was looking forward to reading the book…oh…GOD, what a let down.
I think maybe you mean the Anabasis, a first-hand account by Xenophon?
Pretty much any movie based on a Michael Crichton novel is going to be better than the book, because that’s a pretty low bar. (Though I didn’t see Congo.)
I felt The Poseidon Adventure worked better as a movie; Paul Gallico’s novel had similarly archetypal characters, which just seems more hackneyed in print. (If I recall correctly; been about thirty years.)
It wasn’t pretty faithful to the novel, though it still stayed true to some aspects of the novel. The first part, with Jonathan in Castle Dracula, is pretty faithful (though Keanu as Harker is pretty hilarious). And the events surrounding Dracula’s arrival in England were pretty close to the book, but things started to spin out of control after that. In fact, I was studying the book pretty extensively this spring, and I realized that the film was just basically fanfic of the novel. “Hmm, Dracula and Mina do have a connection after he bites her…what if it’s because she’s his reincarnated lover! And what if Dracula is just a horribly misunderstood soul! Man, this is going to be awesome!”
:eek: I’m distraught over this. What the hell is the book about? The reason I haven’t read it all these years is because someone told me it was exactly like the movie.
Nobody’s ever done justice to the book because, frankly, the book’s a big sprawling mess, with too many characters, too many locations, and too many coincidences. Stage and film adaptations inevitably combine characters and events, or eliminate them in the interests of stageability, consistency, and time. And the audence’s ability to keep characters straight. David J. Skal, in his wonderful book Hollywood Gothic, claims that the PBS/BBC Louis Jordan version is the most faithful. I like the Coppola version, at least a lot of it. I also like the usually condem,ned Jess Franco version Count Dracula, at least at the beginning. The first half is the most faithful version I’ve seen, with Christopher Lee playing Dracula! (with a moustache and all) But Franco ran out of money, or something. The second half is a letdown.
The only place to get the real Dracula is in the book. I recommend The vAnnotated Dracula or The Essential Dracula, both with notes by Leonard Wolf. Wolf, by the way, likes to Coppola version, for which he was advisor. Wolk and Skal don’t exactly see eye-to-eye.
The only two I can think of that haven’t been mentioned are both books that I read in translation, not in the original language: Planet of the Apes and Doctor Zhivago. The first wasn’t bad, but the movie was better. The second was so bad as to be almost unreadable. I can’t say whether the books in their original languages might have been better than the films.
Maybe whoever told you it was exactly like the movie never read the book…or more likely, never finished the book. I’ve been assigned it 3 times for 3 different classes and even wrote one of my final projects for grad school on the novel, and about the last third is very hard to slog through. The very beginning of the movie was created out of whole cloth (or from other cinematic sources. I don’t know. but it’s not in the book). The first part is all about Harker at Castle Dracula, which is pretty interesting and frightening (and close to the movie, like I said). The 2nd third is all about Mina and Lucy, and how Dracula targets Lucy and makes her into his bride/child (again, sorta like the movie but there are a lot of differences). At the point where Mina meets Dracula in London the novel is just completely thrown out.
I like the novel a lot. I think it’s leaps and bounds better than any of the other movie versions, but it is a bit of a mess.
It’s sorta like how Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has almost nothing to do with the actual novel…
I gotta disagree on this one. The Brannaugh version has its flaws, but it depicts more of the events in the original book than almost any other version, and does a pretty decent job of it. The only other filmed version that does this is the very low-budget but well-done Victor Frankenstein (Also called Terror of Frankenstein, but not to be confused with any of the Hammer films):
If you’re going to read the book,. I recommend , again, Leonard Wolf’s annotated versions, The Annotated Frankenstein and the Essential Frankenstein. You could also have a look at the Clasics Illustrated version, which has recently been reprinted. Thjey keep faithful to the book, within the limitations of not grossing out the kids.
My SO said Children of Men was fairly crappy in comparison to the movie, so I haven’t worked up the gumption to read it.
The Iron Giant. The original story by Ted Hughes (“The Iron Man”) is a wispy, cheerless, allegorical fairy tale : Good is Better Than Evil Because It’s Nicer. There is no character development, or even any “characters” to speak of: everyone, even the Giant himself, is a one-dimensional cutout. And the prose is embarrassing: every sentence reaches desperately for a sort of neo-Oscar Wilde classicism and fails miserably. (I say this with full understanding that the author was a Poet Laureate of Great Britain.)
The film, on the other hand, is an hilarious and powerful coming-of-age story of friendship, courage, and sacrifice. It’s also a brilliant satire of Cold War paranoia as seen through the eyes of a child. (Speaking as one of those Cold War kids who had to crouch under a school desk with a paper bag over his head to protect himself from The Bomb, I’d say that no film ever got it better, except maybe The Day the Earth Stood Still.)
And I know of no other film that made so many of my straight male friends cry, entirely without shame.
I seriously snorted when I read this, but thats only because I read the book and it most definitely was not the Odyssey
ug just looking it up made me cringe
“Psycho” by Robert Bloch is second-rate pulp. It’s amazing how Hitch shined that turd.
Speaking of Hitchcock, what about * The Birds*? Reading the short story was not as scary as seeing the movie.