I thought the movie version of Count of Monte Cristo was better than the book. The book spent way too much time talking about the sums of money. Trimmed down some of the plot, but still left more than enough to make the point.
Bridget Jones’s Diary. Renee Zellweger managed to take an annoying, whiny, unlikable, self-centered git and make her adorable.
I have also noticed his…art collection. I don’t know about the best part, but one of my favorites too.
I’ll give Frank Miller credit for the source material but both 300 and the Sin City series made for terrific movies compared to the graphic novels that I paged through. The books were pretty shallow and lifeless and did absolutely nothing for me.
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s” nest was at least as good as the book.
*Woman in the Dunes (Suna no Onna) * is a fairly decent book, but the movie is so much better. Its major improvement was not being filled with the inner monologues of the main character which only confirmed his assholishness. He’s still a jerk, but I had some sympathy for Movie Junpei.
I came in to mention Fight Club and 2001. I also agree with A Scanner Darkly, and it’s one of the few that I think the movie is better even though I read the book first.
I will also claim foresight that Wicked will be a better movie than the book, since the musical is better than the book, and the movie will basically be the musical with better lighting and props. I read the book first in this case.
So was “Rosemary’s Baby,” because Polanski basically shot the book with very few changes. He actually called author Ira Levin and asked him which edition of The New Yorker" had the ad for the shirt that Guy Wodehouse bought. Levin had to admit he’d faked it and hadn’t checked, just assuming any edition would have a nice shirt advertised in it. But it turned out that the correct edition for the time frame didn’t.
imdb claims there are plans to make another movie of it, which is horrible.
I agree. And even though the movie tanked, and got mediocre reviews, I loved it.
I liked both The Commitments and Angel Heart* films better than their sources. Maybe it’s an Alan Parker thing.
For The Commitments, the ability to actually hear the music that forms the heart of the story makes all the difference, especially since the performances in the film are so good.
For Angel Heart, I think it’s Mickey Rourke’s performance that raises the film over the book. And I’ll bet most of you never thought you’d hear anyone say that. 
And since I’m here, I’ll second the previous mentions of Band of Brothers and Trainspotting.
*The novel on which Angel Heart was based was called Falling Angel, by William Hjortsberg.
Over 100 posts and nobody mentioned The Color Purple? The book was very powerful, full of controversial subjects, and written in a series of letters, which is very hard to translate to screen.
Steven Spielberg had no experience directing a “serious” film. Whoopi Goldberg had no experience as a “serious” actor." Oprah Winfrey had no experience as an actor whatsoever.
Spielberg took a powerful book and turned it into a masterpiece. The movie is a classic. Considering what he had to work with, in terms of the book’s subject matter, style, and power, what the movie accomplished was sheer perfection.
AND he still didn’t get an Oscar nomination. Stupid Academy.
True, but it did get a huge number of other Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. In total, nominated in 11 categories, and it won none of them. Zero. Serious mess-up on the Academy’s part.
Catch Me if You Can was a delightful Spielberg movie, from a book that was interesting but not nearly as enjoyable.
Put me in the camp of those who think *Blade Runner * and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as so completely different as to not be comparable.
The BBC Mini-series *Flambards * was IMO far superior to the books on which it was based, but I know the person who recommended it in the first place did so based on the books, which largely left me cold.
The Abyss was the book/movie combination that made me realize that it wasn’t that books were superior to movies unless you saw the movie first, but rather that each worked for different things. I was in Japan for six weeks on business, ran out of reading material and went to an English language bookstore and found a book by an author whose name I recognized - Orson Scott Card. I realized reading the forward that this was a novelization and that the movie was almost certainly worth watching, but at that point could only read the book and did so and enjoyed it a great deal - thought very highly of it. Then I went home and saw the Abyss on video. It blew my mind, and remains my favorite Cameron movie to date. And I came to understand that while movies can obviously be far better at telling you what people are thinking (and it really pisses me off when they then don’t), movies convey the realities of strong emotion more viscerally. I later came across the idea of hot and cool media and realized this wasn’t exactly an original idea. (Yes, I know I did it all backwards) So well-executed movies will be better at showing a battle scene or a drowning-scene than an equally well-written book, but books will better help you understand why the characters behave as they do, unless, as is so often considered “art” since the latter 1800s, they don’t.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was much better than the short story, although I wonder if the story was an adaption of the movie concept. It would make a good remake, but please, this time, don’t use actors in their forties for characters that should be twenty years younger.
The movie versions of A Man Called Horse and The Hanging Tree were also much better than the short stories (all by the same author). The story characters were a bit darker, especially in the Hanging Tree, but the movie versions had much more interesting plots.
Good call. I still have my copy of Fallen Angel around somewhere, but I’ve only read it once. I know where I keep my Angel Heart DVD, though, because I see it a couple of times a year. And yes, Mickey Rourke was great in it.
I’ll pop it in the DVD player tonight.
Might be apocryphal, but Michael Crichton claims that someone saw him on a beach, scribbling on legal pads, and asked him what he was doing.
“Writing a book that’ll turn into a really expensive movie.”
Disney has a mixed track record here. The Headless Horseman and Mary Poppins were much better than the books, I think.
On the other hand, he should never have been allowed to mess with Winnie the Pooh…
The Towering Inferno was loads better than The Tower, but only a skosh better than The Glass Inferno. They must have borrowed just enough from the former book to push the movie over the top.