I would like to second the opinion on Mystic River. A wonderful movie with great emotional depth to the characters. Yet the book fell flat with me, no emotions were stirred as I read it. The characters seemed cardboard cutouts.
May I make a prediction? *The Da Vinci Code * will probably be a better movie than the book. The book’s plot tries to race along, but the characters are too flat and unemotional. The right casting will bring actors who can add the necessary depth to the characters to drive the story and capture the audiences’ attention.
Fearless. The movie had much more of an emotional punch and I found the characters much more sympathetic and believable. Also, the screenplay was non-linear compared to the book. Where the novel begins well before the plane crash, the movie opens with the survivors staggering out of the wreckage and then uses flashbacks from before impact which parallel the main plot. This reveals the story and characters as the movie progresses, as well as timing the main visual climax (the plane crash itself) to coincide with the culmination of the main character’s emotional crash.
It’s a great movie from a thoroughly melodramatic book. While a lot of directors and screenwriters are limited by their source material, sometimes they do manage to transcend it!
EZ
Have to disagree with you here. I think the book much, much better than the movie. Don’t get me wrong – TDOTJ is my all-time favorite thriller, and Fred Zinneman’s film is wonderful (ignore the awful remake), but, having read the book (and re-read too many times to count), the film seems awfully abbreviated and incomplete by comparison.
Heck, even including the book in this thread {“Crappy book…”) seems blasphemous.
I would vehemently disagree. Everything that’s great about the movie is right there in the book, plus many great and wonderful scenes that just couldn’t be crammed into a two-hour movie.
IIRC, wasn’t the book called “Who Killed (Murdered?) Roger Rabbit”? Seems like it would have been an awfully short movie that way… 
I know I’ve posted this in a similar thread before - Last of the Mohicans. While it’s not a *great * movie, it’s at least watchable. The book, on the other hand, is completely unreadable.
The book was Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, by Gary Wolfe, and it was vastly different from the movie. It revolved around printed comics, rather than filmed cartoons, and the wjhole Judge Doom subplot was missing. And the guilty party was different. It definitely was a pretty good book. The movie was such a different animal that I hesitate to say “crappy book, good movie”.
That said, I think the movie was a lot better than the book. It is not only an animation tour de force that demands repeated viewings (step through the animated portions slowly – they’re simply crammed with gags that you’ll miss otherwise – The literal “cattle call” at the beginning (with different kinds of cows), the “cow pie” at the entrance to Toontown, “Acme Overused Gags” (not merely “used” gags, but “overused”), “Porky’s All-Beef Sausages”, etc.) . It’s also a brilliant analysis of the purpose and place of animated cartoons in American culture. And Jessica Rabbit is the sexiest creature, animated or otherwise, ever put on the screen.
Wolfe wrote a sequel, in the wake of the film, and apparentkly based on the film rather than his earlier book, but I never read it.
Nope, I like to read a book apart from the movie that was styled after it and I try not to compare the two. I am several hundred pages into teh book and nothing has really happened other than Bourne whining about “oh no! I might be a killer!” Ugh. Have some action in a book for the love of God! Make the plot move! Introduce some characters! Have them do something! Sitting in a hotel room isn’t entertaining or interesting.
As it has been noted in the thread, sometimes a movie’s best bet is to use the source material as little as possible.
You like the book and hate the movie. I’m the opposite. That’s why they both sell I guess. :rolleyes:
I found the book versions of The Joy Luck Club, The Bourne Identity, The Princess Bride, Hannibal, and Misery all to be superior to the movie versions adapted from them.
Hannibal in particular was especially disappointing due the altered ending. I find the ending of the book to be far more compelling than the rather generic ending the movie presented.
While not crap books by any means, I think the movie versions of The Bridge on the River Kwai and Field of Dreams (based on the book Shoeless Joe) both improved greatly upon their source material, and IIRC the authors of the books thought so as well.
It would appear that Pierre Boulle belongs on the list of writers who improved when writing the screenplay version. However, despite the screen credits, Boulle had nothing to do with the screenplay for Bridge; he didn’t even speak English at the time. The screen credit was a condition of the sale of the novel. The screenplay was entirely written by Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman, who took Boulle’s rather ordinary POW camp novel and turned it into something truly great.
Queer Eye For The River Kwai?
And?
He portrays a small group of Arabs as terrorists. It also goes to great lengths to point out that the majority of Arabs are repulsed by their actions. I’m trying to figure out why the eye roll. Have Arabs never been terrorists?
As for the rest of what he writes, it can get painful. As someone else pointed out, he feels the need to stick a submarine into every damn novel. Beyond that, he has to go into extensive detail about the US Navy in each novel, including SoAF which had to do with Irish terrorists. I guess it’s a way for him to data dump all his “cool facts”.
Then again, based on what I’ve read of him, Clancy is a serious Ahole.
HINT: Hover over the emoticon in your Smilies bar and see what the popup tells you.
No, it doesn’t. You’re thinking of Patriot Games, although the terrorists from PG are mentioned in SoAF as having been recently executed.
I can.
Last of the Mohicans is a much better film than the overrated “classic” from which it was adapted.
There may also be an argument to be made that Apocalypse Now is better than Heart of Darkness, but I am not qualified to comment, having not read the novel. I can say that I found Conrad’s other “classic” book Lord Jim so slow and impenetrable that I couldn’t even bring myself to give Heart of Darkness a shot.
I also have to disagree, the movie and book to Fight Club were roughly equal in my eyes.
The bit about going from office to office with an AR-15 (?) was very entertaining in the book…
Spoke, I read Heart of Darkness years ago, and would have to say that Apocalypse Now is streets ahead, even if it’s only a loose adaptation.
HoD is also slow and inpenetrable but has the virtue of being shorter than his other books.
Glad I’m not the only one who liked Princess Bride the novel better than the movie. Not that the movie isn’t great, but I love the darker, cynical tone to the book.
I’m surprised so many Stephen King adaptions have been mentioned, but no one brought up Stand By Me.
I know what the eye roll emoticon means, I’m talking about you using it because Clancy uses a terrorist group composed of Arabs in his book. Last I checked such groups existed.
Ahhhh, yeah, Patriot Games had the extraneous military babble in it. SoAF obviously had military in it since it was central to the story.
Umm… The Long Road, I think you’re being whooshed here. RickJay was the Doper making the accusation of racism/facism for Tom Clancy’s works. EvilDeath was simply using sarcasm to make the same point you’re trying to make. For myself, the only one of Clancy’s books (and I can’t say I’ve read them all, after Executive Orders I pretty much stopped reading him.) with actual racist tones was Debt of Honor. Unlike his other baddies, those in DoH are described as being representative of Japanese society as a whole - or at least that was the impression I got from the book. While I’ll be the last to claim that modern Japanese society is immune to hypocracy, racism, sexism and other social ills, it IS changing. Of course what really burned me was when Clancy made the argument in the book that ALL manga was x-rated, and pretty gross. <shrug>
errrrrr, ok, I suck.
Makes sense now and answers my question.
I stopped reading his books after SoAF. I just did not find his work interesting anymore. To me, Red Storm Rising was his best book because it was straight military. It did not have Clancy trying to right romance as in some of his other books. The horrid crap in Patriot Games where Jack Ryan is working to fix the relationship of the Prince and Princess of Wales…Good God man!
Couldn’t agree more. The book’s ending was just brilliant. But you knew as soon as you read it that no major studio would have the stones to film it that way.
I did read it, shortly after I read the first book, but can’t remember a thing about it except that, early on, Jessica Rabbit claims that the events of the first book were an odd dream she’d had, and that Vivian Leigh was working in a car wash.