Diggstown with Louis Gossett, Jr. and James Woods was a great, fun movie. The book, which I sought for years after seeing it, was absolute garbage.
I have to disagree with Sampiro on one thing, though – while I absolutely loved the book Cider House Rules, I liked the movie very much. It’s such a wandering story, in the book. I was initially miffed at the exclusion of the character Melony, but I thought the moviemakers did a very nice job of compressing a story that really stretches over 40 years into a story that happens over a period of one or two years. Is the movie as good? No, but it stands on its own as a decent little picture, I think.
I wasn’t even able to finish the book, but I loved the movie, Dr. Zhivago. I cried at the end of the movie when the young girl discovered that the military guy was her uncle.
In Trainspotting, the addition of some sort of basic plot and the use of one main character pulled everything together a bit better than the book pulled off. Also, it’s far easier to understand spoken Scottish accents than to read them, mentally pronounce them, then try to figure out what the fuck they’re saying.
I forgot to add my contribution: A Clockwork Orange. I started the book about fifty times, but couldn’t deal with having to flip back to the glossary every other word. At least in the movie, hearing it spoken in context helped a great deal with the deciphering.
*Starship Troopers the Book * is a mediocre genre piece; *Starship Troopers the Film * is a viciously effective, multilayered satire on the warmongering dark side of the American psycho. Scuse me, psyche.
Which reminds me: *American Psycho the Book * is a mediocre genre piece with a mildly interesting pomo twist; American Psycho the Film is a viciously effective, multilayerd satire on the metaphorical violence behind the American capitalist dream.
And for the record, Forrest Gump the Film is a dreadful and insulting piece of cynical garbage that gives people permission not to feel guilty about not caring about anything; *Forrest Gump the Novel * is a viciously effective satire on the mindless follower and non-thinker that is, to some people, the archetypical American.
Comic fans will probably descend upon me like avenging angels, but I thought Road to Perdition was a better movie than graphic novel, although the book is still quite good.
Lifeforce is a generally rotten movie, but, if you’re in the right mood, it’s an enjoyably fast-moving piece of trash. It’s adapted from Colin Wilson’s The Space Vampires, which, despite the title, is one of the dullest books I’ve ever read. (And I’ve read linguistics textbooks.)
Starship Troopers the book is a sharp, gritty look at a future militaristic state and what it does to its citizens.
Starship Troopers the movie is an over-the-top campfest dedicated to mocking Heinlein because the so-called auteur is a simplistic-minded political idiot.
I think the Aragorn’s character in the movie is much improved over the book where he’s a bit of a prig: “Hi, I’m Aragorn THE HEIR OF ELENDIL! BOW BEFORE ME!”
I like the movie for Fight Club much better than the book. It’s a very visual story, I think, and actually seeing the fights with Tyler from the narrator’s perspective vs. that of everyone else was pretty interesting. Especially the scene where they’re fighting in the garage, and you see bits and pieces of the fight on the camera monitors in the security office.
Also, I didn’t like the explaination the book gave for the origin of the fat. It just made me mad.
1983’s The Hunger may be my favorite mediocre movie of all time. I’ve watched it again and again, and for a long time I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t a better movie. A huge amount of musical, acting, and production talent went into this film. I believe it features Catherine Deneuve’s only English-language lead role. That alone was enough to make me interested. And yet the whole project just didn’t seem to work out all that well. Solid two-star material, IMHO.
I figured that reading the book might give me some further insight. Heck, maybe the book would be a lot better (the book often is), and since I liked the movie even though I didn’t think it was particularly good I’d be sure to like the book if it was better than the movie! Well, turns out the book sucked. I read the whole thing in about two hours, because I enjoyed it so little I didn’t want it to take longer than it had to. If Whitley Strieber was really abducted and anally probed by aliens then it’s hardly worse than he deserves after writing something that bad.
Amazingly, the film script managed to be remarkably faithful to the novel while improving upon it in many ways. The casting was spot-on given the character descriptions, and even minor details like the names of secondary characters were kept the same. Every problem with the movie’s story comes directly from the book (including the pointless lab-monkey subplot that is suddenly abandoned partway through), and the screenwriters managed to work around most of the worst flaws in the book’s story. And those endless scenes of curtains blowing that made the movie seem to drag on and on? Well, those curtains are actually described in the book!
So I solved the mystery – the film The Hunger wasn’t all that good because it was crippled by lousy source material. It’s a mid-range movie made from a bad book. I think the screenwriting team made the best possible script they could from The Hunger without turning it into one of those “adaptations” that shares little but the title and basic premise with the original novel. It’s a shame that better novels haven’t always been treated with such respect.
The definitive example of the phenomenon, as mentioned upthread, is The Godfather: the novel is quintessential crappy summer beachside reading, the movie a true masterpiece.
Thoughared little in common, I actually enjoyed The Sum of All fears the movie better than the book. I thought the book was much too long, and often boring. I found the movie to be rather suspensful.
And I agree with the LOTR trilogy. I only read the fellowship, and after that I decided to just stick with the movies.
The movie version of The Firm, based on the John Grisham book, impressed me by greatly improving the ending of the story. Based on my reading of the book, I was expecting a long, rather confusing, chase scene. Instead, the screenwriter came up with a “trick ending” that wrapped everything up in about 30 seconds, and actually worked!
