They were certainly in the books. They were completely different in the movie from how I imagined them too. I imagined that the staircases were a bit more “sneaky,” changing when no one was looking so subtly confuse everyone. I didn’t visualize a large multi-story hall, but still, it was quite cool to see someone else’s vision. 
Two examples from Elmore Leonard: Out of Sight and Jackie Brown. Both were good books, but both were great movies, thanks largely to the direction of Steven Soderbergh and Tarantino, respectively.
I know there’s contention about these two, especially Jackie Brown, but I loved both of them. Out of Sight is in my top ten films of the 90s.
Not this banal inanity again… :rolleyes:
In Goldfinger the novel, the title character plans to use a small nuke to blow open the gold depository at Fort Knox and rob the place.
In the movie, Sean Connery rightfully dismisses this idea as patently stupid and then learns the modified plan is to detonate the nuke inside the depository, in order to destroy/irradiate the gold, causing economic upheaval in the U.S. as well as making Goldfinger’s own gold reserves more valuable.
Originally posted by lissener:
Are you fucking kidding me? I think maybe you have mixed the two up. While the movie is very good and Christian Bale gives a great performance,the movie pales before the genius of the book. Although the movie is largely narrated by Patrick Bateman it is not completely, but in the book you experience everything he experiences through his eyes, and slowly pick up the subtle nuances at the beginning of the book that “hey wait a minute, I think this guy is a complete sociopath”. And the book does the nearly impossible job of making you feel sympathy for the main character while the movie just falls short.
The movie might as well have a G rating compared to the brutal “in your face” frankness that the book delivers.
Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Much better than the original Andersen tale.
Contact the movie was a huge improvement over Carl Sagan’s novel. I’m a passionate defender of the film (and a devoted fan of Sagan’s nonfiction), but I wouldn’t recommend the book to anyone.
The Choirboys. The movie was really funny, the book more realistic and much less funny because of it.
Nobody’s mentioned The Princess Bride yet. I thought it was a very well done adaptation; it cut the unimportant stuff and kept all the great stuff. Which, interestingly, is what the book (very good in its own right) purports to do. Would that make the story twice-distilled? 
Hannibal the movie had a better ending than the book.
Now, now…
I know it has its fans, but the whole time I was reading it I kept thinking “this guy only wrote this book so that someone would make a movie out of it.” It felt really sloppy to me.
By the way, the above post refers to Fight Club. Forgot to add any reference to that.
Also, someone mentioned A Clockwork Orange. I don’t remember whether the movie was necessarily better, but I was very disappointed by the book, especially the ending. It seemed as though the author just got tired and looked for some easy way to end the story. Made me feel like I’d been fooled.
My, fast-moving thread.
For the record, I haven’t seen Manhunter, and I thought the book Hannibal was superior to the movie in every aspect, including the ending. Hey, I got a soft spot for the old psycho.
Red Dragon and Manhunter were both based on the same book (Red Dragon), so of course they are similiar. Manhunter came first and was way ahead of its time. Red Dragon more closely sticks to the book, whereas Manhunter left out a few things and kind of diverged from the book as the movie went a long. However, it should be mentioned that Red Dragon would never have been made, IMO, if it weren’t for the success of Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. They were feeding on the popular desire to see more Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal (Who was played by a different actor in Manhunter.)
Forrest Gump was the worst POS book ever written, yet the movie was pretty good (although too long, IMHO).
I had to fight to finish the book, that’s how bad it was.
The ending of the movie was certainly less conventional than that of the book, but it does change the meaning of the work in what strikes me as a self-contradictory way. If Alex is an unredeemable violent sociopath who will not and cannot possibly change of his own free will, then I don’t see how the government was wrong in what they did to him. The movie comes across to me as actually supporting mind-control experiments on prisoners – it’s the only chance we have of modifying their behavior! I don’t think this was Kubrick’s intent, but that was the feeling I got from it.
That said, many people do prefer the ending of the movie to that of the book. Or rather, the ending of the full-length, 21-chapter book. The old American edition had the last chapter chopped off, and that truncated version is the one Kubrick chose to base the film on.
I know I’ve done this before, although I didn’t see my post in the old thread linked on the first page.
Anyway, two of my favorite films that improve on the book are, IMHO:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, based on Muriel Spark’s novel. The book has a rather more episodic feel to it; things happen, and don’t have anything to do with the main plot. Sandy’s and Jenny’s imagined love letter from Miss Brodie to Mr. Lowther, for example: in the book, it gets buried under a rock and is never seen again; in the movie, it’s found years later to create crises in the relationships between Miss Brodie and Mr. Lowther, and between Miss Brodie and the headmistress (plus, the scene where the headmistress reads the letter aloud to the two is one of the funniest in the film). Also, there are six schoolgirls in the novel, but only four girls in the film, which helps to focus the story on a smaller group. The combining of some of the girls’ characteristics also gives the less developed ones a little more depth: pretty Jenny is merged with Rose, “who is known for sex,” and hopeless Mary MacGregor is also the girl who runs off to get killed in Spain.
Maurice, based on E.M. Forster’s novel. Another episodic story gets pulled into a stronger narrative focus on film. The key improvement to me here is in the character of Clive. In the book, he just sort of turns straight and loses interest in Maurice. In the film, he’s terrified when one of his also-gay friends is arrested for picking up a man in a bar and, like Oscar Wilde, sent to prison; after that, Clive dumps Maurice, goes into the closet, and gets married, which seems much more plausible to me than his suddenly having a different sexuality for no reason.
Thought you might enjoy this quote…
Cite
So in truth, nobody was really sure how Fight Club was going to be made into a movie. Kind of defeats the idea that the book was written specifically to be a movie.
No offense intended for my earlier (snarky) comment. It was meant in good fun.
I notice nobody’s mentioned The Passion yet.
I think the ending of The Color Purple was more believable in the movie than in the book. I just couldn’t see how Celie could have forgiven Mr. after all he did to her.