It would have to be; it is one of the few books I could not finish reading.
And I’ll finish almost anything once I got started.
The Prestige was a great movie, and a great book. It has a resolution that you might think would make it less watchable/readable, but it was just as good the second time through (both reading and watching) for me.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a very good movie that almost totally misses the point of one of the most fantastic and beautiful books ever written.
Apt Pupil is also in “Different Seasons”, and that was also made into a moive. All, IMHO, are better as movies. “Stand By Me” is one of my favorite movies of all time, and it (along with “Shawshank Redemption”) represent some of the only times I can recall when a movie added background or plot to a story in a book.
(Admittedly, I can’t recall details, but that was my present sense impression at the time I read “Different Seasons”)
Sleepers was a good movie and book.
East of Eden
Forrest Gump, the movie was better than the book or I should say more believable than the book
The Beach
Flowers for Algernon, I think the movie was made for TV and called Charlie
A River Runs Through It
Bringing Down the House (not the one with Queen Latifa, but the one that is supposed to be out in theaters under the name 21, from what I can tell from the previews the movie doesn’t look anything like the book)
Bridge to Terebithia
Empire Falls
Mother Night
The Virgin Suicides
The Kite Runner The movie followed the book to a certain extent but reading the book would give a bit more detail.
That would be Charly, starring Cliff Robertson. I haven’t seen it, but the original novelette (not the full novel) is one of the best things I’ve ever read.
For another, see my previous rants about Johnny Mnemonic. Again, the original story has a lot more depth and texture than the movie - the “technical boy” speech, the unfinished dome over New York, the Lo-tecs’ Killing Floor, and more.
The movie was good, and I’d totally watch it again. But the book was waaaay better. The book filled in a lot more of the back story with the main characters, and had a lot of interesting side stories. It was also much less ambiguous about Ruth & Idgie’s relationship. But I am happy that I saw the movie first, because it let me picture Mary-Louise Parker as Ruth and Mary Stuart Masterson as Idgie while I was reading.
Sorry, I totally forgot to answer you. As Annie X-mas said, Mr. Bridge is just as good as Mrs. Bridge. With Newman and Woodward, the movie was good, but should have been better.
I would also recommend Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Even though the movie totally missed the point of the book by misunderstanding Ripley and giving his “gayness” a modern interpretation, the movie wasn’t too bad. The book has some excellent insights into striving, psychological yearning and personal incompleteness that were missing from the movie but could have been captured had someone really tried.
Another vote for reading the Orson Scott Card novelization of The Abyss, which gave a lot of very useful and interesting backstory (Cameron showed it to the actors during filming, IIRC, to help them get into character). Ditto the Alan Dean Foster novelizations of Alien and Star Wars (the latter released under George Lucas’s name), and Arthur C. Clark’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, written more or less concurrently with the filming of the movie. It answers a lot of questions left by the movie, and is a pretty good scifi novel in its own right.
The movies based on Tom Clancy’s *Patriot Games * and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings are, by large, quite a bit better than the source material, IMHO (with some quibbles aside). But reading the original Tolkien, of course, is highly recommended.
I once was reading Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and slowly ground to a halt. Then I saw the movie, which I liked, decided to take another stab at the book, and it just flew by. Made a big difference, and they really compliment each other.
Not a movie yet, but…
I just saw Wicked on Broadway. I haven’t read Maguire’s book. I wonder if my only real peeve about the story–that Elphaba (I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here) came into her power and infamy mere days before Dorothy arrived, not the decades that common sense would dictate–is also the case in the book? I could definitely see that being a conceit of “stage time,” like Jack McCoy and Det. Green having the same partners for the entire duration of every case they ever worked, but is it the case in the book as well?