I read it in 1980. My first exposure to Stephen King, who I eventually lost interest in by 1990. Of the dozen or so books of his that I did read, for me The Shining is his best by far.
It’s also the only time any book or movie has scared the crap out of me. Lying on the couch in broad daylight, hesitating to turn the damn page. Became aware of my heart racing, and was embarrassed to realize I felt like I was eight-years old at a monster movie. I was THIRTY, for Christ’s sake. Put the book down, took a deep breath, and only then realized that the hairs on my neck were literally standing on end. First and last time I’ve ever had that sensation in any context.
All my usual choices (Jaws, The Godfather, Field of Dreams, Being There) are taken, but here are a few more:
The movie of The DaVinci Code is better than the book, solely because the book’s prose is so painful.
Full Metal Jacket is better than the novel it was based on (The Short-Timers), although a lot of that has to do with the strengths of the actors’ performances.
While definitely not true for the other movies in the series, I always thought that Prince Caspian was the weakest of the Narnia books and I thought the movie made some improvements on it.
Another one of his roles that fits the OP is Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. I never realized it was a comedy until Mary Harron’s excellent adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel. The novel is turgid, lumbering, and a snuff book in parts. The movie is much more smartly paced, gleefully making fun of the entire era and especially the shallow vapid, venal people he both is part of, and preys upon.
Really? I thought the changed ending of the Star Trek episode really added a lot to the basic story. Without that ending, the original story wasn’t terrible but it was pretty one-dimensional.
Thanks for the warning! I’ve been reading “The Princess Bride” on and off for a few months, have only gotten around 30 pages in and wondering all the time when it was going to get better.
I read As You Wish by Cary Elwes a few months ago. His first-person story of what it was like to make the film. (No spoiler here) It’s a really good little book. Fun to read.
I thought that that Roddenbery-inspired ending was his usual Pollyannish view of things. Sometimes the Bad Guys are just irredeemably Bad – as Fredric Brown makes very clear in his story. Carson does try to negotiate with the Outsider, difficult as that is under the circumstances, but he’s flatly turned down.
And Brown’s situation (and solution) are a helluva lot more clever than inventing gunpowder,
I wish Elwes had gotten a few better roles. He was good as Dudley in the virtually unknown Lady Jane Grey, and he was the perfect tool for sending up Robin Hood in Mel Brook’s film, but everything else he was in – not his performance – was second-rate.
I thought the 2016 ITV adaptation of Trollope’s “Doctor Thorne” was an improvement on the novel; it was more briskly paced and cut out some of the meandering subplots.
One book/movie that I always bring up in discussions like this is A Clockwork Orange. Both the book and movie are fantastic, but in different ways. The imagery in the movie is fantastic; the book fleshes out many of the scenes.
And, just to add on to kicking Stephen King, the movie Cujo was much better than the book, and the movie sucked.
I’ll spoiler this even though we’re talking about a story that was published in 1944 and a TV show that was broadcast in 1967.
On the enemies:
[spoiler]I feel the Gorn (from the TV show) were set up as more interesting characters. The show made them initially look like pure evil. But by the end of the show, we learned that they were just an ordinary alien race, no better or worse than humans, who had their own legitimate claims from their viewpoint. In Star Trek’s expanded canon, the Gorn end up being a close ally of the Federation.
I feel this is much better than Good Guys fighting Bad Guys, with the Outsiders being nothing more than a stereotype of evil who literally torture small animals.[/spoiler]
On how the hero won:
[spoiler]Another area where I feel the TV show did a better job. I liked the idea of Kirk winning the fight by making some gunpowder and building a small cannon. It showed that he won by using his brain.
Carson won because of luck. If the alien hadn’t tortured the lizard, if the lizard had remained conscious, if the lizard had died, if the alien hadn’t thrown the lizard through the barrier, if the lizard had died before Carson found it, if the other lizard hadn’t approached Carson - any one of those would have broken the chain of random events that led Carson to the solution to his problem. Along with his luck in being able to knock himself unconscious just long enough to get through the barrier but not long enough for the alien to kill him.
Carson won because he had a long string of luck. It was the alien who had a plan for winning and was building catapults.[/spoiler]
On the plots:
[spoiler]Brown’s story was one dimensional. A human and an alien are told to fight. They fight. The human wins. That’s literally the entire plot.
Coon’s story had a plot twist. A human and an alien are told to fight. They fight. The human wins. But then the human refuses to kill his opponent as he had been told to do. Then the superior aliens return and say this was the correct answer. So there turned out to be a surface level to the test, where the human and the alien fought each other, and a hidden level, where the Metrons were watching to see if one of the opponents would rise above the conditions they had been placed in.[/spoiler]
I have always liked The Wizard of Oz and the Lord of the Rings movies better than their respective books. In both cases the books are great, the movie are great; I just like the movies better. Same for Hunger Games and Harry Potter.
I think the The Thing(1982 film) is better than the short story “Who Goes There Are?” it is based on. And the Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life” is better than the short story it is based on.
