I enjoyed David Lynch’s Dune more than the book as well. The additions were interesting and appropriate, from the Mentat’s recitation before drinking the Juice of Sapho, to Baron Harkonnen’s awful skin disease.
The kickass sf thriller Limitless is much different from, and IMHO quite a bit better than, the book which inspired it, Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields.
Likewise the excellent Boer War adventure and court-martial drama Breaker Morant, adapted from a book and play.
Agreed. I think the movie of Patriot Games is also much better than the book.
And the 2006 film is better than both.
Well, true if you have a short attention span and no desire to make the effort to at least read the invented languages. The trilogy does not exactly lend itself to dramatization and the result is simply different. Unfortunately, films tend to trivialize, and my feeling is the LOTR is inherently prone to that.
I suppose that it wold not have been possible to have made a decent LOTR more than a few years earlier, given that it requires a large amount of good CGI, but to the more jaundiced you could say that it looked far too much like many another fantasy film and it was being copied before it even came out. In other words, a bad case of deja vu.
You could say the same about Dune, although frankly the film was weird, but then it described a very weird world. Dune is of course full of rather pseudo-Arabic language and references, which the film left out, but I saw the opposite treatment in a made for TV mini-series that covered just the first book in much more detail. After a time, I felt that it was excruciating detail.
Elmore Leonard’s ‘Rum Punch’ and Tarantino’s ‘Jackie Brown’. Both sensational.
The movie took (the better) bits from two books and cut the plot down to a simple defeat and revenge story, while using great visuals. The books are lengthy, and probably too verbose for most tastes.
I once read an author (S.M. Stirling perhaps) who said that an author working in a fantasy, science fiction, or alternative history setting should develop all of the details about how his world works - and then put them away in a drawer and write the story.
Authors from the 18C, such as Defoe, tend to be very verbose. I think most of us have only read RC in abridged editions, and no wonder.
As for Dickens, many of the 19C authors were paid by the word, and were also expected to crank out x pages for next week for whichever literary magazine was publishing them. This applies to authors such as Trollope, Bennett and Hardy as well, plus there are doubtless many more. Too bad if they wanted to rewrite anything.
I think The Princess Bride is often cited as an example where the movie is better than the book. Goldman was already a successful screenwriter when he wrote the novel, and when he wrote the screenplay he was able to improve upon his earlier work. But I like the novel a lot too.
For a more recent example, I would point to Crazy Rich Asians. The characters and the plot are really deepened and enriched in the movie. In particular, the character played by Michelle Yeoh is much more complex, sympathetic, and interesting than in the book, but that is far from the only improvement.
When a movie based on a short story, comparing the two is probably not going to be a good comparison. The movie just has to do so much more to flesh out its story.
If you think that the movie version of The Lord of the Rings is better than the book, perhaps reading isn’t for you. (I refer to it as one book, because that’s what Tolkien had in mind, although it was published as a trilogy.) LOTR is one of the great books of the 20th century. Its influence is enormous.
True, but the film is also fantastic. Mind you, I think the book is better, but when they are both A++, the edge can be counted as personal preference.
But you must admit that Troy is a lot more exciting than that dull old Iliad, and Man of La Mancha improves enormously on Don Quixote.
I preferred the movie version of The Lord of the Rings over the books. And I have **read **the books. Or attempted to read them I should say. I don’t doubt they are great or that they have had great literary influence. The books really aren’t an easy read so it’s not hard to see why people would prefer the movies to them. I think the books were written on level above all but the most serious readers could enjoy.
See, this is why trying to engage Ringheads is a waste of time. If you don’t absolute adore their Precious as much as they do, you are immediately called names and insulted as to your intelligence, attention span and general reading ability.
For the record: I hold 4 Secondary Teaching Credentials, including one in English. I also have GATE and CLEP certifications and 33 years experience teaching at the high school level. So any random schmo out there who thinks I don’t have either the attention span, brains or anything else it would take to read LotR can stuff it.
I still liked the books and found the movies boring.
And I respect your opinion. It is one shared by a large number of people.
Just not me. 
Sorry, silenus, I couldn’t resist the cheap shot. Obviously LOTR, like most classics, appeals to some but not others, and there are some very literate people who don’t care for it.
In terms of comparing the book to the movies, though, I think they’re like the movie adaptation of Moby-Dick: The movies are excellent, and the source book is one that many people find boring, just as I find Moby-Dick boring. But I have to admit that the book is a classic with enormous richness and that many people have found deeply satisfying, and that it’s unlikely that the movie adaptation has the same stature. I would argue that LOTR is similar.
I read As You Wish last year and really enjoyed it; on seeing how much Cary Elwes liked the Goodman novel, decided that it was worth looking at. I didn’t expect to be as disappointed as I was.
Yes, he strikes me as a case of sadly underutilized talent. I’ve heard that he’s good in Glory, but it wasn’t that big a role.
You actually enjoyed the Lucy Mancini subplot?
I did.
Oh come now. You started out by saying “There I said it,” indicating that you were fishing for that kind of response. And you never actually engaged, you just kept goading and goading by repeatedly saying they were boring without adding anything of value to your response. And you weren’t “immediately called names,” it took almost 100 posts and five days before someone really did that.
As a teacher, I’m surprise that you’ve done what you’ve done here: denigrate a work merely because you personally find it boring. How much sympathy do you have for students who insist something is “bad” just because they find it boring?:dubious:
Where did I ever say the books were “bad?” Please quote me, because I don’t recall ever posting that. I said I found the movies to be better than the books. You are the one that immediately jumped to the conclusion that I thought the books were “bad.”