Most of the Harry Potter movies. I saw the first two or three before reading the books and was very disappointed with the books when I got around to reading them. I might not have been the target audience for the books, but I was definitely in the audience for the movies. I read the next book or two before seeing the movies and they fell pretty flat for me, and spoiled several important moments in the movies, so I stopped reading the books and just watched the last few movies.
The World According to Garp.
The movie only hints at the novels Garp writes. You see the 1 minute visualization of Magic Gloves and you fill in your own book. You get the point, the sadness, the beauty of it without having to read it. (If that’s what it was about, I like it. -Jenny) In the novel, not only do you get (have?) to read The Pension Griillparzer, which not only not as good as Magic Gloves could be, it sucked. It was boring and tiresome.
After Garp dies, the novel tells the fates of all the main and secondary players. While somewhat interesting, it makes the novel not end. It just sort of trails off. The movie rightly ends as Garp dies.
One thing I really liked that was added to the movie was the echos of minor points throughout the movie. I could see some arguing it’s trite (probably Irving 
)I liked it. It unified the movie, made it more than the collection of vignettes the novel is.
Dan Brown can’t write. Fortunately for Dan, Tom Hanks can act.
The ending of the movie The African Queen was better and more satisfying that the book.
I liked the book Presumed Innocent, but I found the movie riveting.
And I echo what was said about The Godfather movie, which was great, while the book was good.
Regards,
Shodan
I have not read the book but doesn’t it end with the shark just swimming away out to sea rather than getting blown up by Brody? I can see why ending the book with a massive anti-climax might work on a literary level but if the movie had ended like that, the audience would’ve burned down the theater.
As I remember,
the shark just died at the end, without Brody doing anything. I think it was supposed to have died from an accumulation of injuries. Also, Hooper (the oceanographer) didn’t survive in the book.
“Babette’s Feast” (late 1980s Foreign Language Oscar winner) was too.
I stand shoulder to shoulder with you, DigitalC!
As a teen, I was a role-playing, fantasy-reading, socially-outcast dork. And I couldn’t get through a single Tolkein novel. I tried again when I was older, and I still couldn’t. And this was a time when I read Faulkner for fun! I’m sorry. I know Tolkein is held in high regard here, and lots of people love his work, and that’s wonderful. I just couldn’t get into the books at all.
I found the movies to be very compelling and moving.
The Scarlet Pimpernel. The book was terrible and I couldn’t finish it. So much of the action takes place off the page that I just gave up on it.
By all accounts Tristram Shandy, but I’ve not read the book.
The Thing is significantly better than Who Goes There?; which isn’t all that bad itself.
I came in here to say this. I liked reading The Hobbit but LotR was impossible. The movies distilled out the key stuff.
Good pick.
How is that different than the film?
My friends and I came to the conclusion a few years back that Jenny is one of the worst human beings we are supposed to have sympathy for in film (Holly Golightly is in that conversation as well).
I’d actually argue the exact opposite. I loved the books and find the movies to be mostly meh aside from a few standouts (Prizoner of Azkaban, which is also my favorite book, The Half Blood Prince, Deathly Hallows pt 1). They just don’t capture the (for lack of a better word) magic and charm of the world. Nor do they, though you’d imagine they’d have to due to the length of the books, adequately deal with the breadth of the world Rowling has created.
Star Trek adapted Fredric Brown’s short story “Arena” into an episode of the series. The basic structure was the same but they made a major change in the ending - and the new ending was much better than the original.
I thought both versions of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo were much better than the book. I found it such hard, unsatisfying reading that I didn’t bother with the rest of the trilogy. The movies were a pleasant surprise.
Similarly I find most of James Ellroy’s stuff unreadable so I think the movie of L.A Confidential is quite an achievement.
I’ve read the book, and I don’t agree. The characters in the book are far more interesting, and the humour and satire is more varied than the movie, and even more over the top.
However, the movie is really good. It captures a lot of the zaniness of the book. It’s faithful to the spirit of the book.
You should try reading the abridged version by William Goldman. It has a much better pacing.
Not sure if a book or just a story, but Shawshank Redemption (the movie) was better than anything Stephen King could produce, ever.
IMHO, Field of Dreams is better than W.P Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe”. In the book, there are two long subplots that are left out of the movie that kind of sidetrack the narrative.
The most significant of those, is that the narrator, Ray Kinsella, has a long-lost twin brother who ran away from home at sixteen to join a carnival and returned to Iowa as the owner/manager of the carnival during the novel. It was this twin, not Ray, who had the conflicted relationship with his father and needed closure. Ray himself got along fine with his father, and stayed in Iowa his whole life. Oh, and that movie ending? In the book, Ray not only suspected that the field could bring his father back, he actually lobbied for it, telling Shoeless Joe he knew a good minor-league catcher who could play a few games.