101 Dalmatians. When I finally got around to reading the book in adulthood, I was surprised at how much it differed from the movie, and I have to admit I think Disney did a better job of telling the story.
Utter snobbish nonsense. SR is basic King; create real everyday characters and put them in difficult situations.
REally? Did you read them in English? I enjoyed them, very much, and valued the movies primarily as a way to enjoy the books differently. Well, I did enjoy comparing and contrasting the two movies.
Heretic.
Maybe, but the movie introduces its own flaw. Goldfinger loves gold (“its brilliance, its divine heaviness”), not the things he can buy with it. He welcomes any enterprise that will increase his stock. Irradiating the gold in Fort Knox will hurt his ambitions. It won’t get him any more gold, and by making gold more valuable it will become harder for him to get more.
I think the movie “Gorky Park” was much better than Martin Smith’s book, which suffered from late, meandering plot contortions.
About “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand By Me” - I prefer the original story versions, which were excellent.
Yes, I had thought of posting the same thing, but it has been long enough since I read the book that I couldn’t remember the extra details, just that after reading it I thought the movie improved things by removing those subplots. I have the same vaguely remembered opinion about A Simple Plan. And Where the Heart Is. (Don’t judge me, I’ll watch anything with Natalie Portman.) That book was a total mess.
A lot of these opinions on which of the two are better, though, I think are based on which order you originally consumed them. In the three above examples, I saw the movies years before I ever read the books–if the order had been flipped, so too might have been my opinion.
I couldn’t either. But for me the movie has had a heavy-handed visit from the Suck Fairy, too.
I’m also in the boat of not being a fan of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books–never even attempted to read them (fantasy not being a strong genre reading intrest for me) until only a few years ago, after the LotR movies came out–I quit on Hobbit around halfway through, quit on Fellowship probably 1/20th of the way through. Tolkien IMHO created interesting worlds but wrote very clumsy dialogue and prose.
Well, I liked the Hobbit and LOTR books much better than the film versions. The films grew incredibly tedious as just so many more mindless action movies.
You are dead to me.
The Ten Commandments
Oooh, disagree. I think the plot of Moby Dick is pretty threadbare, though many of the characters are developed enough to make the story interesting.
But the chapters about whales etc. are so great! To me, they seem like a mirror image of Ahab’s dark obsession: Melville is chasing down his own white whale, which is the giant, sprawling, all-over-the-place novel he’s writing. But unlike Ahab, Melville loves his whale, is fascinated by it – wants to look at it from every conceivable angle.
Without Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” or Chapter 56, “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars,” we’d have a semi- interesting short novel, or the bones of an adequate movie or miniseries.
And we wouldn’t have this, from Chapter 65, “The Whale as a Dish”:
So fun to read Melville being cuckoo for cetaceans.
Huck Finn has a similar dynamic: Twain’s best, funniest writing comes through when the plot goes on hiatus.
Well put. One of the best novellas in American fiction, in my view, is Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. I cannot say that Robert Redford’s movie version is better than the novella; but it’s easily as good.
Gibberish, sheer gibberish.
The Wizard of Oz. I didn’t read the book until I was an adult. Dull, boring, etc.
Couldn’t agree more about Holly Golightly. My book club recently read the novella, and I really despise that chick!
And Holly and Jenny really do have alot in common now that you mention it, as both are supposed to be running away from a traumatized past. In the movie Forrest Gump, you could sort of understand why Jenny was running once they showed you how horrific her home life was, and she DID pray to God to be turned into a bird, so she (in her mind) was flying as far and fast away as she could. None of that childhood abuse was mentioned in the book, so if you didn’t like her in the movie, you’ll want to run her over in the book.
- Krieg der Knöpfe - War of the Buttons War of the Buttons (1962) - IMDb The old b/w Version.
The book: a simple tale of children continuing a feud between two French villages, haha, isn’t it funny how Kids are Kids (being cruel to each other for no reason: the narrator doesn’t mind at all).
The movie: an example of how stupid a generational feud is, how brutal war is, and how violence Feeds this.
- She-Devil She-Devil (1989) - IMDb
A man leaves his normal (ugly) housewife for a good-looking author. The woman gets revenge.
The book Ends with the woman literally taking the place of the author - after ruining her, she buys her Villa cheap and gets plastic surgery to look like the author. That’s the opposite of empowering.
The movie, Roseanne empowers herself and others with her employment agency, her husband gets some insight in prison, and the Family is re-united after People have learned from their Errors. Much more empowering.
Nobody’s mentioned the movie Apocalypse Now, which was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.
I loved the movie until the end when it fell apart. Mainly because I saw it when I was 16 and was a HUGE fan of The Doors. The sound track “The End” was the perfect mood.
The book, I re-read within the past year or so. I can’t decide which was “better” because, frankly, they were both flawed in various ways. But, worth the slog. Both were talking about historical horrors, real stuff: the Belgian Congo in one case, and Vietnam War in the other. Both did a great job of setting the mood. Both were vague about what actually happened and why. I just could never really understand the personality of the main character, in both instances named Kurtz.
Worse than you can imagine then.
I have my own admittedly weird reasons for not getting into fantasy, but even having watched the movie (which helps) I still couldn’t get through it.
My vote goes to Jurassic Park. A good read in and of itself, but the movie is just so, so much better.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but the movie “The Bridge On The River Kwai” is markedly superior to the book (which is OK, but lacks the excitement and vivid characters of the film, as well as having by comparison an unsatisfying ending).
My contribution is Dr. Zhivago. I’ve never been able to get even halfway through the novel, but I thought the movie was a breathtaking epic. My heart broke when the girl breaks down at the end, sobbing that “she let go of my hand”, when she got lost in the crowd.