I have to disagree. I’ve read “Godfather” several times. I love the book. I have attempted to watch the movies on several occasions, but I just cannot get more than an hour into the first movie before being bored shitless.
Not to mention the costuming is all wrong, wrong, WRONG! Not an empire waist to be had in the whole thing.
I saw an interview with Ann Rutherford, who payed Lydia in that version, and she said that her experiences in P&P and GWTW as Careen inspired her to collect props and try to preserve them because it horrified her seeing beautiful objects butchered. She said that the prop people would come back from Europe with caseloads and crates of fine antiques, and treat them carelessly. She told an anecdote about how in P&P one of the actors (might have been Olivier) was sitting at a mahogany desk and the height of it was too high for the shot, so rather than take time to readjust the gigantic camera, they just sawed the legs off the desk. :eek:
Hannibal. His parting of ways with Clarice was much better than the book’s drawn-out ending.
*The Graduate.*Charles Webb earnestly believed in Benjamin, while Mike Nichols kind of didn’t.
The Pope of Greenwich Village. Vincent Patrick wrote both. The principal difference is in a scene where Charlie discovers that Diane, his pregnant fiancee, has absconded with the loot. In the book, Charlie calmly reads her letter explaining why she did this and uses the moment for calm introspection. In the movie, he runs around the apartment screaming while we get a voiceover of Diane reading the letter, a huge improvement.
Well, granted, but (a) it costs him no gold; and (b) he got paid in something, which I’d figure means he acquired more gold before the big day; and (c) unlike the flaw of a heist seeming flatly unworkable as a matter of logistics, it’s a little weird and kind of hilarious to think that this flaw goes away if he takes the time to utter a single quip about, uh, also liking platinum, or something.
(The guy does like other stuff, right? He genuinely enjoys, say, mint juleps?)
I’ve seen this expressed several times here in the last few days, and I just don’t get it! I find the novel to far surpass the movie, which I also love.
The Lost World, however… both movie and book are abominations. (“They cut you from the gymnastics team?” or whatever… blecch.)
I agree with you.
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If we expand the definition to include graphic novels…
Both Watchmen and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Even with the second film’s flaws, it’s an improvement over the source. Alan Moore comes up with great ideas, but his execution can be sorely lacking.
Oh - I almost forgot.
**The Wolf of Wall Street. **
I’ve actually read the original book by Jordan Belfort. He is a horrible writer. So many passages in the book are plagiarized almost word-for-word from Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, which Mr. Belfort would doubtlessly describe as “an homage”, but which is really just blatant copying. When he’s not describing his sexual encounters in pornographic detail, or describing how unbelievably glorious it feels to snort, inject, or shove up his ass various drugs, he’s complaining about how stupid the “WASPs” are and how much he hates them and how much smarter Jews are (I wish I was joking.) It’s like he views his career and that of his accomplices as an epic quest on behalf of the Jews to outsmart the Gentiles. Oh, I forgot, not all of Belfort’s compatriots are Jewish, there’s also one Chinaman, as he is repeatedly described. It’s just a terrible book. Terrible. It’s not the content of the book that makes it terrible, or even the character of the narrator (though I would agree that he is a shitty person) - it’s the way the book is written. It’s just not good.
The movie, on the other hand, is a fantastic piece of work by Scorsese and the large ensemble cast. The chaos and debauchery comes to life spectacularly on the screen, and the characters are memorable as hell. It’s just a great movie.
I think this scenario might apply to a lot of movies that are based on memoirs by people who were not professional writers.
Die.
Now please.
I would say, A Clockwork Orange.
I can win this argument with a single word: Radagast.
: mic drop :
I was going to post this, except, I didn’t much care for the book. There were some interesting notions brought up in the book, almost all of which were covered in the movie, but better.
Also, the androids were such jerks! They absolutely needed to be hunted down and killed, they were menaces to society. There’s none of the moral ambiguity you find in ‘Bladerunner’. The book seems a bit shallow after seeing the movie.
The Hunt for Red October. The book was okay, but really was a huge heap of technobabble masquerading as plot. The characters were thinly drawn, the dialogue was wooden, and Clancy can’t write an action scene for shit. The movie fixed all those flaws and was fantastic.
The same’s probably true for all other Clancy movies, even though I haven’t read the books for any of them.
Yes, when I was young I read every Bond I could get my hands on.
This was just a short story, I think, but it was WAAAY TOO LOOOONG.
“Octopussy”, the story, on the other hand, was short and sweet, had a bit of melancholy. Absolutely unsuitable for a movie of course. But they had long since abandoned any pretense of nodding to the written works by then. Probably started that with ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. 
The Sweet Hereafter. The book is pretty good but the film is outstanding. The brilliant Sarah Polley (as a teenager) plays a key role. The script also includes references to the Pied Piper that subtly underscore some important themes. These references don’t appear at all in the novel.
Interestingly enough I almost threw down Fellowship of the Ring because I was so bored with it UNTIL the Council of Elrond. It was then when I got sucked in and then ingested the rest of the books. It felt like finally something was happening.
IIRC, Radagast only shows up in the Hobbit movies. He’s not in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
You couldn’t be more wrong!
cite:
::sticks fingers in ears::
LALALALALALALALALALLALA
Maybe it works better in French, but the English translation I read was pretty tedious. Using hypnotism to reveal past lives is a pretty hacky exposition technique. I’m glad we didn’t have to sit through that in the movie.
The framing story was fun, though.
I’d like to suggest the Made-For-TV version of “The Stand”. It’s a little cheazy in places, but parts of it I really enjoyed, while getting through the King tome was work.
The Stand was an awesome novel and a really good exercise in character creation. The mini series wasn’t bad but it wasn’t anywhere nearly as good as the book. Perhaps the upcoming reboot will change this.
I liked the movie Mr. Holmes better than the novel it was based on, A Slight Trick of the Mind, by Mitch Cullin.
The book was good, but I felt that the author wanted to make sure his readers knew he was writing Serious Literature and not a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, so he mostly avoided the detective story structure of a Conan Doyle mystery, created a very downbeat plot and ending, and just generally chose to write a depressing novel that’s mostly a meditation on old age and regret. Well done, but not my cup of tea.
The movie, on the other hand, used the same basic plot threads but pulled them all together at the end, solved a mystery, made a real human out of Holmes, and ended on a much happier note than the book.
Also, Ian McKellen as a 94-year-old Sherlock is just magnificent.