Wow. I had no idea The Phantom of the Opera was based on a book until now.
I respect your right to be wrong. The movies - especially the extended editions - are mostly a worthy and magnificent retelling in a different medium. But Jackson majorly fluffs the ending; Tolkein does not.
My biggest problem is that Christine is a little idiot who falls for deceptions that wouldn’t fool a five year old today. Raoul isn’t much better, falling for the Phantom’s “Lost in the Desert” illusion. I love how Terry Pratchett’s Discworld book Masquerade sends up the whole Phantom thing.
Actually, I like the Phantom in the book better than what he was turned into by the films between 1943 and the 1980s – a fatally-wronged composer who gets his face destroyed by acid. At least in the book and the original Lon Chaney film he was an honest psychopath.
‘From Hell’… just kidding
‘Dune’ by Alan Smithee… just kidding
‘Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland’… just kidding
‘Twilight’… I wish I was kidding (when you take a shit on a shit and it’s still an improvement)
I thought the book was unenjoyable, but I found the movie trite and naff. For my money the shallow obsessive banalities of the “protagonist” were the most important part of the story. Being dragged through the most tedious and uninteresting thought processes is one of the most important tools of the story. Without that, the political statement of the book falls by the wayside. Bateman is not just a serial killer but an allegory for the corporate capitalist state of mind. Even though he is a sociopath, psychopath and serial killer, you’re still left thinking ‘Man, you’re boring.’ I’m not titillated by violence so the movie felt like an even bigger waste of time than the book was.
Yup.
I think the book is perhaps slightly better, but I do think that much like ‘A Scanner Darkly’ the adaptation brushes up awfully close to the source material… The only reason I prefer the book is that the theme of no longer knowing what is organic and what is synthetic is more comprehensively explored and the notion that living animals are a scarcity is drummed home a little more. I also appreciate the more awkward, paranoid tone. Blade Runner on the other hand is a brilliant detective noir movie set in a world based on Philip K. Dick’s and spends it’s time dealing with the moral ambiguity of whether the replicants deserve retirement, or whether they deserve the same inalienable rights as a human. Both are great, but the film at best equals the book in my opinion. It is more entertaining, but I draw the line at saying it’s better. Usually the inferior work panders more to what we find enjoyable. So I’m largely undecided, but in a pinch I would have to go with the book.
Yup.
Yup. Exodus does contain a lot more information, but the pacing and narrative style (king james version) suck. 
Read it as a teen. I don’t think it’s as dull and boring as you found it, but yeah the movie is waaay more fun. I would agree, an improvement.
Could not disagree more. Alan Moore has this inconvenient tendency to try and speak to the reader’s intelligence. Every director who has gotten their hands on his work just goes and appeals to the viewer’s… I might cut myself off right there.
Kubrick’s …Clockwork… is a cinematic tour de force. I don’t think it surpasses the book, but certainly the story doesn’t suffer under the compromises of adaptation. I’d say they’re pretty even-stevens.
I would also like to add ‘Dr. Strangelove: Or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb’. ‘Red Alert’ by Peter Bryant would’ve been way better if it was a comedy… and thanks to Stan, it was
‘The Birds’, but only because Hitchcock’s cinematic style is ever so slightly more engaging than du Maurier’s literary style. Otherwise story wise, I’d give the nod to du Maurier for originality.
Also, not because it is better than the book, but rather because the film and the book are so close to identical that they are nearly interchangeable I would like to quickly mention ‘Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas’. Gilliam really hit the nail on the head with that one. I read the book first, and when I saw the movie I was floored at how well transposed the whole thing was. You can tell Gilliam really loves that piece of literature.
Lastly ‘A Muppet Christmas Carol’, no disrespect to Charles Dickens, but come on… you know I’m right on the money with this one.
…and so was the book, after that. In the wake of the film, Bryant rewrote his novel and republished it under the movie title Dr. Stangelove…Or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb under his real name Peter (Bryan) George.
There aren’t many cases of authors rewriting their books to make them more like the film after they were published. The only other case I can think of offhand is Martin Caidin’s Marooned, which was rewritten and published in paperback just before the movie came out.
Um… I understand that the books are tedious. Yes. Very tedious. But how come very few people seem to be twigging to the fact that the movies are equally as tedious while also being way more vapid. Jackson didn’t add any female characters he just put Arwin in a couple more scenes where she does some badass stuff. fair enough, if that was the only change I’d actually say it was unnecessary but admirable, but he shits on this story worse than he shat on King Kong. Character development is not anywhere near as nuanced as in the book, and CRUCIAL parts of character development are omitted, especially the friendship between Legolas and Gimli (which in the films is basically just distilled down to a cornball battlefield one-up-man-ship bromance). The Ents, and how they perceive and understand reality (also of crucial importance to the underlying message of the story) was non-existent. The film ending had no meaning or significance, the sense of the old world fading into the mist to make way for the new world was fundamentally lost. Even the friendship between Frodo and Sam and the revelation that Samwise is the true hero of the story and the bravest, most tenacious, most good hearted character in the Fellowship… also lost (or diluted at best).
The only things the movie bothered to dwell on were the battle sequences. Half the movies were chewed up by crap like CG elephants and the fact is that the battle descriptions are far and away the most tedious parts of the books. If you skim the battles, you’re left with a really, really good adventure, right of passage, saving the world story… that the films missed out on almost entirely.
Anyone who hasn’t seen the LOTR trilogy yet, don’t waste your time. Instead of watching the Lord of The Rings Trilogy, just watch Peter Jackson’s King Kong three times. It’s slightly less of a mind rot.
Also if you have to choose between reading LOTR or reading Dune… read Dune.
That’s actually very interesting. I read a good chunk of Red Alert in the library when I was younger after discovering it was the basis for Strangelove and I remember thinking, ‘dammit, when’s the Vonnegut-esque satire gonna kick in?’ I didn’t think ‘Red Alert’ was badly written, but I was expecting something far more ironic and scathing than what I was reading.
I never revisited the subject so that piece of info slid by me. Is the rewrite worth reading?
Not really. You want fantasy that reads like the King James Bible, try E. R. Eddison or William Morris. Or The Silmarillion. I read LotR when I was 13 and don’t remember having any trouble with the language, but The Silmarillion was too much for me. I wish Peter Jackson had tried doing something with that, instead of what he did to The Hobbit.
What some of the comments in this thread are saying is that the movies are MORE ACCESSIBLE than the book they were based on.
On the contrary, this is one of the main reasons the book is leaps and bounds better than the stage show. Erik is not and was never intended to be a sympathetic character.
Also the book gives enough backstory to explain why Erik was able to live in the opera house nearly undetected for so long and how he was able to seemingly appear and disappear at will.
It’s been a while since I read it, but I think so. It sticks pretty close to the events in the film, but it never gets as satirical as you’d probably like. At the end, there’s a note that says that everyone in those bunkers Strangelove was talking about at the end of the film died in them, so there was no salvation there.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you just said.
Except maybe, the Peter Jackson+Silmarillion comment. I think he should have stuck to making deliberate trash like Brain Dead instead of accidental trash like everything else he’s made. But other than that, agree with everything you said.
Nice. All the worlds politicians and capitalists together in a bunker would eventually tear each other apart for sure, not to mention passing on their weak, anaemic, never-did-a-hard-day’s-work-in-their-lives-bloodlines. But I do like the ambiguity of the “We’ll meet again…” ending, as well as the implication that the uh ‘penny’ dropped while they were all still bickering in the war room and before they made it to their bunkers… Maybe I’ll check it out one day if I run out of classics to catch up on. I still haven’t read ‘The Plague’ by Albert Camus, which is a travesty since I received it many birthdays ago.
When I first saw “Strangelove”, I had thought it was based on “Failsafe”, a rather touching book where heroic flyers bravely overcome all odds to follow their orders and nearly doom the world. Very much in line with Slim Pickens valiant (above and beyond) efforts to get the bomb to release from his plane.
But it’s a different story.
It was made as a movie (didn’t see it). Apparently had good reviews, but was box office flop, probably because “Strangelove “ was released first, apparently by the same studio.
Giving the Phantom a beautiful singing voice and portraying him as a madman whose motives are, on some level, pure (his fondness for music, his obsession with perfection), raises within the audience the same conflict that Christine wrestles with. Does she (and you, the audience member) fall for his “Angel of Music” bit? Does she (and you, the audience member) look past his many, many failings because his heart is adjacent to being in the right place?
Whereas in the book there’s no subtlety or conflict in their relationship. He’s her captor, she’s his captive, that’s it.
Lol, “Hey this formula is a sure thing! Got any more of them ‘haplessly starting a nuclear holocaust’ stories in the works? It’s a cinch! We can’t lose!”
I agree.
I loved the addition of the White Council vs the Necromacer, which was the reason behind the Hobbit in the first place. The Shire was beautifully done, the casting was good, etc.
But yes, altho it had great moments (I even liked Radagast, to a point, his intial discovered of the Necromancer was good) it was over done.
“The Devil’s Advocate”. The book was a throwaway horror novel of the sort that you find in the used bookstore. The movie was brilliant. Pacino as Milton was fantastic. And the director even got a great performance out of Keanu Reaves, yes Keanu Reaves.
Speaking of the Bible, let me nominate Jesus Christ Superstar as being better than the gospels they’re based on. Besides replacing the tedious, archaic prose with groovy rock music, Rice raised Judas from a cardboard villain to a thinking, feeling, conflicted political activist, imbuing him with a plausible and even agreeable motivation for betraying his friend. The script and production also take a secular, even atheistic, view of Jesus, presenting no miracles or other evidence of his divinity. Even most of his followers don’t seem to believe or care that he’s the son of God, except (in some cases) to the extent that it empowers them politically or personally.
Of course, the concept album and music theatre production upon which the film is based are even better than the film, but any of the three serve as a more accessible and believable biography than the scriptural sources.
Are you sure you read the thread title correctly? :dubious: