Perfume. I thought the book was overrated but the film was excellent.
I think I will have to disagree with you on that one. If for nothing else, I think Dustin Hoffman acted pretty poorly in it, which is not a good sign.
**The Devil Wears Prada **is supposedly better than the book it is based on. All I know is that Meryl Streep rocked her role and that the writing of the book was so bad that I put it away after five pages.
As always, my answer is the Disney version of The Little Mermaid.
Oh, and Zorro, the Gay Blade was better than the original book, The Curse of Capistrano.
"Last of the Mohicans" - The book was almost unreadable. I seriously thought that English was Cooper’s second language and I’d picked up a crappy translation.
The movie not only makes compelling changes to the plot (e.g. the romance between Cora and Hawkeye; Alice throwing herself off the cliff rather than live with the evil Magua) but it was filmed in the gorgeous mountains of North Carolina. Throw in a delicious long-haired Daniel Day-Lewis and voila! Great film!
This is what I was going to say. The book (Who Censored Roger Rabbit) is terrible and makes very little sense. The movie is fantastic.
Let me third (?) The Princess Bride. Both the book and the movie have their own pros and cons, but overall I liked the movie better.
The movies is missing one of my favorite exchanges from the book, though:
“Your Higness, your father is dying.”
“Drat, that means I’m going to have to gt married!”
Seconded. The only reason I was even interested in reading the book was because I liked the movie. As I’ve mentioned around here before, the cashier at Borders when I bought the book warned me that it was the worst book she had ever read. I should have listened to her.
Twilight. Lemme see…Stewart’s Bella is better, but that’s because she actually isn’t anything like the book Bella. But it still counts. Stewart reminded me of a skeptical indie kid, whereas book Bella seemed like an insecure crowd follower. Basically, if Stewart’s Bella read the book, she’d throw it across the room complaining about how stupid it was.
LotR. My Gods, I could watch the entire trilogy in the time it took to Tolkien to describe one patch of grass!
Man, I don’t read a lot of books that get made into movies…
Yet he and his flunkies appeared at WorldCon to showcase the bugs, and to enlist fans as extras in the game crowd near the beginning of the movie. This says to me that either a) you are wrong about Verhoeven’s motivations, or B) he really is the biggest douchebag in the universe, and needs to be tarred and feathered before being impaled.
The book was wonderful, BTW.
The Right Stuff. The book is fine, but the movie is awesome.
This.
And purists will mock me, but Dune. Loved the visuals, loved the music, loved the actors. I found the books hard to get into and found it hard to give a crap about any of the characters or their situations. But I’m not a huge fan of overly political storylines, it’s just a personal preference. I read the first 4, but really didn’t enjoy them.
I dunno about this one. I think they hold up equally. Great book, great movie.
Speaking of Stephen King, I liked the movie of *Needful Things *more than the book, which I found nihilistic. W. D. Richter’s script was a big improvement. especially Ed Harris’s big humanist speech to the town.
**The Last Detail **was a very good book. Especially since I read it when I was in the Navy. But the movie with Jack Nicholson was outstanding!
The Hours worked better as a movie for me and I usually prefer books.
Isn’t Cooper the guy that Mark Twain ranted about? Yep, here it is.
Another vote for No Country for Old Men. Maybe if I’d read it before seeing the movie I’d recognize the book’s greatness, but the movie rocks. The book felt like cliff notes. But I think Tommy Lee Jones improves anything he’s involved with.
Also The Name of the Rose. Nicely condensed, without all the fancy Latin words that I didn’t understand.