Sorry, no.
Road to Perdition. The book is good, but the movie is better.
Ummm, no. No. Jeez, I’m trying really hard to say this without being a jerk, but no. And especially since you haven’t read the books, NO. No no no no no.
Why would you say such a thing? Maybe I’m in a horrible mood and didn’t know it until just now but this really bothers me. No, the LOTR movies are nowhere near as good as the books. They aren’t in the same ball park. They aren’t even the same sport.
The movies are good (not great.) The books succeed some adjective that is so far beyond “good” that it hasn’t been created yet.
Don’t get too excited, here. I might have suggested the same thing, because I read the Hobbit and completely lost interest about halfway through. Then the LOTR movies came out with a HUGE amount of hype, a load of awards and a whole new generation of fans (many of whom also haven’t read them.) Assume that vivalostwages either enjoyed the movies or heard so much about them that s/he couldn’t imagine that the books were better.
The Exorcist. Ordinarily, I’ll take a scary book over a scary movie any day, but for some reason, the book only mildly frightened me, while the movie caused me to sleep with the lights on for a couple weeks.
The Thin Man. William Powell and Myrna Loy’s chemistry and snappy repartee brought depth to Dashiell Hammett’s characters and fleshed out the story. His writing wasn’t bad, but all the movies based on his books were better.
Soylent Green. Based on Harry Harrison’s Make Room, Make Room. Book totally sucked.
I’m not sure about LotR. I read the books and liked them a lot, but they had quite a few parts that drug along badly (the Dead Swamps comes to mind) whereas the movies didn’t have that luxery.
I’ll third the ‘if the book was written from the movie’ thing…
‘STAR WARS: From the adventures of Luke Skywalker’ was actually so bad my eyes bled at 10 years of age. It was faithful to the movie, I admit, but the writing itself was terrible.
TERRIBLE.
Hard to tell, sometimes. Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein purported to be, and so far as I know, was, closer to the 1918 novel than any film adaptation to date. Shortly after it came out I saw a book on the stands called Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – which was not Shelley’s original novel, but a novelization of Branagh’s movie! :eek:
I remember an old Phil Foglio cartoon from The Dragon about how a writer should deal with getting his book made into a movie. (Basic instructions: Go to the California state line to pick up your payment. Have a sealed bag of cash tossed over the line into your hands. Do not touch the money until you boil it… Have nothing more to do with the movie.) One panel shows a mogul at his desk with a huge Dune poster behind him; he says to the phone, “But, Frank! Sweetie! Alan Dean Foster does all our novelizations!” In another, you see a director and production crew on the set. Director: “OK, Sigourney, wave your flippers!” Sigourney: “Father! Spare the Earthman! I love him!” The shooting script is labelle, “I, Robot.”
Conceded, but I still can’t believe they wrote out Tom Bombadil! And all of Sam’s (and almost everybody else’s) poetry recitations!
I believe the movies are better.
I wouldn’t deny that there is a whole lot of good stuff in the books that doesn’t make it into the movies, hoards of quality that went missing in the adaptation, but I think your love of Middle Earth is making you favor the books, which reveal so much more of it.
Pointed out by MrAtoz’s post in a previous thread:
Tolkien’s primary achievement, his crowning glory, was not the novel but the creation of the world with its own mythology, history, languages, etc. And as the quote makes perfectly clear, he did not at all mind referring to the various names of things in various languages as often as he could. If you dig that sort of thing, more power to you, but I would be hestitant to call it consistently good writing. Middle Earth is a fascinating place, but his picture of it seems to me rigid and narrow. Such focus can be considered admirable, but I believe it has a negative effect as often as not.
And even worse, they Saruman out of the third film! Gandalf’s confrontation with Saruman at Orthanc would have made such an awesome scene! And what about the Scouring of the Shire?!
I’ll venture that the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ, the famous one with Judy Garland, is better than the book. By “better”, I mean more focused, more thematically satisfying, deeper, more enjoyable. The book is a simple series of magical, imaginative episodic adventures, with nothing tying it together. The movie focuses on people seeking what they already have (brains, courage, heart, home); in the book, the Wizard actually gives the Scarecrow brains (via pins and needles and bran), etc.
I’d say, movie wins over book in this case.
Originally, Kaffee had documents proving that Jessep had given the order and covered it up. Rob Reiner said “I could go into court and get a conviction with this!” He said that for the sake of dramatic tension, Kaffee had to go into court with nothing and bluff Jessep into confessing. Sorkin made the change, to the story’s immense improvement.
:raises hand to deliver bitchslap, is restrained by onlookers, chastised, and released:
Anyway, Where the Heart Is was a truly bad movie, but the book it was based on (same name) was actually a little worse. Oprah’s Book Club…oy.
I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but I just cannot get into LOtR in book form. I’ve read and enjoyed the Hobbit very much. But I’ve gotten 200 pages into LOtR two or three times, and have always put the book down because, I don’t know, the story is far too tedious for me. I have great respect for Tolkien, and I think he is a genius (especially the invented languages he uses throughout the book) but I can easily understand how somebody would find the movie more entertaining and subjectively better than the book. (FTR, I only saw the first of the three movies. Once again, the storyline didn’t interest me enough to want to catch the next two parts.)
Look, you have to have noticed other people here have said the same thing. He’s hardly alone in his opinion and if you like what the movie gives instead of what the book gives, it’s not wrong. If you can go that far overboard in liking the book better, he’s allowed to prefer the movie. I liked the books but I can definitely see why people wouldn’t like them and how some parts would come across more as an exercise than as storytelling.
the movie version of “A series of Unfortunate Events” was much better than the three books it covered. The movie went deeper and made more sense (it showed the paranoid grammar freak lady’s strange fears come true when the house blew away in the movie. Also, for the wedding scene instead of that convoluted super semantic parsing of “written in one’s own hand” in the book; the movie just had the marriage deed burn up, and gave a subtle nod to the book’s solution.)
Dr. Zhivago.
I rather liked the movie, but I tried to get through the book…and tried…and tried…and finally gave up. It just seeemed to go on and on and on without anything interesting happening.
Moby Dick gets points because the book has a lot of excess that really doesn’t need to be there and just slows it down.
I thought Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy was a pretty good book.
But, the movie by the same name, is mounmental. The acting was outstanding (Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Sara Miles, and many others) and the direction, by John Schlesinger, unrivaled. It was also the movie that cemented the “anti hero” as a legitimate focus for mainstream American movies, as well in its explicit depiction of hitherto taboo subjects such as drug use and male prostitition.
No, the End of LOTR the movie was a sappy happy touchy feely ending. While, taken as a whole, it is the best movie ever made, everything is wrapped up much more true-to-life in the books than in the movie.
Now, I think cutting out Tom was an improvement, as this is the one part of the trilogy that seems out of place. It seemed Tolkein just wanted to shoehorn in his special creation. I knew they were gonna cut him, and I was cool with that. The cutting of the Scouring I am NOT cool with. It changes the whole tone of the ending of the movie.
But other than the stupid plot inadequacies, the movies do some things better and some things worse than the books. For instance, Rivendell in the film was more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen in a movie, or in person for that matter!
On the other hand, while it was nice to see a visualization of the battle between Gandalf and the Balrog, it couldn’t compare to the description Gandalf gave in the book. Moria in general benefitted more from readers’ fertile imagination than from actually showing you stuff, but the ancient paths forgotten by even the Maiar cannot be improved upon in a film.