The Shining. Kubrick was a brilliant director, Jack Nicholson was great. Stephen King is just an average writer <ducks quickly>
I think the books worked well as books, but the movie worked well as a movie. In other words, if they’d tried to stay completely faithful to the books (even all of the first one), it would have been way too drawn out and disjointed. The books were a quick read for me, but the movie seemed way more involved and would have suffered from being longer.
The Bridge on the River Kwai is a pretty good book. The movie improves on the book in nearly every way, opening up the action, developing the characters more deeply, showing both the horrors of war and the heroism that can be inspired by it better.
Field of Dreams improves on the novel Shoeless Joe in just about every way. W. P. Kinsella said as much in his intorduction on the back of the laserdisc.
Not usually a Spielberg or Di Caprio fan, but Catch Me If You Can was a better movie than Abagnale’s actual autobiography: not that the book was bad, but it was obviously heavily ghost-written, and focussed more on entertaining the reader with tales of Abagnale’s cunning scams - the movie began like that, but oddly for Spielberg took a much darker turn about half-way through, exploring the isolation and loneliness of a life of constant trickery and lies. I was expecting a light-hearted “caper” flick, and came away very impressed at how well Spielberg explored the psychological angle - his most “human” film for a long time.
When I saw that the had removed Bombadil from the movie version I knew I would enjoy it more then the book. I found Fellowship of the Ring to be so dull I never bothered with the other two boks. I really hated Tom Bombadil and I didn’t see how he added anything to the book plotwise or character wise.
Marc
I read the Lord of the Rings books when I was younger. There’s no doubt in my mind that Tolkien was a brilliant man. However he was a man in heavy need of an editor. I lent the books to my brother’s wife who loved the movies and she summed up why she gave up on them very nicely “100 pages and they still haven’t left the Shire yet!”
For the movies they made some horrible horrible mistakes (like having Aragorn fall off the cliff into a river what a tired stupid cliché) but at the end of the day the movies are a hair better and more enjoyable then the books. I’ll stand by that no matter how many purists demand my head I’m no Johnny come lately fan that watched the films first but someone that got into fantasy because I loved the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. It’s one of those cases where someone defined a genre that’s evolved over the years worthy of respect of course but not the alpha and omega of high fantasy.
I enjoyed the movie of Harrison Bergeron slightly more then the short story. Though that might be an unfair example.
The Shawshank Redemption is a tie for me. The best parts in the book aren’t in the movie and the best parts of the movie isn’t in the book.
I liked Lawnmower Man more then the short story…but then again they have just about ZERO to do with each other.
There’s a couple more that I’m forgetting. I’ll have to look through my books/movies later.
I’m of the opinion that the LOTR movies are good but the books are unreadable.
Probably another minority opinion, but I think Mists of Avalon the book is the biggest piece of dreck imaginable, but the TV mini was at least mildly amusing. The Arthur/Morgaine love-scene is very sexy and tastefully done.
The book Silence of the Lambs was a poorly written hack job done by someone who seems to have never had a long conversation with a woman.
The movie was pretty decent.
The movie for White Oliander doesn’t really have much going for it, but at least it spared us the cheap repetative “artistic” symbolism.
The first person I thought of. I think I have read bits of at least 3 Grisham books (generally someone else’s while I was holidaying) and never bothered finishing any of them including The Firm, A Time To Kill and The Pelican Brief. I watched each of the movies to see how the story turned out and found them far more palatable than Grisham’s writing.
Any of the first four or five Star Trek movies are better than the books. The books are truly awful. **Adhemar ** made a good point about books written from screenplays being worse than the original movies as a rule but about The Abyss being an exception.
CJ
The novel of 2001 was written while the movie was being made. Clarke and Kubrik had quite a few disagreements as to where the story should go… The book is at best no better than the movie…
Elysian wrote:
I haven’t read a lot of novelizations, but I haven’t had such terrible experiences with them. For example:
Goonies – I loved the movie, and I thought the novel enriched the adventure profoundly. Mind you, I was twelve. But it impressed me early on with what you could do in a novel that you couldn’t do in even a good movie.
E.T. – It followed the movie well enough, and you had the bonus of the internal thoughts of various characters, including the alien’s.
Buckaroo Banzai – I read the novelization before I saw the film, and the movie seemed to me at best a montage. The people I saw the film with were completely mystified, and I had to explain to them what they saw, because all these things that appear out of nowhere in the movie had a backstory – the band, the Blue Blaze Irregulars, the comic book that the Black Lectroid flashes at the gates, and the world of Buckaroo Banzai in general. It was written by the same guy who wrote the screenplay, but the movie seemed to me more like a supplement to the book than the other way around.
What killed me on reading novelizations, however, was Robocop. I found it painful, oy vey.
But recently I came across the novelization of The Blues Brothers, which is certainly not superior to the film, but from what I read of it I though it took a fascinating approach of not merely telling the story, but preaching it in a kind of hepster style.
Novelizations don’t have to be bad.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The movie had a much better ending, and a more focused story.
Strangers on a Train.
Well, that’s the most important difference between books and movies, isn’t it?
The book, at least, has an unambiguous ending – one that, had it been adhered to as canon, would have made impossible the plots of all the sequels, film and book alike.
We’ve had this thread many times in the past, so if you want other opinions, look them up.
The classic example, for me, is Goldfinger. Most of the Bond books are better than the movies, but in this one the villains were too casrtoonish and the Fiendish Plot was downright unworkable. The movie points this out, pretty cleverly, I thought, and substitutes a different, workable Fiendish Plot. It also made Goldfinger the quintessential Bond Villain – he actually likes what he’s doing, and revels in his amorality.
I liked Field of Dreams better than Shoeless Joe, but I think that’s a close and personal call. I liked 2001 and The Abyss about as much as the filmsIn most other cases the book, having more time to give information and depth, wins out.
IIRC, in earlier threads we discussed several movies deliberately based on not-so-great books. I think Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil was such a case.
Then there are the films where the movie gets a happier ending. I don’t condemn these in all cases – if the bopok’s too much of a downer, I can live with a more satisfying ending. So Bridge over the River Kwai and The African Queen and The Power and the Fury are OK by me (but not better than the books). The Little Mermaid and “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” in Fantasia 2000 is OK, too. But I won’t let them get away with this in The Scarlet Letter or The Sea Beast (John Barrymore’s silent version of Moby Dick.)
Here’s a close one: I enjoyed the Coppola film Bram Stoker’s Dracula a lot more than I did the novel. But then, I’m not part of the generation Stoker was writing for. I guess you really can’t compare. Coppola wrote for an audience whose sensibilities had been shaped by decades of vampire movies, so the vampire-seeking-his-reincarnated-lost-love theme, which has no foundation in the book, fits well in the movie. And Van Helsing’s preachiness is thankfully toned down; a late-Victorian audience might have appreciated it, even needed it as “redeeming social value” to balance the novel’s violence and sexual subtext, but a modern audience doesn’t. Also, Dracula is a much more sympathetic character in the movie – but that’s a commonplace, isn’t it? Compare the book and film versions of Barry Lydon and Vanity Fair. In both cases, the protagonist is a heartless monster in the book, merely an unscrupulous schemer in the film. I attribute that to the nature of the different media: If you put in the hours required to read a novel, and get a look inside the protagonist’s head, you will form some sort of sympathetic bond with him/her no matter how horrible a person he/she is; a film doesn’t have that luxury, it is much more constrained in time and presentation.
Personally, I thought the book was better than the movie (I didn’t realise they were done at the same time). A lot of the things explained in the book didn’t really come across in the movie at all. Although, I must admit, I don’t remember much beyond the beginning and ending of the film, I kind of zoned out for most of it. The film has lots of good special effects, but that’s all I got from it–eye candy. The book is much more interesting to me.
“Mary Poppins”
“A Christmas Story”
“The Princess Bride”
“Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”
How about the Hunt for Red October. I liked the book, but as Tom Clancy tends to do, it is a little too detail-y, if you know what I mean. The movie was tighter and flowed much better than the book.