Well, I did just read The Hobbit and it wasn’t too bad overall, if a bit of slog now and then. Maybe fantasy just isn’t my deal, because I didn’t care for the songs and all the cute little names (Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Kili, Fili, Oin, Gloin, etc.). I’ll get the LoTR trilogy and see if I can do better with it.
Folks seem very divided on this particular subject, to say the least.
The movie The Lost World (JPII) was far better than the book. Granted, the movie may well have sucked three kinds of ass, but the book sucked at least twelve.
Starship Troopers!
D&R
I remember we both talked about it in the other thread. The Hunger is my favorite example of a movie being better than the book. It’s by no means a great film, but it’s far better than the book. And not for any of the usual text-to-audio/visual reasons, but because the screenwriters worked out several plot problems and simply omitted the stupidest points of the book.
In other words, the movie was better written than the book. What story flaws do exist in the movie (like the abandoned lab monkey subplot) come directly from the book.
This probably is more a text-to-audio/visual thing, but the novel The Hunger also has the most unappealing sex scenes I’ve ever read in a professional work. The movie manages to make the sex…sexy.
There’s not a big division. It’s certainly a valid opinion to prefer the movies to the books, but it’s a distinct minority opinion, given the enormous popularity of JRRT’s writings in many languages and in many cultures.
But to each their own. De gustibus non est disputandem.
(Except of course when I declare a certain opinion to be “wrong”. 
)
I think the LotR movies did some things better. I thought they did a better job of illustrating how dangerous the Ring was, and I liked the characterizations of Boromir and Faramir better. (Yeah, that’s right. I like the movie Faramir better than the book Faramir. Suck it.) But the movies better than the books? Naw, not by a long shot. The books are Capital-L Great Literature, the best of their genre, and part of the Western Canon.
The movies were merely very good.
(Lest a mod mistake my intentions, 
on the “Suck it.”)
I’ll mention this again (since I dropped it like a log into the “Hannibal” thread)
“Legally Blonde” was far better as a movie than a book. The movie rights had been bought (and the movie made) while the novel had not been published. I was curious about why, and finally tracked down a copy of the book. It’s a horrible book, and the producers were quite right to rewrite the story.
Asimov’s novelisation of Fantastic Voyage too.
I’m sure there’s probably several examples against this but the one I thought of was Funhouse by Deene Koontz.
The movie was directed by Tobe Hooper, fresh from his big hit The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They had given the script to Mr. Koontz and asked him to do a novelization of it. He hated the script, but needed the money so he did it.
He gave all the characters backstory which lead to a more involved rationale for the events of the movie. In fact, the events of the movie don’t even start until about the last quarter of the book.
Not a great book, but a good one. A horrible movie.
Well… as someone who immensely enjoyed both the book and the movie, I think this is one case where you really are comparing apples and oranges when comparing the book and the movie.
About the only common things between the book and movie are the character names and some of the other names/places/ships. Not much else.
The book mused at length about the nature of citizenship, why men are willing to fight, etc… while the movie was satirical and intentionally cheesy.
Not exactly a fair comparison in my opinion, especially since it wasn’t the same story, just the same title.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit was much, much better than Who Censored Roger Rabbit. Much, much better. Also very different plot and characters. Big improvement.
This was the first one that jumped to mind for me. I really enjoyed Abignale’s autobiography because the scams he pulled were amazing, but it’s not really a great story. Spielberg’s film gave the story a dramatic arc that made it far more interesting, and DiCaprio and Hanks breathed life into the characters.
“Jaws,” too.
For different reasons, I’ll cite “Jurassic Park,” the original. The movie had some obvious flaws, but overall it was immensely enjoyable and, at the time, a spectacle of awesome proportions. It best scenes - mainly the T-Rex’s first appearance, and the raptors in the kitchen - are still classic, classic scenes.
The book was pretty good, but like most Crichton books it was fifty to seventy pages too long. It simply didn’t have the impact the movie did.
Coincicentally, I named three Spielberg films without even trying to. Perhaps this reflects his willingness to work from fairly ordinary original sources?
Jurassic Park was a good flick, but IMHO not nearly as good as the book.
They both suck, but I like the Judge Dredd novel better than the movie.
Absolutely not! The books have a grandeur and epic sweep that is only hinted at in the movies. Don’t get me wrong: I loved the movies, but the wealth of imagination is much greater in the books. Whenever I read them I have to set aside three days to do nothing else, because as soon as I crack a page, I’m not putting the books down. The movies’ spectacular special effects pale in comparison to what Tolkien’s prose inspires in one’s imagination. Tolkien also has almost no dramatic missteps, quite unlike Jackson’s films, which, for all he gets right, still have quite a few blundering, cliched moments of pure dorkiness.
The movies will never reward repeated viewing the way the books reward repeated reading.
One thing I liked in the movie better than the book: the character of Boromir is rather more sympathetic in the movie, and more fully realized. However, Jackson utterly ruins Gimli’s character, and doesn’t begin to do Sam justice.
To all you Tolkien naysayers: well, I’m very, very happy the world of literature at large is in complete agreement with me and not you (concerning the quality of the novels). The novels have garnered high praise from such great literary figures as W. H. Auden and C. S. Lewis. But, what do I care? Nothing you say can take away what the books mean to me.
But, I should respond to the OP. A movie better than the novel. Ummmm…hmm. How about “High Fidelity”? The book is great, the movie better. IMHO.
Casino Royale. I laughed, and laughed all through the movie. The book, I don’t think I even cracked a smile.
And that ending (to the book)! OOOF! Talk about depressing! And even though more people were dead at the end of the movie, nobody seemed very sad about it.
Battlefield Earth
Now, you probably think I’m nuts. You’re probably right. The movie was a horrible piece of shit - but it was a horrible piece of shit that was mercifully restricted to the first third of the book. The book gets considerably worse from where the movie ends and through the next eight hundred pages. Yes, I finished it all :smack:
For the record, I still think the book was considerably better than Wuthering Heights.
Wrong on both counts. The book is very well-written and does a great job of building suspense and dread with actually very little violence. And speaking as someone who’s read the book and has had several long conversations with women, I’m not sure what you meant with the second crack. Did you think Clarice didn’t talk about shoes often enough?
And the movie was excellent. Everybody in there gave a great performance, especially Jodie Foster and Ted Levine, and Anthony Hopkins was having so much fun with it it was hard not to be fascinated by it. Plus, it was very tightly directed, again from somebody who understood that the most suspenseful scenes are the least violent.
If I had to choose one or the other, I’d say the movie was slightly better, but I don’t think it counts for this thread. It’s one of the best movie adaptations I can think of; they’re perfect complements for each other. The characters are given depth in the book and given life in the movie. And the scariest scenes in the book aren’t the same as the scariest scenes in the movie. I really like them both.
For the thread, I’d second The Shining. It’s the best Stephen King book I’ve read, and a very well-told modernization of a haunted house story. But the movie is genius.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: LoTR.I read them when I was 15 and thought they were the best thing ever. I kept that opinion and read other things. With much more to compare with, but not because of that, I decided to re-read them when I got to 30 or some such.
While I agree with the fans that the impact cannot be overestimated, and that JRR created an epic world, as literature goes, it’s truly awful. So yes, the movies are much better.
I can’t remember the exact quote, but Kafka said something to the effect of film putting a uniform on literature. By this, he emant that once we’ve seen a movie, based on a book, and then read the book for the first time, it’s very hard, almost impossible, not to put the actors in the movie into the parts for your inner eye, when you’re reading.
The flip side of this is that when a books is very loved, the reader’s inner-eyes have very clear ideas about how things should look. Whenever Hollydumb decides to make a movie from a hit novel, that many, many people loved, they will tend to make those readers disappointed.
Case in point: Robin Williams as Garp? Tom Hanks in Bonfire of Vanities?
It’s much better to take a crappy or little known book and make a great movie. Stephen King (Much as I enjoyed him in the past) will nerver get a pulitzer, but a couple of his stories have won Oscars. Alistair Maclean’s books are truly awful, but there have been some ok movies made from them.
It surprised me from this thread how I agree that many movies are indeed better than the books (or short stories; think “The Dead Zone” by Stephen King). Of course most (emphasis most) of these that have been named are in the realm of popular, not classic or serious, literature.
My 2 cents worth on LOTR: First, obviously you can’t really say which is better til you’ve read the book. Read it, then come back and tell us what you think. As a long-time book fan (& one who puts it in the serious lit category) I have to say I’m a waffler - Parts worked better than the book for me (Boromir, the fight scenes and battles) but for other aspects the book remains superior (Frodo’s story specifically; I think a lot of the meaning and power of the main points of the book were lost in translation to screen, despite good efforts on all parts. And while I understand cutting the Scouring section for the movie, it is really vital to the meaning of the story).