Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
Which was better? The movie or the book? (e.g. Three Pines, To Kill a Mockingbird, Pride and Prejudice)
If this goes well, we will have a short series of “Which is Better? Medium Cool posts.
So please don’t veer off into “which was better?” for other culture-related things or you’ll mess up my whole plan. :-)
P.S. I miss Inspector Gamache!
For those who are new to Medium Cool, these are not open threads.
NeenerNeener
There are 2 different versions of “Three Pines” filmed to compare, too. The first one was a 90 minute or so movie with a Brit (Nathaniel Parker, a wee bit too young to play Gamache at the time) as Gamache and the 2nd was the Amazon Prime series. I liked the Ammy Prime series better than the 2013 movie version. I liked the book better than the first movie and the series was as good as the book. It’s a shame that Amazon didn’t want to do anymore episodes. I really wanted to see what they did with the monastery full of singing monks in the middle of nowhere.
If Amazon had made more episodes though I would have skipped anything from “The Long Way Home”. That one wasn’t one of Penney’s best.
NotMax
Unless we’re talking Lovecraft or Spillane, the book.
/gross generalization :)
piratedan
three days of the condor (Movie) >>>>> Six Days of The Condor (book)
The Warriors (movie) >>>>> The Warriors (book)
Royal Flash (book) >>>>>> Royal Flash (Movie)
The Andromeda Strain (Movie) >>>> book
WaterGirl
@piratedan: Why? :-)
Everybody, please also share the what and the why.
Mr. Prosser
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the four book trilogy is infinitely better than either the film or the BBC television series. Admittedly both really only covered the first book but there was no chance the films could do justice to Adams’s writing.
NeenerNeener
Movies/tv shows that I preferred to the source material:
The Bridges of Madison County: The author went into long, loving detail in the book about what an amazing man Robert Kincaid, the photographer, is, describing him as a god and a shaman among other things. The main female character, Francesca, was described as a hot Italian war bride, but that was pretty much all the description she got. Shortly after I finished the book I caught an interview on one of the morning shows where the interviewer asked the author if Francesca was modeled after his wife. He said no. Then he was asked if Robert Kincaid was modeled after himself and he sheepishly admitted yes. I’ve never been able to think of the book as anything other than a love letter he wrote to himself.
I was really surprised at how good the movie is. Not just because Streep and Eastwood are great actors, but also because the script wasn’t beating me over the head with narration about how lucky Francesca was to have met this god among men. It was all “show, not tell” so I could make up my own mind about whether he deserved her or not.
The Wheel of Time on Amazon Prime:
Robert Jordan’s humongous book series could have been half the size if he’d left out all the descriptive text about what the Aes Sedai were wearing. I never cared about what colors the sleeves of their dresses were slashed with and didn’t see why it mattered to the narrative, but Jordan devoted a lot of words to them anyway. The tv show doesn’t dwell on what anybody is wearing; we can see it for ourselves.
Gormenghast on BBC:
I never made it past page 150 in Titus Groan, but I loved the BBC mini series. The books must have been a dream come true for the set designers because everything about Castle Gormenghast was described in excruciating detail, but I was bored to tears reading it.
TV shows that are better than the movie:
I like the Interview with the Vampire tv series on AMC better than the movie version, and it works very well as an extension of the book. Most times the movies leave out important plot info and character motivations.
schrodingers_cat
@NotMax: Agreed. Usually the book is always better. My imagination is better than any movie.
JPL
Louise Penny’s books are always better imo. Gregory Peck made To Kill a Mockingbird imo. I’m going to add Sophie’s Choice because my own opinion is a toss up. The movie portrayed the terror in having to decide which baby to give up and the book didn’t quite match that. The rest of the book was heart wrenching though. Someone asked me about the movie and I said that I just didn’t imagine the screams and burst into tears.
Phein64
Bram Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm lacks the comedic (and erotic) flair of Ken Russell’s 1988 film adaptation. Verdict: Movie.
NeenerNeener
As you can see, I’ve thought a lot about this.
Books i liked better than the movie:
Ghost Story: I’m particularly disappointed with this one because the book was set in a small fictional village that was supposedly just to the east of my actual home town, so it was easy for me to imagine all the creepy stuff. Parts of it really scared me.
The premiere of the movie was actually in my town, in winter. The heating in the theater was broken so while we were shivering, it wasn’t in fear. The script was weak; all the things that scared me in the book were missing from the movie. The movie was a waste of a set of great actors playing The Chowder Society, and Patricia Neal was miscast as Stella, and Craig Wasson was miscast as Don. There are also scenes where you can see the booms and microphones at the top or in the corners of the picture.
I’m surprised that nobody has tried to do a remake of this. At one time Straub was as almost as big a name in horror as Stephen King and even collaborated with King, and several of King’s major works (The Shining, Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Stand, Pet Cemetery, etc) have been re-made by Hollywood multiple times.
In most instances the book beats the filmed version just because of the necessary exposition. But not always.
Rachel Bakes
@NeenerNeener: I read Bridges of Madison County and thought “ Meh. Love letter to Iowa ans Kinkaid”.Saw the movie years later an: barely recognized it. Streep and Eastwood gave such nuanced performances and gave depth to 2-dimensional characters.
kalakal
Elmore Leonard’s books are better than the movies and some of the movies are pretty good eg Get Shorty, Hombre, Cat Chaser, Out of sight but a lot are terrible eg Stick, Mr. Majestyk
Scout211
The Color Purple was a wonderful book, with wonderful characters and a really good story.
The Color Purple movie seemed to minimize some of the wonderful characters and focused way, way too much on Whoopi Goldberg’s storyline. It lost a good deal of what was wonderful about the book and all the characters.
Or maybe I just didn’t see Whoopi in the Celie roll. I don’t know, it just seemed a little boring compared the the book.
As always, YMMV
thruppence
As much as I love the LOTR books in all their complexity, Peter Jackson and his team made them real in a way my poor imagination could not match. While I’ll grumble about some of the details, I say the movies
kalakal
A Night to Remember (movie) is better than the book, both are good and both are better than Cameron’s Titanic
eclare
@NeenerNeener:
Agree completely about The Bridges of Madison County. That scene toward the end where she’s in the Jeep, wrenching. The book was good, but didn’t really convey the emotion.
lowtechcyclist
The Lord of the Rings: easily the books.
Old Dan and Little Ann
The Shining is one of my all time favorite movies. I must have watched it at least a dozen times before reading the book about 10 years ago. Holy shite! The book is so much more creepy and intense. The ending part in the maze garden could not have been replicated in 1980. Maybe now with CGI and all that jazz.
Jeanne
@NeenerNeener: the singing monks book was amazing
Mathguy
Lord of the Rings. The movies arebetter than the book.
The Wheel of Time. Agree with NeenerNeener. If he had a decent editor the books would be vastly superior, but 100 pages on how the climate is fixed by the Windfinders was awful.
kalakal
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. No contest- the books
A Ghost to Most
I read hundreds of sci-fi books back in the day, and watched a bunch of movies based on those books. I still say that both the book and the movies of Dune are the worst sci-fi I ever encountered.
eclare
I don’t have a lot to contribute because I usually do one or the other. For example I read Into Thin Air about the Mt. Everest disaster, so I’m not inclined to see the movie, I know how it ends.
Phylllis
Two movies that are as good as their source material are The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. They are both based on Stephen King novellas included in the book Different Seasons. Shawshank is based on Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me is based on The Body. I remember reading and re-reading the book, getting something new and different every time. Stand By Me was a pitch perfect adaptation; Shawshank has become one of those movies I’ll stop and watch, no matter what.
Scout211
The Last of the Mohicans movie was soooooo good but the book it was based on was nowhere as good. I couldn’t even get through it. Of course, it was first published in 1826 and didn’t have Daniel Day-Lewis in it.
Daniel Day-Lewis. Oh my. Good Lord.
Baud
The Ten Commandments was better than the book.
Rachel Bakes
African Queen: movie is much better. The characters are caricatures in the book and, while the actors played them pretty close to the way they were written having Bogart and Hepburn embodying them automatically gave them depth. Additionally the ending in the book was anticlimactic-I don’t remember how they escaped but it wasn’t with the destruction of the German cruiser. The Hollywood explosion actually added something.
id rate the 1996 bbc Pride and Prejudice about equal. So much of the script lifted right from the book and fully captured spirit and letter of Austin’s words.
Enchanted April. Book was kind of humdrum but the movie shoved all the humdrum into the rainy, dreary England scenes and amped up the beauty and romance in the Italy scenes. Was just lovely. (If you ever get a chance to see a professional theater perform the play, do it. Wonderful adaptation.)
Hunt for Red October. Book is great-was thr first Clancy I’d ever read and it grabbed me. But the movie is awesome with (in my opinion) the best Jack Ryan. It cut the chaff, ramped it up a bit, and gave a great and varied cast an opportunity to shine.
NotMax
@Mr. Prosser
To veer OT for just a moment, the multi-episode BBC radio production was an absolute delight.
Phylllis
@kalakal: I will say the movie adaptation of A Night to Remember is very good. Pops up on TCM fairly regularly. Cameron basically stole the entire dramatic structure of his version from it. As my late husband said, ‘a lot less screaming and hysterics in the 1958 version’.
NotMax
@Baud
TL:DR.
//
prostratedragon
@eclare: At the time I thought the movie wasn’t bad, but the book was much better, I think because the numerous details of the story are harder to convey with the tools of a movie. Years later, I find I have almost no memory of the movie, unusual for me.
Quaker in a Basement
@schrodingers_cat: I’m with you and NotMax. There’s never enough time in a movie to flesh out the characters or build the internal narrative. It’s vastly rare for the movie to be better.
Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy provides a good example. The movie version of “The Golden Compass” (the one with Nicole Kidman) tried so hard to cram the whole story into less than 120 minutes that it was chaotic. The TV series did a bit better because it had more room to work. But it too fell short of the books.
kalakal
The film(s) of The Hobbit dragged out a short book for what seemed like weeks ( Smaug was pretty good though)
Blade runner was far better than the book
I Claudius both the book and the TV series are fantastic
Steve in the ATL
Anything Reacher: books far, far better than mediocre series or midget Cruise movies.
A Time to Kill was a great book and a great movie.
I thought the movie Porky’s was a faithful adaption of the novel. This may not be a real thing.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Agree 💯. That was my first exposure to it. And of course, it was the original creation.
WV Blondie
All of the Spenser novels are better than any of the movies or TV series that have been made. OTOH, while I enjoy the Reacher novels, I find the TV series just fabulous
[Not the idiotic Tom Cruise movies – he’s SO not Reacher!]
eclare
@prostratedragon:
That makes sense. Plus Krakauer is such a good writer. Another book of his that I’ve read is Under the Banner of Heaven. Plowed through the book, gave up on the TV adaptation after one or two episodes because I read a review that mentioned scenes of animal violence. No can do.
Likewise Black Hawk Down. The book was so gory, but very good, I cannot imagine seeing it on a big screen.
kalakal
Inspector Morse is interesting as there’s a lot of books and Colin Dexter’s writing improved considerably over the years. I’d still saying the TV series is better ( such fantastic acting) but the gap is huge between the early novels and the TV series and far closer as you get to the end
Dorothy A. Winsor
Peter Jackson’s LOTR movies are better than the books for me.
I didn’t like the TV adaptation of Louise Penney’s books. I prefer the kind of interior life you get from Gamache in the books.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I read the book years after seeing the BBC production (Alec Guinness as George Smiley). I enjoyed the book but the show is perfection.
Steve in the ATL
@eclare: Black Hawk Down movie was excellent. Which is hard to pull off when Josh Hartnett is in it.
eclare
I thought of one where I’ve read the book and seen the movie: the first Bridget Jones Diary.. I’d weight them equally, mainly because the movie was so perfectly cast.
HinTN
@kalakal: I have seen none of thr movies (didn’t know they existed), but Mr Leonard is a master storyteller.
mali muso
@Scout211: come sit by me. I adored that movie (and DDL) when it came out when I was in high school. I choose to read the book for an American literature class and it was mind-numbingly boring.
eclare
@Steve in the ATL:
Ha!
Gloria DryGarden
@NotMax: lol
HinTN
@thruppence: Nope! I liked what he did with The Fellowship of the Ring. I absolutely hated what he did with The Two Towers. The Return of the King, good but the book is, in my world, superior. That said, I loved the movies.
Grover Gardner
Paulette Jiles’ NEWS OF THE WORLD is one of my favorite books (and one of my all-time favorite narration jobs.) I was loath to see the movie based on the trailer, but when I finally did I was pleasantly surprised at what I nice job they did. They made some changes, but they were sensible and even, at some points, clever and enlightening. The scene in the movie in which Johanna asks some Kiowas for a horse was not in the book but was, I thought, a lovely touch.
hitchhiker
Can’t read LOTR — not sure why, but every time I try I get a half an hour in and wander off to wash my hair or something. I love the movies & have seen the extended versions many times. I also love the youtube videos about the making of those films.
Let’s see what else. Room with a View is one of my favorite films, and I love the book, though for different reasons. I enjoyed the Age of Innocence on film but I think the book is better. We watched the entire Lonesome Dove miniseries when it aired in the late 80s, and I still think it’s much better than the book.
In college (ike everyone else I knew) loved Shogun, the book, and I was pretty much convinced that I wouldn’t like the new tv adaptation — wrong. The tv series was great, but I don’t think the book holds up.
Big disappointment was the film All the Light We Cannot See. Great book, though. Same with A Gentleman in Moscow, a book I can practically recite. I really wanted that series to be good, but … nope.
tam1MI
JAWS the movie is waaaaay better than JAWS the book. The book had a bunch of extraneous side plots that were very soap opera-y in a way that detracted from the spine of the start. The movie improved the plot exponentially and also developed the characters better.
HinTN
@A Ghost to Most: Dune, the book, was great, IMO, and the movie did it reasonable justice. The rest? Fugettaboitit
pajaro
First of all this is a great topic.
Three movies that I liked better than the books, even though I liked the books a lot, were the Namesake The Constant Gardner, and The Third Man.
In the Constant Gardner, it was the performance of Ralph Fiennes, which made the movie just tragic for me; in the Namesake, it was a number of decisions of the Director Mira Nair to change some of the emphasis of the story, even while telling basically the same story–the way Gogol’s parents fall in love during their marriage and the peace that Gogol and his mother achieve at the end– (the final scene of his mother singing is blissful to me). In the third man, it’s the incredible atmosphere that is created and is shown in the foggy streets and, particularly, the music, which the book obviously could not replicate.
Just look at that parking lot
True Grit. I’ll take Charles Portis’s book over the two movies made from it. A lot more fun reading how they talked and how Portia’s described their actions. Though at least the Coen brother’s version did have some of the same vernacular as the book. Also the Coen’s Bear Man inclusion (he wasn’t in the book) was kinda cool.
piratedan
@WaterGirl: granted its a matter of opinion here, but in most instances its a case where the director did a better job of storytelling than the author did, or at least made a compelling visual case of visual storytelling that was better than the written work I’m not such a stickler where the movie has to adhere to every plot point in the story, in certain cases the original work wasn’t anything special but covers a kernel of an idea that a director or a screenwriter can visualize for a movie.
In my counter example, the story is rich with detailed characters, in a setting that should lend itself to a great movie, but the casting was poor, as if the guys making the movie missed on who the main character was and their entire motivation. Kind of like casting Jack Reacher (a 6’6″ man mountain) with Tom Cruise. While Cruise did capture the confidence of the character, the book fans just couldn’t accept him as the lead, hence the popularity of the series, as the casting is much closer to the reality the characters live in.
scav
Better at what? Makes a massive difference what criteria you choose. After a basic level of competence and integrity, I often have the most fun picking apart the differences between versions (and that often includes the “original” on an even footing.) Generally I prefer books, but wooo golly, do I prefer the filmed version of Wolf Hall to the originals. After the sheer verbiage of the books, the communication achieved in silence on the screen is stunning. And Mantel was involved with both, so it’s no slur on her: They’re just different. The verbiage served its purpose in one setting. But the fun of keeping track of the glances and what isn’t being said . .
Mr. Bemused Senior
@HinTN: yes, the Dune sequels went downhill fast. I gave up after Children of Dune.
HinTN
@kalakal: Blade Runner was a very different story. Both good but Blade Runner tops Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Steve in the ATL
Slow Horses: books were good; Gary Oldman makes the series incredible. Despite his abominable political views.
HinTN
@pajaro: The Constant Gardener was magnificent in both cinema and book. Thanks for reminding me.
kalakal
I’m a big fan of Len Deighton’s books but I think the film of The Ipcress File is better. The atmosphere and filming are wonderful and Michael Caine & Nigel Greene are at the top of their game
Citizen Dave
@Old Dan and Little Ann: Maybe someday I’ll check out King’s The Shining–I’ve never read one word of him. Kubrick pretty famously took vast liberties with his movie, and in the drive up has a broken-down VW on the side of the roadwith the broken down one in the color of the one from the book (too lazy to look up and don’t want to state the colors as I’m not sure). It was Kubrick’s F U to King.
Since I saw a couple of original American Splendor comic books the other day in a NOLA shop, I’ll do Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. Nothing can recreate reading each comic book issue. I highly recommend the movie because Paul Giamatti, but the movie is multi-level as it sometimes breaks the 4th wall, and has the real Harvey Pekar commenting on the movie action, etc. Amercian Splendor (2003).
geg6
I have never encountered a situation where, if I partake of both the book and movie, that the movie is better. Sometimes they come close, but the book always wins.
evodevo
@kalakal:
don’t forget Justified!
narya
LOTR movies are swashbuckling war movies; the books are about grief (someone on Bluesky noted the other day and I agree) and common folk doing hard things step by step. I like the movies, but love the books.
HinTN
@Mr. Bemused Senior: You have more fortitude than I.🙄
If I come to Cali on a quick trip, wanna have a mid-afternoon meet-up at Duarte’s on Sunday, 6 April? All still TBD, of course.
Chief Oshkosh
PG Wodehouse books are better than the TV shows, IMO.
The BBC adaptation of Peter Mayle’s “A Year in Provence” and the Ridley Scott movie based on “A Good Year” are insufferable.
A Ghost to Most
@HinTN: That seems to be the consensus, but I found it to be the Infinite Jest of its’ time. Not even Sting could get me to watch the movie through.
As for book/movie, my wife is obsessed with the differences. I rarely care.
Another Scott
A Christmas Story was a great retelling of some of the stories in Jean Shepherd’s short story collection – In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.
I have to admit, though, that I’ve seen the film many, many more times than I’ve read the stories.
Best wishes,
Scott.
HinTN
@Citizen Dave:
OMG – Read Salem’s Lot and tell me you’re not checking the locks on the windows.
Miki
Delete the double.
Miki
IMO, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was way better as literature than Apocalypse Now the movie. Sometimes literal visual art moves too far in too little time. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t grab us, but IMO the book did it better.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@HinTN: sure thing. Let’s plan on it and ask WaterGirl to make it official 😁.
kalakal
Ran as an adaption of King Lear is awesome. The sheer spectacle alone
RSA
It’s been a long time since I’ve read the book or seen the movie, but I’ll say that for The Milagro Beanfield War, the book was better than the movie. Part of it is a matter of scope: John Nichols creates so many interesting side characters in his novel who were either missing or only barely present in the movie, and a couple of the movie characters seemed to be either stereotypes or bland composites. The book also delved into cultural, historical, and political issues in more detail than can be managed in a movie. Another part is that magical realism on the page is hard to capture in a movie medium, and I don’t think director Robert Redford succeeded. It was a fine movie, just not up to the book.
HinTN
@A Ghost to Most: I hated Infinite Jest. The book was turgid. Never considered the film.
hitchhiker
@Citizen Dave: The Shining is about alcoholism — as horrifying as any invented monsters King ever came up with. It’s worth a read.
eclare
@Miki:
I’m kind of torn on that one. I read the book in high school and liked it, and I think I even wrote a paper on it. But the movie was spectacular visually: the napalm burning, the helicopters, the spinning ceiling fan, Marlon Brando at the end. And a very very young Laurence Fishburne giving a great performance.
narya
Much as I loved Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy and Pruit Taylor Vince and even Melanie Griffith and Bruce Willis, Nobody’s Fool is a better book than movie. Newman brought Sully to life perfectly.
NotMax
An anomaly is Greed, during which (as the story goes) director von Stroheim began filming on day one by opening the book to page one of the novel (McTeague) and kept that up, page by page, until the closing, with only minimal alterations and excising of sub-plots culturally questionable/objectionable at the time. Thus the original version of the film, now mostly lost, ran for 8 hours.
HinTN
@Mr. Bemused Senior: Copy
WaterGirl – are you listening? Also too, The Other Hank?
Citizen Dave
@HinTN: Thanks! Not sure I want to get that scared, but… hoping when I’m retired I’ll have more time for pleasure reading. I’m surely not hating on King, I really like some of the movies based on his books.
Followup: There are (per some googling) alternative views of the why of the Shining VWs–red in the book, yellow in the movie. In the movie they drive by a crushed-up red one.
hitchhiker
@HinTN: Agree. On audible you can get an abridged version of The Constant Gardener that’s quite good, OR you can get the unabridged version, which LeCarre reads himself. I’m very attached to that book, and the movie was just exquisite.
Andrya
@thruppence: With great respect to a fellow LOTR reader, I disagree. Peter Jackson did a great job, but made a couple huge mistakes (IMHO).
Mistake #1: Tolkien makes it clear that The Ring’s power of seduction (to want power over others) is strong but not irresistible. The Ring exploits pre-existing faults in a person, but a genuinely good person can resist. Although I enjoyed Peter Jackson’s movies, I find it hard to forgive the way he portrayed Faramir.
Mistake #2: The book makes clear that Aragorn and Gandalf respect the rules of decent warfare (such as not harming ambassadors) even when the enemy is despicable. The film having Aragorn behead the emissary from Mordor brings Aragorn down to the level of Putin, and implicitly condones war crimes.
Full disclosure; I admit that I am the world’s worst Tolkien fanatic.
Anyway, I enjoyed your comment, despite the disagreement!
A Ghost to Most
@HinTN: His supernatural books mostly bored me. Cujo, on the other hand, was the hardest book I ever read. But I got mauled by a St Bernard, so it was personal.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: “Oh, Moses, Moses!” That line appears nowhere in the book.
eclare
@kalakal:
You’re right, forgot about that. I am not a Shakespeare fan, but I had to read it in high school. To see Ran on the big screen in ATL at an indie theater was mind blowing. That final scene…
VFX Lurker
Max Brooks’ World War Z opened my eyes to the interconnectedness and fragility of the modern world while delivering classic George Romero shuffling zombie horror thrills. It also takes place ten years after the end of the Great Zombie War, and it interviews survivors to ensure that every narrator has a happy ending. I try to listen to the full-cast audiobook every year.
The film adaptation replaces the shuffling zombies with fast zombies. It centers one protagonist, and the film becomes “zombies around the globe.” It’s OK, but it’s not the nerdy book I love.
zhena gogolia
No movie is as good as any book by Jane Austen. Sorry, Colin, I love you.
zhena gogolia
I don’t think the books on which Marnie or Rear Window were based are as good as the movies. But they’re good.
HinTN
@Citizen Dave: I thought I read Lovecraft to get the heebie jeebies until I read Salem’s Lot. Boy howdy!
NeenerNeener
@scav: I prefer the filmed version of Mantel’s Cromwell books, because she used just pronouns so often I was never quite sure which “he” was speaking or being spoken to. With the film version you know exactly who “he” is at any given time.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
Not even with zombies?
:)
hitchhiker
@scav: I really, really love the Wolf Hall books, excessive verbiage and all, but I think the movies are wondrous. That scene of Anne Boleyn entering Westminster Cathedral, pregnant, and lying face down … damn. I think the final installment will finally be aired next month & I can’t wait.
zhena gogolia
@HinTN: Pet Sematary was the scariest book I ever read.
Torrey
The 1971 film Duel, about a salesman harassed by a truck driver, is much better than the short story of the same name by Richard Matheson on which it was based. Matheson just doesn’t stick the all-important ending, IMO, but the movie does. There’s also an excellent YouTube video that shows how the ending was filmed. And Dennis Weaver as the salesman does a brilliant job.
IMO, the film Gettysburg was better than the book The Killer Angels. Shaara has several errors, including the idea that one could slaughter a steer and have the meat ready to eat within a few minutes. And rhetoric, one of Chamberlain’s specialties.
Ivan X
@HinTN: That book spooked the fuck out of me as a kid. I only ever read that and the Shining and the Dead Zone, but it was Salem’s Lot that just had me scared out of my wits. Don’t know why I didn’t read more, I certainly enjoyed all three (though the Dead Zone I found depressing). The movie adaptation of the latter I wouldn’t say is great or anything, but it was enjoyable seeing Christopher Walken in a lead role and Martin Sheen playing a creep.
eclare
@hitchhiker:
Season Two of Wolf Hall starts tonight. I have set my DVR.
lowtechcyclist
@Mr. Prosser:
Um, four books? Which one would you exclude? (There’s one I feel doesn’t belong; I wonder if we agree. If we don’t, well, you’re only human. ;-)
Regardless, it’s hard not to love the blurb on the cover of Mostly Harmless: “the fifth in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy.”
I’m firmly in the “movie is almost never as good as the book” school of thought. That said, I thought the HHG movie came way closer than I’d have expected.
zhena gogolia
@hitchhiker: It starts tonight.
HinTN
I’m having a senior moment. What was the novel (movie of the same name) about the daughter of the Ozarks family who wanted to enlist to get away but had to care for her younger siblings while fending off the repossession of the property because her daddy couldn’t be proven dead? The chainsaw to retrieve his hand scene in the book was really amazing. The cinema version was pretty good, too.
zhena gogolia
@HinTN: Winter’s Bone.
And I might be wrong because I’ve never seen it.
Looks like I’m right. Wow, never gonna watch that one.
hitchhiker
Cold Mountain is one that I think the book and the film are equally good.
zhena gogolia
@NotMax: Haven’t tried that one (or are there more than one?).
Memory Pallas
A Clockwork Orange is the only movie/book combo where I think neither is greater than the other, though they are differently great.
HinTN
@Ivan X: I was in my late 20s when I read Salem’s Lot. Thought I was ready. Nope!
Just look at that parking lot
@geg6: Sometimes there can be ties. The Hustler by Walter Tevis and the movie with Paul Newman & Piper Laurie are both excellent. I wouldn’t be able to say which I like better. “ Nine ball, cross pocket”.
eclare
@HinTN:
Winter’s Bone. Jennifer Lawrence nailed that role, I’ve only seen the movie. The movie was harrowing enough, I’ll never read the book.
HinTN
@zhena gogolia: That’s the one. Thanks. Mrs H and I argued forever about whether she escaped or not. Great story.
zhena gogolia
Neither War and Peace nor The Master and Margarita has been adequately filmed. (I haven’t seen the most recent M&M, but it doesn’t sound promising.)
HinTN
@hitchhiker: Never saw the film. Great book.
HinTN
@eclare: Great writing!
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Exodus 3:4
CaseyL
Oh, this is tough for me, because books and movies are entirely different things, and are experienced very differently.
A lot depends on the book’s writing: did the author need, and not have, an editor? Then the movie might be better, because of necessity the movie will need to be pared down. Excess padding, exposition, characters and digressions that are there purely because the author loved them (but add nothing to the story)… a movie improves on all of that.
OTOH, is the background detail, the glimpses into the character’s minds, the settings and digressions… are all of these absolutely necessary to tell the story in its fullness? Then the book will be superior to the movie, because the movie will have removed what gave the book its depth, what made the book a self-contained entire universe.
I generally like both the movie and the book, but as separate things.
The Andromeda Strain, for example. I have read the book multiple times, and seen the movie multiple times, and each time is hugely enjoyable. The movie winds up the suspense so well that, no matter how often I watch it, I’m still on tenterhooks. The book, on the other hand, fascinated me precisely because of the extra information Crichton put in there, the scientific and medical background he included.
One thing that has stayed with me ever since first reading the book was a discussion of an experimental drug that essentially dismantles the immune system – a throwaway plot point that Crichton put in mostly so he could talk about immunology. He goes off on a tangent about the horrible things that happen if an immune system is destroyed, how opportunistic infections no one has ever seen before will take hold. When I first read the book, I thought “Gosh, that’s really interesting.” (And, if I remember correctly, that throwaway plot point was a throwaway line in the book, quickly mentioned and as quickly disposed of.)
Then HIV AIDS happened – decades after the book was published. It gave me chills, how Crichton wrote about exactly that decades before “immune deficiency” became a plague in the real world.
Craig
I believe it was here that you mentioned 3 Pines. I watched and I liked it a lot. I wish there more cop shows with their level of thinking and restraint. I thought the lead actor was remarkable and had to look him up. Even more remarkable when I found that it was Alfred Molina. Such a great actor. Thanks for the recommendation.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: But that’s God speaking, not Anne Baxter in a sexy Egyptian getup.
Marc
Dr. Strangelove was a far more interesting movie than the book it was derived from Red Alert. The novel was a few years earlier than, but very similar to Fail Safe, to the point where Kubrick sued the book author and producers of the Fail Safe movie for stealing the concept from Red Alert to which he owned the rights. Confusing, ain’t it?
And, I loved both the Mouse That Roared book and movie, I’d be hard pressed to choose between them.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Don’t kink shame God.
Andrya
@zhena gogolia: I agree, although “Sense and Sensibility” (IMHO) comes close. Emma Thompson AND Kate Winslet AND Hugh Grant AND Greg Wise AND the godlike Alan Rickman!!!!!! Amazing.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@zhena gogolia: there seems to be a legal hassle. Drat, I would like to see that film.
kalakal
@Torrey: Neither The Omega Man nor My name is Legion (espescially the latter) are as good as Matheson’s book. Both films completely invert the idea behind the book.
Thinking of 70’s Cheston Heston SF I thought both Soylent Green and Planet of the Apes (That ending!) were better than the books they’re based on
RSA
For movies made from Michael Crichton books, I’ll add Jurassic Park. One reason is just the medium–describing dinosaurs in a modern day setting isn’t as compelling as seeing them on the screen. Another is the changes in characterization: I think John Hammond, for example, is a more compelling character as a sentimental dumb-ass than as a greedy CEO.
Doug R
Stephen Spielberg is good at taking decent books and turning them into better movies.
He got rid of an affair with a sex scene that really didn’t add anything to Jaws, plus changed one death.
He cleaned up Jurassic Park, which to be honest was a bit of a mess.
He made a decent movie out of Ready Player One which apparently was a horrific mess of a story.
kalakal
@eclare: Absolutely, I will never read that book
Suzanne
Anyone read Room by Emma Donaghue? Harrowing book. Excellent. The movie was very good; Brie Larson won the Academy Award. Book might have been better, but the movie better conveys the tiny, tiny scale of that shed she was kept in…. and the scene where she falls apart while being interviewed…. absolutely devastating.
Doug R
@Old Dan and Little Ann: How does Spielberg’s “tribute” in Ready Player One stack up?
zhena gogolia
@Andrya: True. And Emma made up almost all the dialogue.
Chris
The Hunt for Red October is an interesting case.
I enjoy the book a lot more than the movie in at least one respect: the movie turns Jack Ryan into Fox Mudler, the lone man with a theory nobody believes, who has to spend most of the movie racing, more than anything else, against his own side as he tries to convince them he’s right. In the book, everybody in the U.S. government figures out pretty much right away that Ramius is trying to defect, and Ryan and the rest of his peers are largely on the same page. The question is, rather, how the U.S. Navy can help him defect, and how the hell they can stop the Soviets from knowing they’ve got the sub.
On the other hand, the way the movie chooses to go does make it enjoyable in other ways. One of the fun things about the story (both book and movie) is the way it fakes you out at the beginning about what kind of story is being told. The way it starts, with the captain cold-bloodedly murdering his oversight officer and just vanishing into the ocean with a bunch of nuclear warheads, you’re meant to think you’re in another one of those Cold War stories with a General Ripper type character who’s gone insane and trying to start a nuclear war. In the book, you find out reasonably early that it isn’t that kind of story. And the movie does that as well – there’s an officers’ meeting not too far into the first hour where the intention to defect is made clear to us. But the way Sean Connery plays the character has him always keeping his cards close to his chest, and remaining just menacing enough (including to his own men), that even when the Americans finally board the Red October, if Ramius were to welcome them and say “well done, gentlemen, I salute your courage, but unfortunately for you, I really am trying to nuke Washington,” it wouldn’t feel out out of place with everything we’ve seen so far.
A big part of this difference is, in fact, the medium being used. Both stories split their time between Ramius and Ryan’s stories so you get a lot of both points of view, but part of that inevitably means sharing a lot of their thoughts with the audience. It’d be a lot more awkward to maintain the ambiguity around Ramius’ motives that way, and Clancy knows better than to try, laying out most of what we need to know about him in the first three chapters. But movies don’t have narration, just dialogue and what the audience can see, which gives you a lot more freedom to go in that direction where the book chose not to.
Craig
Not sure which is better, but the script adaptation of Trainspotting is a masterclass in turning a book into a movie. Compressing multiple scenes into one that develops characters in a more streamlined way and that then frees the director to flesh out the character even more from the skeleton that the compression created. Danny Boyle was doing amazing work back then. His use of a russian doll structure of flashback inside flashback is such a brilliant way of telling Begbie’s story.
kalakal
Young Frankenstein was far funnier than…
Citizen Dave
@Torrey: David Mann. M-A-N-N.
(I”ve seen Duel between 5 and 10 times. Due for a re-watch).
I’ll have to check out that YouTube. I watched one once of how a regular guy from Saint Louis bought the truck and would drive it around his area. They showed Spielberg around 10 trucks, and the one he picked was actually the smallest one.
princess leia
@Andrya:
Yes! Mercy is at the core of the book, and how that plays out in so many situations (hello Gollum.) Totally agree with you!
lowtechcyclist
Here is where Peter Jackson’s LOTR lost me. The part of the Council of Elrond that goes:
That penultimate paragraph, that drawn-out silence, is for me the heart of the Trilogy.
And Peter Jackson turns it into a damned cacophony.
bluefoot
@Miki: I read Heart if Darkness for the first time in high school and I don’t think I had enough life experience to really get it. Several years later, I saw Apocalypse Now and it helped embody the story and I got it. Several years after that after some pretty horrific life experiences, I reread Heart of Darkness and OMG, it just shot me in the heart. Plus Conrad’s use of language to set the scene. He does it subtly. For instance, when he starts describing the trip on the river, he uses these words with long drawn out syllables, accentuating the languor of the voyage. his use of language is amazing.
Doug R
@zhena gogolia: Not even Clueless?
VFX Lurker
I read the 1979 Ghost Story because I wanted to (finally) start reading Peter Straub’s work, plus I had seen the film. Whoever adapts this book to film again would have to take care with the source material. I’ve seen problematic source material spun into pure cinema gold in the right hands (Exhibit A: M’Baku in Black Panther), so it can be done.
Here’s the review I wrote about the 1979 after finishing it in November 2023 (spoilers hidden in white text — highlight to read them):
Again — I wouldn’t rule out Ghost Story for modern film/TV adaptation. I’m just not sure I’d enjoy a straight adaptation of the source material as-is.
Another Scott
@zhena gogolia: Have you seen the Bondarchuk version from 1966?
422 minutes. (Yikes!)
I haven’t seen it.
(Scroll down for a trailer and 5 stills.)
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Interesting Name Goes Here
@piratedan: It’s funny that you mention Reacher, because I feel like the first movie eclipses anything that has been done with the character since, although Alan Ritchson is trying his damndest to do it justice. Cruise did amazingly well with the part; problem is, the second movie was just…uninspired and not worth the price of admission. I think Jack Reacher 2012 was lightning in a bottle that Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie somehow managed to recapture for the Mission Impossible series afterward.
As for my personal entry, it’s been mentioned, but The Hunt for Red October. The book is one of my favorite novels of all time, but I do have to give the edge to the movie. The finale there works much better than what Clancy wrote.
Also, because I’m feeling cheeky, Die Hard is much, much better than the book it’s based off of.
kalakal
L A Confidential is one where I think the film and book are tied.
The film was impressive in that they had to strip so much out of the book, multiple characters and plotlines and yet it still worked. In the book you know who the baddy is in the first couple of pages, in the film it’s the big reveal at the end yet it still works
And the film of The Guns of Navarone is better than the book
schrodingers_cat
Agatha Christie’s books are better than their screen adaptations. The movies with Branagh as Poirot are abominable.
schrodingers_cat
I found the LOTR books BORING. Movies were better because they ended sooner.
Mike E
@Marc: Kubrick sued the Fail Safe effort to slow them down long enough for Dr Strangelove to get released first.
Jim Appleton
Two goats find their way into the projection room of a drive-in theater and start eating the movie. They finish the whole thing, all four reals.
As they’re leaving, one asks the other, “How was the film?”
“Yeah, I really enjoyed it. The book was better.”
bluefoot
It’s hard to compare adaptations of plays and the written plays (the “books”) themselves, since they were meant to be performed. That said, I think I love Ran better than any other adaptation or performance of King Lear that I’ve seen. I don’t know why, but I feel the tragedy much more deeply with Ran.
Chris
@A Ghost to Most:
I like the book, and I still think the 2000 miniseries is the best adaptation I’ve seen.
(A lot of books should be miniseries rather than movies, honestly; more time to do the book justice).
Craig
@lowtechcyclist: Very true. I generally felt Jackson did as good a job as could be done. The scene I was disappointed in was Strider’s entrance, in the book he reveals himself with the shards of Narsil as the embodiment of Gandalf’s watch words. Great lines
‘All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.’
Chris
@kalakal:
What’s spectacular about The Hobbit is that it’s the only time I can think of where you can literally read the book faster than you can watch the movie.
That’s a commentary on Peter Jackson in and of itself.
NotMax
@CaseyL
Would add (although no longer carries the emphasis it once held) being among an audience experiencing the same film in a theater on a larger than life screen may serve to elevate its “betterness” as opposed to the solitary practice of reading a book.
Andrya
@princess leia: Tolkien had been through the horror of WWI, so he spoke from experience.
To quote JRRT himself, “By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.”
Just look at that parking lot
Another tie for me is The Last Picture Show. Larry McMurtry’s describing the dying town of Thalia and the people dying right along with it is both beautiful and depressing. But the movie has Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson. Too tough to call.
WaterGirl
@Jim Appleton: LIteral LOL.
Jeffro
just skipping to the (current) end of the thread here: the book is ALWAYS better than the movie
that’s it, there isn’t anything more. ;)
p.a.
LOTR: Books. The fellowship movie was fine. Moria in the movie hit home. The last 2 movies 🤢, excepting Frodo & Sam once they were on Mt. Doom. If you too are a Tolkienatic, I recommend the GirlNextGondor youtube channel.
Catch 22: Book. Just sprawling, episodic, tough to do in a movie.
Pride and Prejudice: Book. Forgive me Keira💗 Have not seen the BBC production.
zhena gogolia
@Another Scott: I saw it when it came out! It’s impressive, and Vyacheslav Tikhonov is great as Prince Andrei and Efremov is great as Dolokhov, but a lot of the other actors are . . . not good. Natasha is great visually but what an annoying actress. And don’t get me started on Bondarchuk.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: I couldn’t get through the movies. Can’t even get through The Hobbit despite Richard Armitage.
Steve in the ATL
@kalakal:
I thought the book and movie A Bridge Too Far were both great, though admittedly I read the book when I was 13 or 14.
Chris
@Andrya:
I’m nowhere near the Tolkien fanatic that you claim to be, but I remember noticing that difference at the time the movies came out and thinking that it was very clearly a moment of “I care more about giving the audiences of post-9/11 America what they want to see than I do about staying close to the source material.”
By the way: what does it say about post-9/11 America as opposed to post-WWI/WWII Britain – the latter of which, I’m sorry, had endured so much more trauma than the former that it’s an insult to even compare the two – that Aragorn chopping an emissary’s head off was still considered beyond the pale for the latter, but necessary and cathartic for the former?
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@hitchhiker: The start of The Fellowship of the Ring IS SLOW. You’re right. First there is all the stuff about Bilbo’s birthday party, and then when Frodo et all finally get out of the Shire, there is the Old Forest and Tom Bombadil to get through. I’d suggest starting with “At the sign of the Prancing Pony” where things really get started. With all that said, The Two Towers is always my favorite book. Ents! I always felt a bit guilty because Frodo and Sam are of ultimate importance, but I found their story a bit boring until they finally meet Shelob, compared to the doings with Rohan and Minas Tirith
The Art and Set Direction (and the costumes!) in LOTR movie are fabulous, but the book is still better. And what Jackson did to The Hobbit! Padded out with so much B.S. Really, a romance between Kili and an imaginary elf?!?
Craig
Long ago I had a question for a job interview(4th interview) that was sort of like this topic. It was ‘If you could option any property to turn into a movie what would it be?’. Being a cocksure punk asshole I thought about it for a second, then said Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian- I’d take it, put it in a lock box and dump it to the bottom of the ocean so that no one could screw it up by trying to make a movie out of it. My team of interviewers was more than surprised at that. This was just as All The Pretty Horses was published so only one of the six knew the book, so I was asked about it- bleak, violent, ruthless, non punctuation, evil. I was watching the interview slowly surely slip beneath the waves and die when the one person that had read it piped up and said, ‘He just won The National Book Award. The book he’s describing is biblical, epic and one of a kind. He’s right, somethings should never be made into films’. Somehow I got the job.
JML
I almost always pick the book over the movie, but that’s frequently because of how difficult it frequently seems to be to show the internal moments, I think? And while I recognize the edits are almost always necessary to translate the story to a different medium, a lot of times the choices don’t work as well as the director/scriptor maybe thinks they do, or simply change a critical part of the book in ways that are hard to move past. The worst offense in adapting a work to the screen is often when the movie creative staff decides to add something new of their own creation that was never present in the original book (or shows up in a later volume).
But there have been some movies I prefer to the book.
Get Shorty and Out of Sight are both films I enjoy a bit more than the original Elmore Leonard. The casting is great, the chemistry works, the timing is spot on…really enjoy them both.
Three Pines is a really interesting one: I really liked the show on Prime a LOT, but I’ve also loved the books. I might edge it to the show, but that might be because Molina is so incredibly good and really seems to get Gamache as a character, but also because they made Agent Nicole so much less odious on screen (slightly obnoxious over-eager try-hard vs offensively obnoxious gremlin with zero social skills).
I love the LotR movies and I’m still thrilled that we got ones that were so lovely to look at, thrilling to watch, and recognized for their quality. I prefer the books (I don’t care for Gimli as comedy relief, Pippin’s growth got short shrift, and Faramir’s temptation will always be offensive) but still enjoy the movies a lot. But one of the things I love about the books is the enitre Scourging of the Shire section, in part because of how it shows wonderfully well how the 4 hobbits have changed during their time away and can apply what they’ve learned an accomplished to help their people, and also what Frodo in particular has lost. And much as I recognize how it makes sense to skimp past that (just like giving Glorfindel’s part to Arwen and jumping past Bombadil makes a lot of narrative sense) its the one I miss the most. But Fellowship for me remains a triumph of filmmaking, even if I might have tweaked a few things.
Snarki, child of Loki
Okay, purely “IMO”:
The movie The Princess Bride, and the book The Princess Bride: neither spoils the other. BOTH are great.
WaterGirl
@q: Welcome!
It would be great if you could add at least a couple more letters to your nym. :-)
Craig
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): My Tolkien friend and I used to joke about the pace of Fellowship. What can we chop out? One day sitting on the porch drinking beers he blurted out ‘ Fuck it. Straight to Weathertop’.
Doug R
@Snarki, child of Loki: The screen adaptation was also written by William Goldman, so I guess he knew the author’s intent.
JML
(whoops, accidentally overwrote my nym! sorry, I posted as “q”)
The Harry Potter books & movies are interesting ones to look at in this lens: I prefer the books to the movies most of the time, but book 5 is a slog with all the SHOUTING that goes on, and I think they handled things better in the movie? And credit where credit is due, the 2-part finale didn’t feel like it was just wandering around with all of the camping as much?
I still prefer Dune the book to the movies, but the Villaneuve ones make it a real battle. (Sorry, David Lynch, but there’s some rough stuff in there and FF’d the last third of the book in a brief montage sucked)
Chris
@RSA:
I saw a great post on Tumblr a few months back saying that Hammond embodies a type of evil we don’t get nearly enough of in movies; a generally nice and well-meaning person, who, however, is too self-absorbed to really sit down and think about the consequences of his actions, especially if it’s something he really wants to do.
Also, the next movie was the rare sequel where undoing the previous movie’s conclusion was exactly the right thing to do. Because Hammond is a sentimental dumbass rather than a greedy CEO, the first movie ends with him having learned his lesson and promised that the whole idea of a dinosaur park is done for. … And then, as we learn in the next movie, he’s promptly removed by his own board of directors and replaced with a younger and stupider version of himself, who merrily picks up where he left off. Because of course he does; an idea that eyeball-grabbing and potentially profitable was never going to be allowed to rest in peace.
geg6
@A Ghost to Most:
Never seen any of the Dune movies because the book was so awful! A kindred spirit!
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@narya: good points!
I love Agatha Christie books, and the movies made range from acceptable (the Albert Finney version of Death on the Nile for example) to terrible. They’ll never make a good version of And Then There Were None. But the David Suchet Poirot BBC TV shows are brilliant, in a miniature sense, same with the Miss Marples.
Torrey
@kalakal: I haven’t read The Omega Man or seen the movie, but I agree about My Name is Legion. And thinking of Planet of the Apes (I haven’t read the book but have seen the movie), there can be issues with impactful endings in books, as opposed to movies. It’s hard to beat a sudden and powerful visual.
kalakal
On the Beach is one where I like both the film and book ( and an excellent BBC radio adaption equally). It was a brave choice to film it, everybody dies and knows in advance that they’re going to die. What happens to a society when everyone knows they have only weeks left? The bit that broke my heart was the lady gardener buying spring bulbs even though she knew she’d never see them
stinger
Almost always the book. I prefer using my imagination to having all the visuals “spelled out” for me. Exceptions:
Rebecca: Book and film (Hitchcock version) are equal.
Ordinary People: The book is great, but the acting and the music in the film put that version over the top.
The Natural: I prefer the film, because I like happy endings.
Testament of Youth: Probably a tie, but Cheryl Campbell is one of my favorite actresses, so I may lean a little bit toward the film. Also, the book takes longer to read than the film does to watch, so when reading you have to live longer with the constant, unending drumbeat of pointless deaths. Both versions are extremely powerful.
geg6
@narya:
Totally agree.
Big R
I’m surprised to have gotten 135 comments in and nobody has mentioned The Expanse or The Three-Body Problem. Having seen the series first for the former, and read the books first for the latter, I think I have very different experiences. For example, in The Expanse, Shohreh Aghdashloo simply is Chrisjen Avasarala; I will never imagine anyone else saying those lines. And while the books are pretty clear that the Belters have been physically changed by their zero-g lifestyle, and that Naomi is ALSO changed, the show had hard limits to how much they could show that. So I find visualizing the changes that have happened harder to do.
With The Three-Body Problem, the books are (to my memory; it’s been almost a decade since I read them) devoid of physical description to the point where it’s almost like an Asimov book – featureless spheres having conversations on infinite planes, with just enough of a sketch of a setting that you can sense travel. The television series (both the Chinese and the Netflix series) round out the story a lot more (and a Chinese-led international consortium to challenge an alien invasion seems a lot more plausible these days).
And speaking of Asimov, the adaptation of Foundation is doing amazing work telling a gorgeous, compelling story, while making just enough changes that it holds together in a way that the early books (which were just short stories with a throughline) could never be. I’m sure there are folks who don’t like the changes to Eto Demerzel and Gaal Dornick, but for me they open up possibilities that Asimov couldn’t even imagine because he was, at heart and for all his virtues, a raging misogynist in the way that men in his social circles often were.
To conclude:
The Expanse: series > books
The Three-Body Problem: Chinese series > books > Netflix series
Foundation: series > books
Geminid
@HinTN: Elmore Leonard wrote a couple Western short stories that were made into movies. One of the movies was titled The Tall T, with Randolph Scott as the good guy and Richard Boone as the very bad guy. Worth watching if you like Westerns and/or like Elmore Leonard.
Ed. Randolph Scott once said, “I can’t act and I’ve got 34 movies to prove it!”
Suzanne
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
Don’t you mean Peter Ustinov? Finney was in the original Orient Express, which I enjoyed as much as the book. Didn’t like the remake as much — Johnny Depp is gross.
geg6
@narya:
And we again agree.
JML
The Godfather was an enormously popular book, and the movie pulls all kinds of dialogue straight from the page, but the movie is definitely better. Paring down the plotlines works very very well and almost certainly would have been a sprawling mess for a film. I definitely preferred the movie to the book (though the book was better than I expected); the film is deservedly an all-time classic.
I think one of the things I notice movies handling more poorly than the book very consistently is the passage of time. even in great adaptations it’s often hard to feel the weight and scope of years passing, and sometimes its really key to making the story stay grounded.
stinger
Well, my edit of my own comment got lost. I was adding:
Gone with the Wind: Love the movie but when reading the book and about 50 pages from the end, I’m so sorry that there’s so little left to read that I almost hate to keep turning the pages. If that’s not clear, the book!
Beau Geste: The film is far superior, as the book has a lot of pointless digressions.
JML
@Big R: I’m a big fan of how they handled adapting The Expanse. I don’t know if I like it better or not. That one might be in the category of “I like them both a lot, please don’t make me pick” lol
I think easily the smartest choice they made with adapting The Expanse was bringing in Aversarala into the story earlier than they did in the books. She’s such a compelling character and was brilliantly brought to life. (even better once they went to Prime and she was allowed to swear properly, lol) But it was a bold choice and doesn’t always work.
Ramalama
Ghost World is one of my favorite movies, period. Two high school best friends decide what to do when they graduate high school. One is artsy, the other kind of striving for normal young adulthood, after being weirdos at school. Both fumbling, lovely, hilarious without meaning to be. It’s interesting, different, cohesive, wonderful.
It’s based on a graphic novel which I read after seeing the movie, and it surprisingly holds up. Love them both. Actually bought a copy of the book to give to my sister in law, who’s an aging artist of some fame. She enjoyed it, and still has it in her house, which she’s always emptying and rearranging.
Toeless Flenser
Jackson’s films get the edge, though it’s a close run thing:
He cuts the worst parts, for the most. Tom Bombadill (even worse in Rings of Power, sadly), the Barrow wights, the scouring of the shire.
No damn song lyrics! Sorry, not a fan.
The most grating addition (elves showing up at helms deep) isn’t all that grating.
Debating which I like better from Apocalypse Now vs. Heart of Darkness. Can’t decide.
geg6
@Just look at that parking lot:
Absolutely, but I can’t make a comparison because I’ve only ever seen the movie. I find, most of the time, that seeing a film before I read the book ruins the book because the actors distract me from visualizing the book’s characters and details and even some major plot points may be changed and I can’t wrap my imagination around what I saw and what I’m reading. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I rarely read a book after seeing a movie based on it because it doubly disappoints me in some way that is hard to describe.
Big R
@JML: I think this is absolutely one of the flaws of the Lord of the Rings movies. Fellowship says explicitly that seventeen years go by between Bilbo’s birthday party and Frodo’s departure, which explains Gandalf’s haste and the way that things were set up to shuttle Frodo from Bag End to Rivendell. Once the Fellowship leaves Rivendell, the rest of the plot plays out over a matter of months; but because we bounce between the Renaissance of the West and Frodo and Sam’s Wacky Adventures (Now With Extra Gollum!), and the dates aren’t explicitly stated, the story feels slower than it actually is.
The movies don’t show us the sweep of seasons in the same way.
Viva BrisVegas
@kalakal: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, no contest, the original radio series.
Radio always has the best special effects.
Chris
Movies better than books:
James Bond. The entire movie franchise versus the book franchise. People complain about the political incorrectness of the movies. I’m not saying they’re wrong, but it’s so much worse in the books. Partly because they’re way more explicitly political.
Also, Goldfinger may be the quintessential example of the movie improving on the book: the gold heist in the book is fun and high-stakes, but completely impossible, in a way that was lampshaded by a lot of fans. The movie took the fans’ critique and used it to rework the plot into something much cleverer. “Whoever said anything about removing it?” is still one of my favorite wham lines in all of cinema.
stinger
@Viva BrisVegas: I heard a radio version of The Dark Is Rising that was great — but I still prefer the book.
kalakal
@Viva BrisVegas: Couldn’t agree more
WaterGirl
@JML: Thanks for clearing that up! :-) I changed the nym to JML on the previous comment from “q”.
central texas
As a rule, I prefer the book. For some reason, film makers insist that they have to tell you their own story to the detriment and often loss of the author’s. The only exception that I’ve experienced was the film version of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I thought the film maker did a better job of introducing and explaining the voice/persona of Birony and it helped ground the story and the tragedy.
NotMax
@kalakal
Also too, BBC radio adaptation of the Foundation series was excellent. Plus an oddity which should not have worked out as well as it did, their radio adaptation of the original Star Wars movie.
Wally
Book and movie equally good: Lonesome Dove.
Torn about LOTR. I’m glad the movies left out Bombadil, my least favorite episode in the books, but I wish they’d cut down some stuff so they could include include The Scouring of the Shire, one my favorite chapters.
Chris
Books better than movies:
Jason Bourne. (At least, based on the original book trilogy; I haven’t read past that).
As with the Bond novels but in the opposite direction, I always cordially disliked the Bourne movies’ politics. Felt that way when I was a dumb gung-ho Republican teenager watching them come out in the post-9/11 era; feel exactly the same way twenty years later as a cynical middle-aged liberal Democrat. I wouldn’t have known the term at the time, but the movies’ entire worldview is just so Greenwaldian. Every bad thing leads back to the evil American Deep State, and the evil American Deep State is, in fact, thoroughly and uniformly evil, with no shades of gray at all except for maybe a few people who haven’t been in long enough to become that way.
Which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, if not for the fact that they’re adopting a book series that’s all about the shades of gray; every country has its dark underbelly with other ones frequently coming into play, every country has its variations of patriots to necessary evils to complete monsters, Bourne is both a product of an unforgivable war crimes program and the lynchpin of an undercover operation that is in fact extremely justified and necessary.
The movies are fun popcorn thrillers, but I’d have been vastly more interested in them adapting the books’ world.
TheOtherHank
Since this is still the active thread, I’ll jump in, HinTN I’d be up for meeting in, I assume, Pescadero if I’m in town.
I love the movie version To Kill a Mockingbird, but I’m going to have to come down on the side of the book. I read must have read it a dozen times while growing up. No matter the gender roles of the era in which I grew up, I didn’t want to be Jem or Dill, I wanted to be Scout. She is such a great character.
Steve in the ATL
@geg6:
Totally agree
Melancholy Jaques
@Andrya:
Same, same. It served no purpose that I could see.
Ever since then, a friend of mine & I use the phrase “Faramir tries to take the ring” as a term for any radical & generally unwelcome alterations to the story in a film adaptation. See, e.g., the ending of Dune, Part Two.
kalakal
@NotMax: The BBC do some fantastic radio, they did a wonderful series of all the Sherlock Holmes stories with Clive Merrison and Michael Williams
I’ve always preferred Holmes in written form, though I think Jeremy Brett was fantastic.
To be fair he’s hard to film, the actual books, with the exception of The Hound of the Baskervilles aren’t that good, the stories are brilliant but very short so to make them movie length is a tough gig
Miki
@bluefoot: I read Heart of Darkness the first time when I was 20 in a sophomore lit course through University of Maryland while serving in the Army in The Republic of Korea, circa 1975/76. The 1899 novella knocked me over. The movie, 1979, moved me, for sure, but not in the same way as the literature.
Central Planning
@Another Scott: It’s not part of this medium cool, but there was also a musical stage version of A Christmas Story.
I haven’t read the book, but have seen the movie multiple times. We liked the musical because we know the guy who played the Old Man.
Rick Taylor
I strongly prefer the Lord of the Rings books to the movie.
As one example, there’s the scene in the Fellowship where Gandalf first tells Frodo about the ring. It’s built up slowly and beautifully. Towards the end, without any pressure or even any suggestion, Frodo realizes he has to leave the shire, and Bilbo is astonished.
It’s so much better than the movie, with Gandalf coming in and saying “Is it secret? Is it safe” and pressuring him. It misses the whole point of the scene.
narya
@Melancholy Jaques: stealing that phrase because it might be the change I hate the most.
Rick Taylor
@NeenerNeener:
I wonder if they’re like the singing monks in Galavant. I may have to see it just for that.
kalakal
Diva is far, far better film than book.
The music, the cinematography are superb and the plot is far better developed in the film
Melancholy Jaques
@eclare:
Jennifer Lawrence is awesome in Winter’s Bone. I don’t know if she’s topped that performance.
Also, I’ve seen John Hawkes in many things, but I had never seen him do menace before. He was just plain scary. It was also great to see Sheryl Lee.
eclare
@Melancholy Jaques:
That may be the only thing I’ve seen her in, but she nailed everything about poor rural life: the accent, the despair, how hard life is…
Melancholy Jaques
@JML:
Completely agree. Surprised it took till #176 to mention it because it usually tops the list in the “book or movie” responses.
Timill
Generally I’m with “the book is better than the movie, because it has better pictures” but I’ll make an exception for Stephen King’s “Faithful” where the TV series is much better thanks to the twist at the end.
Splitting Image
Mansfield Park is possibly Jane Austen’s best book, and has never been even adequately adapted. The protagonist is very different from Austen’s more famous heroines, and directors always seem determined to make Fanny Price into Lizzy Bennett, which invariably wrecks the movie. (This happened in both the 1999 and 2007 versions. The 1983 TV series is OK.)
On the other extreme, I think even Mario Puzo admitted that The Godfather movie was better than the book he wrote. Coppola cut all of the fat out of the book and turned a potboiler into a classic.
Catch-22 contains several chapters filled with dialogue that just scream to be turned into film, but the narrative structure is almost impossible to replicate outside of a book. I’m not sure that any of Joseph Heller’s books could be adapted successfully. The 1970 film is well-cast and contains some really good bits, but doesn’t pack the punch that the book does.
Tehanu
Well, I’m another one, and I totally agree with you. I did like quite a lot of the movies, but for me, the books are far superior.
Yes, exactly. And my candidate for the best movie that’s better than the book is L.A. Confidential — the film is so much tighter and focused, and Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, and James Cromwell are amazing.
dnfree
@JPL:
I saw “Sophie’s Choice” when it came out, and I had young kids. My husband had to go in the house and pay the babysitter, because I was sitting in the car sobbing uncontrollably. Never read the book.
NotMax
Movie version of The Lathe of Heaven was an entertaining adaptation very true to the book.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
I’m soooo late to this. Glad to see you worked on this topic and the response. You are welcome. ;)
‘Von Ryan’s Express’. The movie is great. The book is fantastic. They’re both different from each other but execute well in their own respective way. Everybody should read the book.
‘The Great Escape’. Movie is better than the book.
‘Edge of Tomorrow’. Movie is one of the best recent sci fi movies made. Far better than the book.
‘Papillion’. Great movie, even greater book. Sure, Charriere’s story has been called into question over the years, doesn’t matter, it’s a great read.
‘True Grit’. Don’t let anybody, like the Coen’s, tell you otherwise, each movie is really good and neither is a “more true” adaptation of the book than the other. It was a massive conceit of the Coen’s to suggest otherwise because the 1969 version is *really* good. Portis’s novel is superb.
‘Outlaw Josey Wales’. Did y’all know that the author of the original book, cited as “Gone To Texas” in the film but originally published as “The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales”, only changed when everybody found out who the author was, a pseudonym, was the writer of Wallace’s “segregation now, segregation forever” speech? Book is very well done, movie, also very well done.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Melancholy Jaques:
She hasn’t. She should have won Best Actress for that performance.
The movie was shot on location just south of where me and Ozark lived. They used nothing but locals for the rest of the roles. It’s the only movie where I’ve seen the nature of rurl America captured so well.
dnfree
@kalakal: The film(s) of “The Hobbit” were dragged out and supplemented beyond recognition to make them more of a companion to LOTR than the book was intended to be. Book far better.
dnfree
@kalakal: Also agree on “Ran”. I want to see it again—it’s been a long time. The older daughters were better defined.
pieceofpeace
Mine was a plus, plus: “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” by Ken Kesey. The movie was directed by Douglas. The movie was cast with near-perfect people for every character.
Loved them equally.
billcinsd
@Mr. Prosser: You do know that every version that Adams did was supposed to be different
NotMax
Kind of surprised no one has brought up A Christmas Carol.
;)
BTW, for fans of ol’ Charley, the 20-part series Dickensian is pretty darn well done. Think of it as an extended murder mystery story taking place on Earth-Dickens. Streaming on Prime, on Britbox, on Tubi, on the Roku Channel and elsewhere.
Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom
The Martian was so much better than the book it’s unreal. And I say that as someone who is not a fan of Matt Damon. As someone else said, the book was a how-to manual for survival. The movie was an adventure. Plus that crazy, crazy music!
Martin
I had an excellent course in college called Politics Through Film and Literature where we read the book then watched the film and analyzed them. One novel a week. One of the biggest things you come to recognize is just how little you can fit into a film, and how much story you need to remove – particularly when you are doing that book/film together, week after week. But the most interesting ones were where global politics changed between the time of the book and film and how the film reflected those changes and that became really obvious even for books and films that I had previously read/seen but years apart.
But these were books trying to communicate a message, not merely entertain. That’s a different kind of adaptation. Generally the movie was more entertaining but failed to carry the message of the book adequately. Different jobs to be done.
JML
@Melancholy Jaques: I can find a rationale for having Faramir trying to claim the Ring, and can see why they thought it was necessary/appropriate to show in that movie, but I still find it an unforgiveable betrayal of Faramir’s character. Poor Faramir did not get translated well at all.
dnfree
“The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”: movie is good, book is much deeper. Seeing the movie made me want to read the book, and I have come to believe the book is one of the great American novels. The inability of people to fully communicate is demonstrated in so many ways.
Sure Lurkalot
@Memory Pallas:
I agree. I feel the same about Poor Things…neither book nor movie is more maniacal or fantastical than the other, but they are differently so.
mrmoshpotato
Michael Crichton’s Congo was a good book. The movie was completely idiotic.
sentient ai from the future
i finally read the book that inspired one of my favorite movies, L’Armée des ombres/Army of Shadows, in an english translation, and, well the movie is better in general.
sentient ai from the future
@kalakal: jeremy brett is the only visual version of sherlock holmes allowed, henceforth and forevermore. basil rathbone and benedict cumberbatch can both suck eggs.
Melancholy Jaques
@dnfree:
Carson McCullers is overdue for a renaissance, meaning another look at her novels.
Melancholy Jaques
@sentient ai from the future:
I grew up reading & loving Sherlock Holmes. I saw the Basil Rathbone movies on Saturday night movies. Like the ones where he’s fighting the Nazis. I liked Rathbone’s portrayal, but those movies were just bad.
Yutsano
@Snarki, child of Loki: You stole my answer you magnificent bastage.
frosty
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Von Ryan’s Express. Great book, ok movie except for one thing. How on earth could they have cast Frank Sinatra as Von Ryan??? The name came because Ryan looked like a blond, blue-eyed Prussian! The casting ruined the movie.
frosty
@piratedan:
Yes, Cruise was a disaster as Reacher. I just watched the first three episodes tonight. They got the right guy for the series.
VFX Lurker
The Hobbit has no women speak in it. Women get mentioned, but women never speak in The Hobbit. It’s an odd book that way.
I don’t mind that Galadriel, imaginary women in Laketown and an imaginary Tauriel show up in the film adaptation to give their lines so that women speak in the film. I’m fine with elves, dwarves, wizards, warriors and were-bears…but a fantasy world without women in it seems weird.
Ramalama
@kalakal: ohhh I loved Diva the film. Did not know it was a book!
kalakal
@Ramalama:
yep. written by a guy called Daniel Odier ( pseudonym Delacorta). He wrote several about the Gorodish character which get sillier and sillier
JML
@frosty: I thought the Cruise Reacher movies were good action flicks, but they simply weren’t Jack Reacher. The show is much better. I’ve only read a few of the books, but right now I’d rate them 1. Show, 2. Books, 3. Movies.
Show does a surprisingly good job of being funny. Didn’t really expect that.
AM in NC
@scav: Neither my husband nor I could make it through the first of the Wolf Hall books – the prose was just too overwrought for us. But we loved the first series and have just started watching it again to tee up the newly-released final installment.
Can’t think of other examples of where the filmed version was better than the book for me. Slow Horses comes close because the performances are so good, but I still like Mick Herron’s humor in the books.
I couldn’t finish even one episode of the 3 Pines series – the casting/characters seemed so off to me from how I imagined them.
Barry
The property I would most like to be made into a series of films would be Heinlen’s juveniles. You could tie them together well.
Shana
@Quaker in a Basement: this inevitable shortening of a movie from a book and cutting out subtitles and secondary characters is why movies are almost never as good as the book.
It’s why I have fallen in love with Korean Dramas. They’re typically 16 one hour episodes and are a self-contained story. The time give you the opportunity to really dig in to the whole story without having to jettison what might otherwise be secondary storylines or characters.
Miss Bianca
@NeenerNeener: So funny to see “Three Pines” pinned as our example – we are doing the radio play version of Louise Penny’s Still Life for a benefit performance for our theater in April.
Shana
@dnfree: have you seen Throne of Blood? His version of Macbeth