Audiobooks discussion
The MOVIE Was Better Than the Book ?
Shouldn't this be 3 part with the addition of a movie that was better than the book?Book trashed by movie: I Am Legend was an excellent book. The latest adaptation starring Will Smith was terrible. Especially the alternate ending just mocked Matheson's point.
Book & Movie both good: Mr Majestyk , Hombre, & quite a few others by Elmore Leonard.
Movie better than the book: "Blade Runner" was far superior to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Actually, I've always enjoyed the movie version of Philip K. Dick's books & stories better than his writing. I don't know why, but I simply hate his writing. I feel like I shouldn't. I'm an old SF nerd, but there's no accounting for taste, even to one's self.
Jim wrote: "but there's no accounting for taste, even to one's self. "Nice, I would like this available as a quote on GR!
Book and movie equalJurassic Park
Shoeless Joe which led to movie field of dreams. The book was very good but the movie was amazing obviously. If you build it they will come
Also the movie It's a wonderful life was better than the book . I'll have to think what the book was called now. It was only likr 30 pages long. Had gift in the title but I cannot recall right now
Travis of NNY wrote: "Book and movie equalJurassic Park."
Glad to hear that, Travis. I'm about to listen to the audiobook. I've watched the movie several times and I'm hoping it hasn't clouded my expectations.
The book/movie combo that I thought were pretty close were The Green Mile. I think I watched the movie first and then read the book and was surprised at how close they were. Stephen King did have a lot to do with the movie version apparently.I have 5 books on my "Movie was better" shelf:
The Princess Bride
Ghost Story
The Hundred-Foot Journey
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Starship Troopers
The books may have been awesome, but I had watched the movies so many times that they clouded my expectations of the books. I don't know how I would have reacted to the books if I had read them first.
I thought that The Hunger Games and the movie were very close. Even Mockingjay was good but after that they failed miserably.I'm listening to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and will watch the movie version this afternoon but I've heard they are very close.
One movie that I like a million times more than the book....I know, it's hard to believe, is JUNGLE BOOK. The book was so dry and Disney took that and made a fabulous animated movie.
I always forget I have the Green Mile and still haven't read it. I think its even some coklectors edition version. I don't even know where it came from
I have to agree with Hunger Games for being a pretty on-point adaptation.Movie that trashed the book... gotta go with the Percy Jackson adaptations. Those movies are painful and it makes me mad just to think about them.
Powder River Rose wrote: "One movie that I like a million times more than the book....I know, it's hard to believe, is JUNGLE BOOK. The book was so dry and Disney took that and made a fabulous animated movie..."I saw the trailer for the new version of Jungle Book at the theatre last week. The new one is not a cartoon!
My grandson used to love The Jungle Book so much when he was little. One night, my ex were lying in bed singing, "You-oo-oo, want to be like you-oo-oo.... want walk like you, talk like you...." I said, "You know you've watched a movie too many times when..."
Janice wrote: "Powder River Rose wrote: "One movie that I like a million times more than the book....I know, it's hard to believe, is JUNGLE BOOK. The book was so dry and Disney took that and made a fabulous anim..."hahahahah we sing lots around here too....and it's not always pretty. hehahahahahe
I didn't know a new version was out. I'll have to find it. Thank you for the info.
It looks like it's being released April 2016. While it's not cartoon, it's "3D live-animation CGI". It looks very realistic from the trailer we saw.
Great thread. So many to mention.Movie equals book:
- Nineteen Eighty-Four starring John Hurt. I think you'd be hard pressed making a better adaption of the book than this.
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- Shawshank Redemption, based on a Stephen King novella.
- The Godfather. Movie may actually be a little better, but both are excellent.
- The Silence of the Lambs.
Movies that didn't measure up:
- Dune. Don't get me wrong - I like the movie. But it strayed too far from the book, and the ending was unforgivable.
- I, Robot starring Will Smith. A decent action flick, but doesn't to justice to the source material.
Now another book/movie I would have to say is quite different, though in this case not bad is: A Princess of Mars and it's movie version John Carter of Mars.The books are long and a bit dry but give so much detail that the movie didn't have, however the movie was much better for visual purposes. As I said on another thread...I can't see humans accepting martian "humans" laying eggs so it's best they conveniently left that out of the movie.
Janice wrote: "Travis of NNY wrote: "Book and movie equalJurassic Park."
Glad to hear that, Travis. I'm about to listen to the audiobook. I've watched the movie several times and I'm hoping it ha..."
I, too, thought the movie was better. The paleobotanist (Laura Dern), got a much better part, and the young girl was far less of a brat. There were several times in the audio that I was yelling at the Sam Neill character to make her shut up.
But **Jurassic Park**, the movie, was kind of a breakthrough in terms of gee-whiz effects, so it's got that going for it, making it so memorable.
I came to **The Princess Bride** very late, and then some years passed before I read the book. I have to say that while the book is good, the movie is just great, another breakthrough, IMO.
Warm Bodies: While I liked the book just fine, the actors did a great job adding charm to the characters and I liked the movie slightly more than the book.
Nineteen Eighty-Four definately better in movie form - George Orwell had wonderfully vision but oh so hard to read. Same for The Trial . Can't read Kafka.And Mockingjay. I was very disappointed with the final book of that trilogy.
I think that both Fight Club and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the books and movies were really avout the same
The early days of Hollywood adapted lots of classics and improved on some: Phantom of the Opera (movie left out the weirdest parts), Wuthering Heights (I hate the book Heathclif), Frankenstein (it's the movie version that is iconic), Moby Dick (shorter is better). I think Grisham's The Firm was improved in film.I agree the movie adaptations of the Percy Jackson books were very disappointing. Eragon was another movie bomb.
Fahrenheit 451 was nearly the same as the movie, although the movie added the camp of people who had memorized books, which was a very poignant addition, while the book decided on an air attack. And Murder on the Orient Express was a good book and good movie.
Sense and Sensibility in the Emma Thompson version is better than the book, in my opinion, even though I love Austen.The Martian was surprisingly good as a movie, though nothing could be as good as R C Bray's audiobook.
The Clan of the Cave Bear was a bad movie based on a better book.
Robin wrote: "Sense and Sensibility in the Emma Thompson version is better than the book, in my opinion, even though I love Austen.The Martian was surprisingly good as a movie, though nothing could be as good ..."
The Clan of the Cave Bear was an appauling movie that never should have been made! It was a novel without dialogue. Brilliant book, but what were the movie people thinking??
I am a Jane Austen fan but never really liked *Sense and Sensibility*. The movie was definitely better than the book. And for the youngest sister, Margaret, who barely appeared in the book, an engaging character was created. I couldn't help liking that.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Breakfast at Tiffany's yet. It's not that the book was really bad (it wasn't very good, though), it's more like Capote had a great idea for a story, then badly executed it as a book. It was redeemed by George Axelrod in adapting it for the screen. In the book, Fred is a Gary Stu, Holly a repulsive jerk, there are a lot of characters who don't do much except bizarrely pine after this woman who is described as boyish-looking and has the personality of a spoiled child, and the book's ending makes you wonder who wasted more time -- you reading it, or Capote writing it. The whole thing seems not like a compelling story, but a dated, too-cleverly-disguised metaphor for repressed sexuality.The movie, however, tells a story about two emotionally-damaged escorts who manage help each other find a sense of worth and overcome their parasitic lifestyle.
A few people have already mentioned The Princess Bride and Fight Club. William Goldman had the advantage of making his own book into a screenplay. With that in mind, the book reads like a "stream of consciousness" first draft that was later intended to be revised into something more consumable, which it was. Ironically, the author claimed to have already done that in the book's foreword. You will understand this perfectly if you ever try to read The Princess Bride aloud to someone. All of the asides and tangents and the messy dialogue attribution prevent the Peter Falk experience you imagined.
What's interesting about Fight Club is, in the commentary track with Chuck Palahniuk and (screenwriter) Jim Uhls on the special edition Blu-Ray disc, Palahniuk admits that nearly all of the changes Uhls made to adapt the book for the screen were superior story choices.
Truman Capote, on the other hand, hated the changes in the Breakfast at Tiffany's screenplay. My opinion of his work is pretty low. I think he was only popular because his subject matter was risque, and it was the only contact many middle-class people had with fringe cultural topics.
It used to be that I never did both a book and its movie; it was one or the other (usually the book) as I couldn't separate the two. The Fellowship of the Ring changed that for me; I was able to let both versions exist on their own in my imaginative space. Actually, the trilogy works for this question in reverse order:Movie was terrible:
The Return of the King
Book and movie about the same:
The Two Towers
Movie better than book:
Dare I say it? Maybe so. The Fellowship of the Ring (I am not a Bombadil fan, obviously.) That might be a stretch. Another one, just in case. I would also agree with Jim; Blade Runner was a vastly better story than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I LOVE Fellowship but I'm not as big a fan of Return of the King -- I tend to wonder if it won so many awards because it was the finale of the trilogy? (And if this was the case, WHERE were all the HP Oscars??)
It definitely won the awards because it was the finale (and the Academy had snubbed LOTR up to that point, I think). Fellowship was the only movie of the trilogy worthy of any kind of award, IMHO. Couldn't say on HP; I went back to my book or movie policy: the books shall live alone for all time in my mind. (And I will pretend that that seventh one does not exist.)
Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "It definitely won the awards because it was the finale (and the Academy had snubbed LOTR up to that point, I think). Fellowship was the only movie of the trilogy worthy of any kind of award, IMHO. ..."lol, I feel mostly the same. One way the audiobooks of LotR was better than print was that I actually was able to enjoy Tom Bombadil. I love the way Robert Ingliss sings his songs and voices the character. In print, I simply didn't get Tom Bombadill.
The worst book to movie adaptation is Snowflower and the Secret Fan absolutely beautiful book that they completely ruined by making a movie and adding a present day time line that took the heart right out of a great story!
I also thought The Fault in Our Stars and The Perks of Being a Wallflower were better films than books. in TFIOS, Ansel Elgort made Gus much more likeable in my mind than he'd been in the book -- in the book he came off as very pretentious. I thought Perks worked better as a film because the casting was perfect and with so much music being mentioned in the book, I don't think you get the full effect of what Chbosky was going for until you watch the film.
Jeanie wrote: "One way the audiobooks of LotR was better than print was that I actually was able to enjoy Tom Bombadil."More encouragement to get those read in audio, definitely! (They are very much on my to-do list, but I don't know if I'll make it to a LOTR reread this year.)
Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "Jeanie wrote: "One way the audiobooks of LotR was better than print was that I actually was able to enjoy Tom Bombadil."More encouragement to get those read in audio, definitely! (They are very m..."
Worth it any time you get to it... enjoy!
Atonement was better as a movie.Like Water for Chocolate was great as both.
Water for Elephants was all wrong (IMHO) as a movie.
The Perter Jackson version of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. After a life of checking out dissappointing attempts of film TLOTR, Peter Jackson did not disappoint.The Sound and the Fury, the 1959 film with Yul Brenner and Joanne Woodward. I haven't seen the 2014 James Franco but I am skeptical. I just don't think a visual medium is suitable to interior dialogue books.
Hi Jem,Nice review of B@T.
I had the opposite reaction. I really liked the book because I liked the book Holly GoLightly character much better than the movie. I do like both however. There is lots of speculation about who Capote used as the inspiration of Holly.
The audible version has Michael Hall (Dexter) as the narrator. He does a good job.
Julie wrote: "So, I bet I've heard the line a thousand times that the book was better than the movie . This is a 2 part question :Name a specific book and movie that were both dead on target for level of inter..."
Oh, this is so very easy... but, when you see my answers, you will see that I am "showing my age"....
On target was War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk. Yes, it was a tv movie, but movie it was, so it should count. Have to admit that even though I had already read the books 3 or 4 times, after I saw the movie, Robert Mitchum became Pug Henry to me.
In the second category - a movie that trashed the book - the book was Mitchner's Hawaii They took about a chapter and a half from an excellent story which covers a couple of centuries of information and family stories, and turned that tiny bit of a full length story into a movie. Story was hard to follow if you didn't know all of the "background" from the book, so the movie just didn't make any sense. Such a shame.
I think that Hawaii really burned me on books to movies, cause I rarely go to see movies that were made from books I have loved. <><
Just watched Being Poirot http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3390600/I really enjoyed David Suchet's Poirot all those years and suddenly thought that the whole series outshines the books. Although without the books we would never have had the series.
I can't really say they're on par, but ... I could never finish Orlando (the book), but I loved Orlando (the movie).Amanda Foreman's brilliant biography, Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire, was absolutely ruined by an appalling movie The Duchess, which totally misunderstood its subject's life. One of the most egregious changes was to write her husband as a rapist (which he wasn't, at least according to the biography). There's kind of no going back from that ...
The old Disney Swiss Family Robinson movie is a lot of fun, no pirates in the book, and all that. (I do love the book.)I won't admit to any movie version surpassing Austen's books, but the 2009 Emma comes darn close.
The Hobbit movies come to mind as one of the worst butchering of a story I've seen in a while.
And while it's a pretty good stand-alone movie, the 2005 Pride & Prejudice completely misinterpreted the book.
1-The Road2-The Reader
4-Shutter Island
5-The Martian
I liked the books and the movies very much. the books and movies were pretty much copies of each other.
6-The Lathe of Heaven
the movie completely ruined the book. the movie went so far as CHANGING THE GENDER of the main character just to add a random sex scene that didn't exist in the book, while completely skipping the deeper parts of the book.
7-The Maze Runner
the book bored me to sleep. but I enjoyed the movie
I liked the movie Last of the Mohicans better than the book. I don't think James Fenimore Cooper had a high opinion of women.
I thought The Hundred-Foot Journey movie version was better than the book. I really liked the book version, just preferred the movie. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe movie was so much better than the book, which I just did not like as much.
Felt The Help and To Kill a Mockingbird movies and books were pretty comparable.
Movies better than their book/novella, in my opinion:The Neverending Story.
(Shawshank Redemption) Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.
(Stand by Me) The Body.
Brokeback Mountain
The Devil Wears Prada
Bridget Jones's Diary
As a life long Jane Austen fan I thought the movie Sense and Sensibility was much better than the book. The BBC TV versions of Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion were accurate and delightful, the movies just OK. With Emma, the young wealthy, self important twit trying to direct the lives of everybody around her irritated me so much I was never able to finish the book or the movie.
In the 1930s I enjoyed the movie series based on Dashiel Hammett's book, The Thin Man. Maybe it was because the actors, William Powell and Myrna Loy, and the direction, were so engaging. I read the book much later and found it so-so.
I hated War and Peace - book but the recent BBC adaption did a decent job of changing my mind.Difficult on movies as I nearly always prefer the book but I'll agree on Blade Runner and another classic sci-fi 2001.
Ever the contrarian, in my world Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Sense and Sensibility, LOTR, To Kill a Mockingbird and Orlando are all decent movies and GREAT (superior) books.Jaws, on the other hand, was a great movie and a deeply awful book. YMMV. :)
I would say movies far better than books on almost all Mark Millar adaptations. Kickass to Secret Service
Philip wrote: "I hated War and Peace - book but the recent BBC adaption did a decent job of changing my mind."Never read the book, but this War and Peace miniseries made me wish to listen to it. It would be great if this series would also made into an audiodrama I could listen to, with the beautiful music they used in the series to accompany.
I haven't read "Revolutionary Road" yet. How did that movie/book compare? I put my vote with "Shawshank Redemption" and "Fried Green Tomatoes" as movies better than book.
Audiobooks
Books mentioned in this topic
Magpie Murders (other topics)Magpie Murders (other topics)
Magpie Murders (other topics)
Big Fish (other topics)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Diana Gabaldon (other topics)George Orwell (other topics)
Elmore Leonard (other topics)
Philip K. Dick (other topics)
The BBC filmed part of the book, and it was done beautifully. I had a friend watching who normally did not watch BBC because of missing subtitles (in dutch). But she watched because I made her, and she was so moved, she almost cried telling me about it the next day.
I don't know if I am allowed to add this link? Here's about the movie and the book. http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/...
Your next question.... don't get me started!
Oh, small edit: the movie was not better, but as good as the book.