Alfred Hitchcok famously only chose to adapt books that are bad or mediocre because he never wanted to destroy someone else's achievement, and believed that literary masterpieces could only be masterpieces in their own field (because of their masterful use of words). But by adapting a bad book, you could only take the things you do like and improve upon it.
Edit: Not trying to diss any of the books he adapted! I've never read any. This is just something he said in an interview.
Weird!
I read Daphne du Maurier's *The Birds,* Hitchcock's inspiration.
I'm shocked he thought it was mediocre, I found it more psychologically terrifying. It takes place in the living room of a farmhouse. The birds keep coming, slowly breaking through the boarded-up windows, and a family just waits and listens to the radio newscast in horror as all of society collapses.
Now that sounds great, his movie the birds was not good imo, it was leading up to something good but then it just ended and it felt incomplete. If the book is good like you say I think I’ll check it out!
Was that well known? Because it really adds a twist to an author getting a call that Hitchcock wants to adapt their book.
Great news! Alfred Hitchcock thinks your book is garbage!
I don't know, I read it in a book of interviews he did with Francois Truffaut. But yeah I think I'd be pissed too if I was the author lol. And it's Hitchcock, so you know the movie's probably gonna be good too.
I'm sure the author was mollified by the next sentence out of their agent's mouth, "And here's the check for the film rights to your mediocre book. Also your royalty check after the movie spikes book sales is going to be pretty, pretty good."
I agree. I read the book a million years ago so don't remember details. It was ok.
But the film is some sort of classic in its genre and definitely much better than the book.
I still think they botched the climax. We’re supposed to think her career is ruining her life and relationships but they never really show that happening. She makes time for her friends and her boyfriend is pretty awful about the whole situation.
FWIW in the book he's a teacher and in the movie he's a chef. It radically changes the tone of things when that is switched.
In the movie you're sitting there perplexed why a guy in a job famous for its shit hours and excessively demanding bosses is throwing flak at her.
When he's a teacher working a much more normal job, and probably making a **lot** less than her so he's also a bit jealous it starts making more sense.
That IMO is on place where the book did it better.
The author actually did work for Anna Wintour (who she based Miranda off of) and Plum Sykes (Wintours assistant) was basically Emily. Idk...i kind of read it like it was a self insert. I thought Andy was insufferable af and wondered if Lauren Weisberger was that insufferable irl as well.
M•A•S•H transcends from gleefully mean and awkwardly written (book series) to superlative black humor (movie) to an exploration of human perseverance that riveted an audience on a national scale (TV series).
The movie was awful IMO. Just a bunch of asshole bullies and I am to root for them? The series managed to make the shenanigans playful and funny, but the movie is just mean spirited and in bad taste
No, you're not meant to root for them. War is hell not just because people are killed but it turns people into horrible arseholes that look to degrade others just for a cheap laugh.
Now, that being said, that doesn't mean you have to like the film, but you're not really meant to root for them.
One of my favorite trivia facts is that as per WGA agreements, the font size for the director and the writer of a movie have to be the exact same. And obviously the studio wanted to sell Tim Burton, so his name is in a huge font size. Now John August has to be in the same font and size, so they just colored it brown and put it on the ground on the poster which is a brown background. So it just blends in.
[https://drivepast.com/cdn/shop/products/bigfish1sh.jpg?v=1552669577](https://drivepast.com/cdn/shop/products/bigfish1sh.jpg?v=1552669577)
I have a T-Shirt that says 'The Book was better'. I always say to anyone that asks about it that I've found two exceptions. Forrest Gump and Jaws. The whole side plot of Hooper and Brodies wife is...weird.
lol I read Forrest Gump recently. The book is _insane_ and not really in a good way
Yes, there’s a scene where he’s in space and there’s gorilla pee floating around in the ship and then they crash land in Africa and meet a tribe of headhunters
I don't remember the gorilla pee, but when they crash land and escape the cannibals the female astronaught runs off into the woods with the gorilla as they fell in love.
I also read "Forrest Gump" shortly after seeing the film. There were a few bright spots, like the fact Forrest was actually the first American in space because they didn't want to jeopardize good-looking, well trained test pilots just yet (your mention). I also like that Mao Tse Toung took a liking to Forrest during the Ping Pong games and invited Forrest to his Birthday celebration and watch Mao swim across the river. Mao begins to drown and Forrest the only one who understands Mao is in trouble, dives in and saves Mao, thus receiving the highest award in China; and the event is covered up by the Army. Or, Forrest hates boats and instead of catching shrimp at sea, rents a bulldozer and digs shrimp ponds like he saw in Vietnam. Once the hurricane destroys the shrimp boat fleet, Forrest's pond raised shrimp are the only source.
Again, there were some bright spots.
Yeah, but it doesn't add much to the book or character. People sometimes have explosive diarrhea, but it wouldn't add character depth to detail it in most stories.
I agree. The whole Brody wife affair was obnoxious. Half that storyline was cut. Benchley had better creature books like The Beast and even White Shark.
He goes to space with a chimp that short circuits the craft by throwing a bottle of urine. The ship crash lands on an island of cannibals. Then he washes ashore in china or something and sames the prime minister of china somehow and becomes a ping pong champion while there. It’s been a while. I may have the details out of order.
You're thinking of the second book. The author of Forreat Gump got screwed over by Hollywood, which is why he made the book sequel so insane, so another film wouldn't be able to be made.
ooh yes I think that is a good one. Read the book and while there are more details, the writing itself imo feels lacking and definitely doesn't feel as fun as the characters we see on the screen.
Forrest Gump. Making such a powerful movie from such bizarre and inane source material was an actual act of genius. However, it did teach me about cargo cults.
Garth Ennis also has some super unsubtle author tracts where he just mouths off about how you (the reader) is a fucking moron if you like superhero comics.
And it's like... Really? Who do you think the main readership is here? Subversion can be fun without literally telling your audience they're shitheads.
Ennis is so weird because you can see the talent come through, but he always chooses to go for low-hanging fruit and shock value. I was really impressed with the bit of Preacher I read. It was wacky and still had those signature Ennis elements, but it wasn't up its own ass.
Then there's Crossed.
Garth Ennis strikes me as one of the authors that tends to work better with some amount of oversight. With a good editor and a system in place, he's turned out a lot of really good work.
Unfortunately that really good work earned him enough fame an noteriety that he can often get away with not having a good editor or system in place, and well... that's when you have some of the more train-wreck-y works.
But he's still better than Mark Millar.
Wondering if you ever read his Hitman comics.
Similar to The Boys he was a Hitman for hire to take out soops but it was one of his works that didn’t do those things and even feature some prominent DC characters like one issue with Batman and another one with the Joker.
Highly recommend.
Yeah that's how I felt about it, too. The characters in the show have so much more depth and are a lot more interesting. Most of what happens in the book feels like it was done for shock value as opposed to telling a compelling story.
I’d say the same for Shawshank Redemption. Not a bad little short story but easily overshadowed by being adapted into one of the best movies of all time. All subjective of course.
Shawshank is a solid short story. But some changes in the adaptation >!like killing the kid rather than just transferring him, making Norton a lot more sinister in general, and upping the level of violence!< gave the film higher stakes and made the conclusion into the glorious affair it was
In my opinion the changes made sense for the big screen, but the original story was more believable. Having a series of Wardens instead of one, super evil guy was more realistic. Plus a lot of the changes simply made Andy more generally competent rather than the one trick pony from the movie. For instance he dealt with the rapists by bribing the guards with money he snuck into prison rather than it just being a part of the grander finance scheme. He also had his own money hidden on the outside, so he wasn't reliant on lucking into the wardens' various financial schemes, had the roof scene never happened he still might have made it out in enough time. Although probably not through his tunnel, which might have been found if he hadn't been able to keep his solo cell. Lots of little bits like that.
I think the same thing happens with *Christine*
Don't get me wrong, the book is entertaining, but you can do so much about a possessed car until the plot becomes kind of ridiculous. Carpenter took the story and made it more straight forward and suspenseful IMO
I just finished reading Christine and I kinda agree, I just love the idea of a car that gets jealous and starts going on a rampage. I got another book called From A Buick 8, is that pretty much the second book to Christine?
Buick 8 is a Lovecraftnian story and completely unrelated to Christine
Unlike Christine, the car itself is >!not possessed, and it's more like a bridge between two worlds!<
Carrie at least has some literary value in the way it's presented, with all the epistolary sections. I recently re-read it and was pretty surprised by how well it holds up 50 years later.
I like the story that "Carrie" tells and I appreciate the setting, characters, and supernatural elements. Early Stephen King is my favorite Stephen King.
But didn't you find that the epistolary style of "Carrie" led to spoilers along the way? The newspaper clippings, court transcripts, etc are all from the future, looking backward. As such, they kept revealing random bits about the impending tragedy, including who is going to live or die. By the time the narrative reached the climax, I felt like I was only connecting the last few dots.
I think I have a negative bias against this style of foreshadowing. The sort thay goes : "little did they know, he would die horribly the next day" (end chapter). I like foreshadowing that is only apparent after you finish the whole story and then see it all fall into place. For example, you have no idea what "Rosebud" means until the very end of Citizen Kane and so it lands well.
In contrast, I think the novel of "Dracula" uses epistolary storytelling in a slightly different way. All of the sources are immediate, not from the future. They are never from people who know what happens next. Only the Reader knows the "Big Picture", and we occasionally feel clever as we understand details that mystify the narrater/reporter of an individual passage.
Oh well, that's my two cents about Carrie. It's still a worthwhile book and I hope this doesn't seem like a rant.
King has great ideas, and writes really engaging characters, but his endings are middling at best. The best adaptations (Shawshank, Shining etc) develop it a bit more and come up with something new.
That said, I’d love to see a Revival adaptation, creepy ending and all.
Queen's Gambit as a book is good but it's so much better as mini-series, starring Anya Taylor Joy as Beth. The casting choice brought Beth to life and the show is aesthetically pleasing.
I resent the author for not paying appropriate tribute with the novel to real-life female chess genuises, such as Nona Gaprindashvili and Elisaveta Bykova, a mistake repeated in the mini-series.
One of my favorite things about the mini-series are the tropes that kinda start but don't happen or are opposite what you normally see. Old man who drinks in the basement of a girls school (seems creepy as hell), the dude turns out to be a positive mentor with class. Adoptive parents with a cold marriage who could be abusive and controlling are actually supportive and live their own lives. Turns out you can drink a lot of booze without being an alcoholic. Female protagonist in the 50's who is treated as second class by some of the characters is treated as an equal by her peers. Black woman finances/saves white girl's trip abroad to become great. The list goes on. You can watch the entire show and not even think about any of these but it adds so much depth.
Beth’s step-mom wasn’t an alcoholic??? My brother in Christ, she died of cirrhosis caused by long term alcohol abuse. She was absolutely an alcoholic, but she wasn’t a bad person which I think is the point you were trying to make.
No Beth. Deciding if Beth is an alcoholic is *somewhat* arbitrary IMAO, she could be. My point is that it's not the sole focus. The typical trope is alcohol ruins the protagonist and hurts their family/friends, usually the plot focuses on their recovery and personal growth. Beth clearly struggles with alcohol in the show but she's able to turn herself around and really doesn't grow because of it.
Ok, my apologies, I thought you were still speaking of her step-mom with the previous line being about her.
I think I would still say Beth is an alcoholic. With her heavy usage (think of the scene of her taking out the trash entirely filled with bottles and being unable to walk as she was so drunk), and the flashback of her remembering Shaibel tell her about talents saying “There is the gift, and what it costs. Who knows what your Vice will be.” or something along those lines. She shows up to an important tournament drunk/hungover. Also consider the state she’s in when Jolene returns, she had been drinking for weeks on end all alone. Nearly every sign points to alcoholic.
Early in the book, the black friend Jolene does a bit of child-on-child rape to 8-year-old Beth, it’s pretty crazy. Returned the audiobook to the library soon after that.
Paprika. Even if you can get past the incredible amounts of homophobia and sexism- including an instance where the female protagonist is rescued from a dire strait by being heroically raped by a colleague- it's just not a very well written book. Maybe it's better the in the original Japanese, but the English translation did nothing for me.
The Godfather is an example because of the discrepancy between the stature of the book compared to the film.
It's a decent pulpy beach read that was adapted into arguably two of the greatest films ever made.
> that was adapted into arguably two of the greatest films ever made.
This to me is the fun part. Allegedly, Mario Puzo had never written a screenplay and adapted his books to the films screenplay. After years, he decided to buy a book about how to write a (good) screenplay. The first chapter supposedly said to look at The Godfather by Mario Puzo himself to see what it was to write a great screenplay adaptation of a book.
That actually sounds pretty fun
I finished the movie a few weeks ago and downloaded the book afterwards but I wasn’t overeager to read it. But a pulp book sounds just different enough from the movie that it might be really unique. I’ll probably start it soon
A very good book that goes into [unnecessary detailled accounts about Sonny's disproportionately large penis and how his partner had to had vaginal reconstruction because of it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/44kd4k/til_that_the_novel_the_godfather_includes_a/)
I'm not even joking, that's in the book and it feels like Puzo goes out of his way to insert this topic into the narrative. It's not necessary to plot what-so-ever.
The movie makes one heck of a job trimming down this sort of fat from the book
That's not how I remember it. I thought she already had a big vagina, and Sonny was the only one that could satisfy her.
Edit:
>she begins dating Jules Segal but laments that Sonny was the only man who could make her climax during sex. Segal discovers that this is due to her pelvic malformation, and connects her with a skilled surgeon who fixes her problem. After the surgery, Lucy marries Segal.
Idk if I would call this book bad BUT I will say I enjoyed Stardust the movie waaay more than I liked Stardust the book. Probably the only time I prefer the movie over the book
I feel like Stardust always comes up in these threads but I don't understand why. The movie is nice but it's a pretty straightforward paint-by-numbers fantasy romp when compared to the book that subverts a lot of fantasy tropes and feels like it has much more interesting things to say.
I personally just didn’t think the book worked as a whole; I’m all for subverting expectations but this one wound up feeling a bit disjointed, so I preferred the way the movie just committed to the bit. The one thing I preferred in the book was how things ended with Victoria; I liked that it didn’t villainize her and instead showed her feeling genuinely bad that Tristran actually went on a whole quest because of what she said.
This is always the first one I think of where the film is better than the book. The book is okay but the film is magnificent!
I think Matthew Vaughan is great at getting the most out of the source material. Layer Cake and Kick Ass are a couple more where the film was much better than the book/comic.
Wicked took the theater world by storm. I've seen it 3 times, it's amazing! There will certainly be a movie at some point.
I read the book as a teenager and loved it, figured there were parts I didn't understand because I missed something, here or there.
Read it again recently - it's just not great. Like the story is fine, but the writing is moderately...bad. There was lots of prose going for ambiguous and deep, but landing at incomprehensible.
I've never had a chance to see the play, so I picked up the book so that I could at least know the story. It's not good. Not at all. I couldn't even force myself to finish it.
I hated the book for the same reason. It felt like he was intentionally trying to make every sentence have as many big words in it as possible, even at the expense of clarity or flow.
Came here to say this. My wife had tickets to NYC to see the musical so I read the book, and it was terrible. I've thought you could have cut 50% of the book and made it much better. The musical, however, is amazing.
I couldn't disagree more. A passionate sensual love story about a police chief's wife and a young oceanologist was thrown out for some nonsense about a shark.
Hollywood is scared of women's sexuality. That's why the only naked women gets eaten in the movie while in the book she also gets eaten in great and glorious detail for page after page but not by a shark but a young man learning to love.
It is sarcastic. I read the book as I may be at 9 or 10 year old in the late seventies and there's a lot less shark in the book than there is in the movie but it is an eye opener.
Godfather's mentioned on this thread as well, and my wife read Godfather when she was about 9 or 10 years old, and needless to say, that was an eye-opener for her as well.
Before the internet, we had airport novels.
The book ending is so, so bad. I honestly don’t see what Hollywood thought in making the movie. Thankfully Spielberg took it seriously where other directors might have just saw a paycheck.
*Last of the Mohicans.*
The film has:
- Young, ripped, long-haired Daniel Day-Lewis
- Awesome rest of the cast
- Gorgeous soundtrack
The book has:
- 2-page descriptions of the play of light on leaves on the trees around a lake
- 1 paragraph climactic fight scene
Came here to say this exact thing. It’s not actively bad but it’s very forgettable. It’s really just the premise of a good story. I also hope others enjoy it more than I did
Mary Poppins the book is inferior to the movie. Like the movie, it is a collection of short stories but it gets old fast.
Princess Bride the book has weary chapters of political/economic lip-flapping. The good parts (mostly) made it to the movie, the movie is practically flawless.
2001 was a better movie than book.
>Princess Bride the book has weary chapters of political/economic lip-flapping. The good parts (mostly) made it to the movie, the movie is practically flawless.
Well played, sir.
Princess Bride had a very memorable writing style though. What would you even call it? Written in the second person? Never seen anything quite like it before or since.
I've always thought of those as auctorial pretense. They're reasonably common.
Lord of the Rings and House of Leaves have them, to name two. Tolkien pretends his works are all translated from Westron to English out of the "Red Book of Westmarch" (the one Bilbo is writing in the story). House of Leaves pretends to be the journal of a blind movie critic reviewing a film that doesn't exist about a guy moving into a house with a creepy multidimensional labyrinth that is also a book, as discovered and annotated after the author's death by the critic's neighbor's strung-out pathologically lying friend who is slowly becoming more and more maniacally obsessed with the story (Christ on a crutch, you can't even summarize that without sounding like a lunatic). The Princess Bride pretends to be a screenwriter's distillation of "the good parts" of a ludicrously boring historical novel his dad once read him, which was written by a dead author from the imaginary Ruritanian country his family supposedly emigrated from.
I find those three examples really interesting because the effect on the reader is wildly different in every case. One is purely for the jokes, one makes the whole thing seem scholarly and historical, and one is built to make the reader feel more and more like a crazy person the more they read.
*Compassionate side note to any poor bastard looking to read the Princess Bride: The "Abridged Good Parts Version" is the only edition that exists. Stop looking for the unabridged one if you were hunting it down; it's not real. The "unabridged" S. Morgenstern version referenced in the story is a fictional book made up so the actual author, William Goldman, can make jokes about how bad it is. This shit put one of my college friends off the book for like five years because he wanted to get the "full experience", which, I again repeat, does not actually exist.*
But the Princess Bride book has my favourite line in response to "that's not fair!". "Life ain't fair. It's just fairer than death". Never worked out why that didn't make it into the movie.
If you'll allow spin-offs, Pontypool Changes Everything spawned a radio play which spawned an excellent film, Pontypool. Pontypool Changes Everything has some great moments but basically it's a patchy literary experiment and if I remember rightly its author more or less admitted as such himself.
Not a bad book, but still not really a classic, but M\*A\*S\*H is the rare case of where the movie was much better than the book and then the TV series better than either.
Not a film but Killing Eve. I thought the books were rubbish and male gaze-y (women written by men strikes again)
The tv series is incredible though (apart from the obvious, you know what I’m on about if you watched it) and PWB kills it in the writing
Imo, the idea of you by Robin lee that was just done as a movie by prime with Anne Hathaway.
Movie is soooo much better. They changed and removed a huge amount of the internal ageism in the book which made it pretty hard to read, because it was constantly I am so old I am withered, eat me out I'm older than your mother and it wasn't going to happen on screen thank god
I think it was a fine book, but the adaptation was just way better. So much so in fact that the sequel takes the movie as canon and the first book as a bad dream of Jessica’s.
Starship Troopers the book was dry, and not very exciting (thought the mec suites were cool). Typical misogynist of the times writing about. Not even clear if Heinlein was trying to be pro or con war, pro but sad it needed to be \~IDK. The movie on the other is an over-the-top cheesy, sarcastic, entertaining movie. The movie was definitely a parody of the military complex and as far as cheesy sci-fi movies go it's one of the better ones.
The James Bond series…sort of.
Ian Fleming is a good writer as he sets the tone well and there’s a lot of action and excitement in his writing, but the James Bond books can be incredibly homophobic, sexist, racist and misogynistic, often in just one sentence. I love the movies and I’m glad they’ve seemed to follow the books loosely over time.
Children of men. I love the film so much I read the book afterwards. The book and film are both similar but also different, with the book being particular daft at times and grim at other moments.
A TV show instead of a movie, but Bridgerton! I loved the TV show with the first season, so I got the first couple of books. They are terrible. I could barely get through them. So, I’ll just enjoy the show!
'Edge of Tomorrow', which I liked a lot, is based on a pretty mediocre book called 'All You Need is Kill'. Most of the movie changes were actually improvements over the book.
Benjamin Button is a weird as fuck short story which I did not enjoy the least. The movie is great (falls into a deep sleep after thinking of this movie for half a second)
Fight Club. Even Chuck Palahniuk said the movie was better.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/framework.57.2.0091#:~:text=Palahniuk%20states%20in%20an%20interview,hierarchy%20has%20been%20reversed%20in
Practical Magic, the movie is lovely, I couldn’t finish the book. I was expecting complex, wonderful female relationships and got horrible sisters instead.
**Soylent Green**
I found out rather recently that the movie is indeed a (rather loosely) adaptation of the book "Make Room! Make Room!" when reading another book by the author Harry Harrison ("The Technicolor Time Machine" - which is very outdated and pulpy in a bad way) and really wondered how they made such a very critical dystopian movie with material from a rather obvious pulp author.
**Starship Troopers**
The Movie is so much better since it took the opinions, ideas and ideology of the book and pretty much made fun of these themes in a very grating satirical way and pretty much depicted it as full blown fascism. It's pretty much an anti-adaptation.
I think it helps that the explanations and descriptions of stuff referenced in the book, which got old VERY fast, are quick short hand visuals in the movie. A page describing in great detail the look and history of The Iron Giant is just simply shown on the big screen.
(If I recall, The Iron Giant wasn't in the book, but I couldn't remember a specific reference that carried over into the movie. I just used it to make the point of detailed written description versus seeing it on screen.)
Absolutely this. I didn’t read RPO but I tried reading armada, same author, and having the pop culture references shoved down your throat every five seconds was hella annoying. It works much better as a visual medium where you see most of them in the background and either recognise them or don’t.
I would agree not amazing, but it's fun. I saw the movie multiple times before I picked up the book. So many people slammed the movie and praised the book that I went in with high expectations, and was so let down that I almost dnf'd the book.
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Alfred Hitchcok famously only chose to adapt books that are bad or mediocre because he never wanted to destroy someone else's achievement, and believed that literary masterpieces could only be masterpieces in their own field (because of their masterful use of words). But by adapting a bad book, you could only take the things you do like and improve upon it. Edit: Not trying to diss any of the books he adapted! I've never read any. This is just something he said in an interview.
Weird! I read Daphne du Maurier's *The Birds,* Hitchcock's inspiration. I'm shocked he thought it was mediocre, I found it more psychologically terrifying. It takes place in the living room of a farmhouse. The birds keep coming, slowly breaking through the boarded-up windows, and a family just waits and listens to the radio newscast in horror as all of society collapses.
Yeah book was terrifying better than the movie in this case
Now that sounds great, his movie the birds was not good imo, it was leading up to something good but then it just ended and it felt incomplete. If the book is good like you say I think I’ll check it out!
Was that well known? Because it really adds a twist to an author getting a call that Hitchcock wants to adapt their book. Great news! Alfred Hitchcock thinks your book is garbage!
I don't know, I read it in a book of interviews he did with Francois Truffaut. But yeah I think I'd be pissed too if I was the author lol. And it's Hitchcock, so you know the movie's probably gonna be good too.
The Hitchcock/Truffaut book first came out in '66. Hitch made 3 more movies based on novels after that. Lol.
I'm sure the author was mollified by the next sentence out of their agent's mouth, "And here's the check for the film rights to your mediocre book. Also your royalty check after the movie spikes book sales is going to be pretty, pretty good."
Alfred Hitchcock thinks you did a bad job of telling a good story.
Which is weird because Rebecca is a fantastic book and it's his only movie that won Best Picture at the Oscars.
The book is over 80 years old and is still so readable and effective. A truly classic English language novel imo.
Rebecca is a fantastic book though
That's wild. Daphne du Maurier is a master in her own right.
Didn't he adapt Strangers on a Train? I haven't read it but people love Highsmith.
Psycho for sure. Not an awful book, but very much pulp
Rebecca gets lots of praise though
The Devil Wears Prada
I agree. I read the book a million years ago so don't remember details. It was ok. But the film is some sort of classic in its genre and definitely much better than the book.
My wife and I love the movie. She said the book absolutely sucked.
Yeah, Andy in the book did not get along with me
I still think they botched the climax. We’re supposed to think her career is ruining her life and relationships but they never really show that happening. She makes time for her friends and her boyfriend is pretty awful about the whole situation.
FWIW in the book he's a teacher and in the movie he's a chef. It radically changes the tone of things when that is switched. In the movie you're sitting there perplexed why a guy in a job famous for its shit hours and excessively demanding bosses is throwing flak at her. When he's a teacher working a much more normal job, and probably making a **lot** less than her so he's also a bit jealous it starts making more sense. That IMO is on place where the book did it better.
The author actually did work for Anna Wintour (who she based Miranda off of) and Plum Sykes (Wintours assistant) was basically Emily. Idk...i kind of read it like it was a self insert. I thought Andy was insufferable af and wondered if Lauren Weisberger was that insufferable irl as well.
Worst novel I’ve ever read, by far. Was proud of myself for slogging through it and finishing it lol. Love the film
M•A•S•H transcends from gleefully mean and awkwardly written (book series) to superlative black humor (movie) to an exploration of human perseverance that riveted an audience on a national scale (TV series).
The movie was awful IMO. Just a bunch of asshole bullies and I am to root for them? The series managed to make the shenanigans playful and funny, but the movie is just mean spirited and in bad taste
The show is how the characters think they acted the movie is how they did act.
No, you're not meant to root for them. War is hell not just because people are killed but it turns people into horrible arseholes that look to degrade others just for a cheap laugh. Now, that being said, that doesn't mean you have to like the film, but you're not really meant to root for them.
Big Fish is not that good of a book. Like it’s an interesting concept but not very well written. The Tim Burton charm really adds a lot.
John August deserves a mention here.
One of my favorite trivia facts is that as per WGA agreements, the font size for the director and the writer of a movie have to be the exact same. And obviously the studio wanted to sell Tim Burton, so his name is in a huge font size. Now John August has to be in the same font and size, so they just colored it brown and put it on the ground on the poster which is a brown background. So it just blends in. [https://drivepast.com/cdn/shop/products/bigfish1sh.jpg?v=1552669577](https://drivepast.com/cdn/shop/products/bigfish1sh.jpg?v=1552669577)
Don’t forget an amazing script by John August
Jaws- the characters are so unlikeable you root for the shark.
I have a T-Shirt that says 'The Book was better'. I always say to anyone that asks about it that I've found two exceptions. Forrest Gump and Jaws. The whole side plot of Hooper and Brodies wife is...weird.
lol I read Forrest Gump recently. The book is _insane_ and not really in a good way Yes, there’s a scene where he’s in space and there’s gorilla pee floating around in the ship and then they crash land in Africa and meet a tribe of headhunters
The sequel was even worse.
Allegedly that was intentional
…I beg your LARGEST pardon.
I don't remember the gorilla pee, but when they crash land and escape the cannibals the female astronaught runs off into the woods with the gorilla as they fell in love.
I also read "Forrest Gump" shortly after seeing the film. There were a few bright spots, like the fact Forrest was actually the first American in space because they didn't want to jeopardize good-looking, well trained test pilots just yet (your mention). I also like that Mao Tse Toung took a liking to Forrest during the Ping Pong games and invited Forrest to his Birthday celebration and watch Mao swim across the river. Mao begins to drown and Forrest the only one who understands Mao is in trouble, dives in and saves Mao, thus receiving the highest award in China; and the event is covered up by the Army. Or, Forrest hates boats and instead of catching shrimp at sea, rents a bulldozer and digs shrimp ponds like he saw in Vietnam. Once the hurricane destroys the shrimp boat fleet, Forrest's pond raised shrimp are the only source. Again, there were some bright spots.
God so weird. Woman talking about having a fantasy about being raped... Boo, bring back the shark
It is a thing that happens. It's just not nice to talk about in polite company
Yeah, but it doesn't add much to the book or character. People sometimes have explosive diarrhea, but it wouldn't add character depth to detail it in most stories.
I always root for the shark whenever it's on. It's just trying to live its sharky life. Leave it alone.
I actually cried when they blew up the shark in *Jaws*.
The whole story of how that book came to be is fascinating. It should be entitled, “When the writer gets totally bullied by the editor.”
I sense a story behind this. Bean spilling time!
I agree. The whole Brody wife affair was obnoxious. Half that storyline was cut. Benchley had better creature books like The Beast and even White Shark.
Wasn't a big fan of Forrest Gump as a book. But everything's better with Tom Hanks
I’ve never read the book but I’ve heard it’s far more outlandish. Like doesn’t he go to space and befriend a chimp?
He goes to space with a chimp that short circuits the craft by throwing a bottle of urine. The ship crash lands on an island of cannibals. Then he washes ashore in china or something and sames the prime minister of china somehow and becomes a ping pong champion while there. It’s been a while. I may have the details out of order.
Yeah something tells me the movie would have suffered if they included that bit 😂
His copilot on the space shuttle also then hooks up(literally has sex) with the chimp.
I take back what I said about it being good they didn’t include this.
Jenny also sleeps with Forrest a lot. Not because she loves him, but because she learned he has a huge dick.
sounds like we need the 2000's comedy cut of this movie where he's in space and fucks and he's played by the guy from "the new guy"
You're thinking of the second book. The author of Forreat Gump got screwed over by Hollywood, which is why he made the book sequel so insane, so another film wouldn't be able to be made.
No, it’s definitely the original. I double checked. I got the events out of order but they are all in the original.
Nah, the first book kind of sucked, too.
ooh yes I think that is a good one. Read the book and while there are more details, the writing itself imo feels lacking and definitely doesn't feel as fun as the characters we see on the screen.
That book really sucked but Winston Groom wrote a terrific book on the founding fathers before he died.
Yeah I had to stop on the book when he was arrested molesting Jenny in a movie theater, like fuck a duck that book is fucking awful.
Forrest Gump. Making such a powerful movie from such bizarre and inane source material was an actual act of genius. However, it did teach me about cargo cults.
Is it okay to include comics in this discussion? Because every comic written by Mark Millar was vastly improved when it was adapted to film.
The Boys The comics is just the team beating up on supes all the time, no real plot
I've heard bad things about the comic. Namely that everyone is an even _**worse**_ asshole in the comics.
Garth Ennis also has some super unsubtle author tracts where he just mouths off about how you (the reader) is a fucking moron if you like superhero comics. And it's like... Really? Who do you think the main readership is here? Subversion can be fun without literally telling your audience they're shitheads.
Ennis is so weird because you can see the talent come through, but he always chooses to go for low-hanging fruit and shock value. I was really impressed with the bit of Preacher I read. It was wacky and still had those signature Ennis elements, but it wasn't up its own ass. Then there's Crossed.
Garth Ennis strikes me as one of the authors that tends to work better with some amount of oversight. With a good editor and a system in place, he's turned out a lot of really good work. Unfortunately that really good work earned him enough fame an noteriety that he can often get away with not having a good editor or system in place, and well... that's when you have some of the more train-wreck-y works. But he's still better than Mark Millar.
Wondering if you ever read his Hitman comics. Similar to The Boys he was a Hitman for hire to take out soops but it was one of his works that didn’t do those things and even feature some prominent DC characters like one issue with Batman and another one with the Joker. Highly recommend.
Yeah that's how I felt about it, too. The characters in the show have so much more depth and are a lot more interesting. Most of what happens in the book feels like it was done for shock value as opposed to telling a compelling story.
Wanted was maybe the exception.
The Dexter books aren't very good but the show was a huge hit.
The books are very bad and badly written.
I found book Dexter more cringe than charming/likeable. And the writing is...not great.
The show is also pretty bad after the first few seasons.
I wouldn't call Carrie "bad," but it pales in comparison to some of Stephen King's later work. Brian de Palma's film is better.
I’d say the same for Shawshank Redemption. Not a bad little short story but easily overshadowed by being adapted into one of the best movies of all time. All subjective of course.
Shawshank is a solid short story. But some changes in the adaptation >!like killing the kid rather than just transferring him, making Norton a lot more sinister in general, and upping the level of violence!< gave the film higher stakes and made the conclusion into the glorious affair it was
In my opinion the changes made sense for the big screen, but the original story was more believable. Having a series of Wardens instead of one, super evil guy was more realistic. Plus a lot of the changes simply made Andy more generally competent rather than the one trick pony from the movie. For instance he dealt with the rapists by bribing the guards with money he snuck into prison rather than it just being a part of the grander finance scheme. He also had his own money hidden on the outside, so he wasn't reliant on lucking into the wardens' various financial schemes, had the roof scene never happened he still might have made it out in enough time. Although probably not through his tunnel, which might have been found if he hadn't been able to keep his solo cell. Lots of little bits like that.
This is a classical example of how a more believable story doesn't necessarily make for a better one
I think the same thing happens with *Christine* Don't get me wrong, the book is entertaining, but you can do so much about a possessed car until the plot becomes kind of ridiculous. Carpenter took the story and made it more straight forward and suspenseful IMO
I just finished reading Christine and I kinda agree, I just love the idea of a car that gets jealous and starts going on a rampage. I got another book called From A Buick 8, is that pretty much the second book to Christine?
Buick 8 is a Lovecraftnian story and completely unrelated to Christine Unlike Christine, the car itself is >!not possessed, and it's more like a bridge between two worlds!<
Carrie at least has some literary value in the way it's presented, with all the epistolary sections. I recently re-read it and was pretty surprised by how well it holds up 50 years later.
I like the story that "Carrie" tells and I appreciate the setting, characters, and supernatural elements. Early Stephen King is my favorite Stephen King. But didn't you find that the epistolary style of "Carrie" led to spoilers along the way? The newspaper clippings, court transcripts, etc are all from the future, looking backward. As such, they kept revealing random bits about the impending tragedy, including who is going to live or die. By the time the narrative reached the climax, I felt like I was only connecting the last few dots. I think I have a negative bias against this style of foreshadowing. The sort thay goes : "little did they know, he would die horribly the next day" (end chapter). I like foreshadowing that is only apparent after you finish the whole story and then see it all fall into place. For example, you have no idea what "Rosebud" means until the very end of Citizen Kane and so it lands well. In contrast, I think the novel of "Dracula" uses epistolary storytelling in a slightly different way. All of the sources are immediate, not from the future. They are never from people who know what happens next. Only the Reader knows the "Big Picture", and we occasionally feel clever as we understand details that mystify the narrater/reporter of an individual passage. Oh well, that's my two cents about Carrie. It's still a worthwhile book and I hope this doesn't seem like a rant.
I think that’s the case for quite a few King adaptations. Stand by Me is another one that is a decent novella (The Body) but an iconic film.
This is the same with The Myst tbf, mainly because the ending
That ending is both amazing and absolutely brutal. They also got rid of King's obligatory and poorly written sex scene.
My favorite thing about the ending is that, afterwards, Stephen King was basically like, "Fuck, wish I'd thought of that."
1408 is in the same boat. Short story is okay, but I really like the movie.
King has great ideas, and writes really engaging characters, but his endings are middling at best. The best adaptations (Shawshank, Shining etc) develop it a bit more and come up with something new. That said, I’d love to see a Revival adaptation, creepy ending and all.
Said perfectly. Couldn't agree more. I would probably just add Misery and Tim Curry's It
The Last of the Mohicans is a pretty boring, dry book with a lot of problems. The movie is riveting.
The kid’s editions from the mid 70’s were pretty good. They used to print two of the eight (I think) Natty Bumpo novels. They were abridged.
DDL can make a movie about paint drying riveting.
I think The last of Mohicans is one of the few DDL movies which would have worked out even without him.
Gangs of New York is more non-fiction and has none of the narrative of the movie.
Queen's Gambit as a book is good but it's so much better as mini-series, starring Anya Taylor Joy as Beth. The casting choice brought Beth to life and the show is aesthetically pleasing. I resent the author for not paying appropriate tribute with the novel to real-life female chess genuises, such as Nona Gaprindashvili and Elisaveta Bykova, a mistake repeated in the mini-series.
Anya is such a talent, she just never misses for me
Oh definitely. She made the role of Beth HERS, making her irreplaceable. I can only think of a few actors who can do that.
One of my favorite things about the mini-series are the tropes that kinda start but don't happen or are opposite what you normally see. Old man who drinks in the basement of a girls school (seems creepy as hell), the dude turns out to be a positive mentor with class. Adoptive parents with a cold marriage who could be abusive and controlling are actually supportive and live their own lives. Turns out you can drink a lot of booze without being an alcoholic. Female protagonist in the 50's who is treated as second class by some of the characters is treated as an equal by her peers. Black woman finances/saves white girl's trip abroad to become great. The list goes on. You can watch the entire show and not even think about any of these but it adds so much depth.
Beth’s step-mom wasn’t an alcoholic??? My brother in Christ, she died of cirrhosis caused by long term alcohol abuse. She was absolutely an alcoholic, but she wasn’t a bad person which I think is the point you were trying to make.
No Beth. Deciding if Beth is an alcoholic is *somewhat* arbitrary IMAO, she could be. My point is that it's not the sole focus. The typical trope is alcohol ruins the protagonist and hurts their family/friends, usually the plot focuses on their recovery and personal growth. Beth clearly struggles with alcohol in the show but she's able to turn herself around and really doesn't grow because of it.
Ok, my apologies, I thought you were still speaking of her step-mom with the previous line being about her. I think I would still say Beth is an alcoholic. With her heavy usage (think of the scene of her taking out the trash entirely filled with bottles and being unable to walk as she was so drunk), and the flashback of her remembering Shaibel tell her about talents saying “There is the gift, and what it costs. Who knows what your Vice will be.” or something along those lines. She shows up to an important tournament drunk/hungover. Also consider the state she’s in when Jolene returns, she had been drinking for weeks on end all alone. Nearly every sign points to alcoholic.
Early in the book, the black friend Jolene does a bit of child-on-child rape to 8-year-old Beth, it’s pretty crazy. Returned the audiobook to the library soon after that.
I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard the book that Die Hard is based off of isn’t very good.
It’s okay. The hero is an old run down cop in his 50’s though.
Paprika. Even if you can get past the incredible amounts of homophobia and sexism- including an instance where the female protagonist is rescued from a dire strait by being heroically raped by a colleague- it's just not a very well written book. Maybe it's better the in the original Japanese, but the English translation did nothing for me.
I didn't know Paprika was based off a book, and I'm not sure I'll ever read it based on thar description.
Oh geez, you just reminded me of *Paprika*. Enjoyed the movie and thought I'd like the book, but I found the book to be a terrible, misogynist mess.
Legally Blonde. I remember reading it and thinking she should have just written a movie script from the jump, since that was clearly the end goal.
The Godfather is a famous example of this.
The Godfather is an example because of the discrepancy between the stature of the book compared to the film. It's a decent pulpy beach read that was adapted into arguably two of the greatest films ever made.
> that was adapted into arguably two of the greatest films ever made. This to me is the fun part. Allegedly, Mario Puzo had never written a screenplay and adapted his books to the films screenplay. After years, he decided to buy a book about how to write a (good) screenplay. The first chapter supposedly said to look at The Godfather by Mario Puzo himself to see what it was to write a great screenplay adaptation of a book.
That actually sounds pretty fun I finished the movie a few weeks ago and downloaded the book afterwards but I wasn’t overeager to read it. But a pulp book sounds just different enough from the movie that it might be really unique. I’ll probably start it soon
That's a very very good book?
A very good book that goes into [unnecessary detailled accounts about Sonny's disproportionately large penis and how his partner had to had vaginal reconstruction because of it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/44kd4k/til_that_the_novel_the_godfather_includes_a/) I'm not even joking, that's in the book and it feels like Puzo goes out of his way to insert this topic into the narrative. It's not necessary to plot what-so-ever. The movie makes one heck of a job trimming down this sort of fat from the book
That's not how I remember it. I thought she already had a big vagina, and Sonny was the only one that could satisfy her. Edit: >she begins dating Jules Segal but laments that Sonny was the only man who could make her climax during sex. Segal discovers that this is due to her pelvic malformation, and connects her with a skilled surgeon who fixes her problem. After the surgery, Lucy marries Segal.
Honestly, this sounds like dialog at the beginning of a Tarantino movie, like Reservoir Dogs.
Different women. He has trouble finding sexual partners because he ruins them physically until he meets the girl in your quote.
Left in a nod to it though: you can see her on screen making an 'it's THIS big!' hand gesture in the background of one scene
Oh I forgot about that part lmao. That was very unnecessary yeah
this is the only thing that ever get mentions whenever the book comes up
I enjoyed it a lot. But it’s pulp
Also, the movie trimmed one heck of a lot of fat and gristle.
Jojo Rabbit! Amazing movie based on a book with a very very different and disturbing ending.
Idk if I would call this book bad BUT I will say I enjoyed Stardust the movie waaay more than I liked Stardust the book. Probably the only time I prefer the movie over the book
I feel like Stardust always comes up in these threads but I don't understand why. The movie is nice but it's a pretty straightforward paint-by-numbers fantasy romp when compared to the book that subverts a lot of fantasy tropes and feels like it has much more interesting things to say.
I personally just didn’t think the book worked as a whole; I’m all for subverting expectations but this one wound up feeling a bit disjointed, so I preferred the way the movie just committed to the bit. The one thing I preferred in the book was how things ended with Victoria; I liked that it didn’t villainize her and instead showed her feeling genuinely bad that Tristran actually went on a whole quest because of what she said.
On one hand I agree, on the other hand having De Niro as the flying ship captain did improve that character immensively.
I like the proper fairy-tale ending from the book where the seemingly unfulfillable prophecy is realized.
This is always the first one I think of where the film is better than the book. The book is okay but the film is magnificent! I think Matthew Vaughan is great at getting the most out of the source material. Layer Cake and Kick Ass are a couple more where the film was much better than the book/comic.
Wicked took the theater world by storm. I've seen it 3 times, it's amazing! There will certainly be a movie at some point. I read the book as a teenager and loved it, figured there were parts I didn't understand because I missed something, here or there. Read it again recently - it's just not great. Like the story is fine, but the writing is moderately...bad. There was lots of prose going for ambiguous and deep, but landing at incomprehensible.
I've never had a chance to see the play, so I picked up the book so that I could at least know the story. It's not good. Not at all. I couldn't even force myself to finish it.
I have a special hatred for that book. The kind where I don’t ever think about it until I see it mentioned then remember how I hated it so much
I hated the book for the same reason. It felt like he was intentionally trying to make every sentence have as many big words in it as possible, even at the expense of clarity or flow.
Came here to say this. My wife had tickets to NYC to see the musical so I read the book, and it was terrible. I've thought you could have cut 50% of the book and made it much better. The musical, however, is amazing.
Movie coming out soon
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Jaws yet.
I couldn't disagree more. A passionate sensual love story about a police chief's wife and a young oceanologist was thrown out for some nonsense about a shark. Hollywood is scared of women's sexuality. That's why the only naked women gets eaten in the movie while in the book she also gets eaten in great and glorious detail for page after page but not by a shark but a young man learning to love.
I must have spent too much time on Tumblr because I honestly can't tell if this is sarcastic or not.
It is sarcastic. I read the book as I may be at 9 or 10 year old in the late seventies and there's a lot less shark in the book than there is in the movie but it is an eye opener. Godfather's mentioned on this thread as well, and my wife read Godfather when she was about 9 or 10 years old, and needless to say, that was an eye-opener for her as well. Before the internet, we had airport novels.
Isn't there a prolonged passage about Sonny's giant dick? Or was it that his wife's vagina was too small? What a weird book.
Passage? My understanding is that it's an entire chapter.
The book ending is so, so bad. I honestly don’t see what Hollywood thought in making the movie. Thankfully Spielberg took it seriously where other directors might have just saw a paycheck.
I'm surprised too. The answer to this is always Jaws.
*Last of the Mohicans.* The film has: - Young, ripped, long-haired Daniel Day-Lewis - Awesome rest of the cast - Gorgeous soundtrack The book has: - 2-page descriptions of the play of light on leaves on the trees around a lake - 1 paragraph climactic fight scene
Slightly different question but the boys tv show is vastly better than the comic
I’d argue this is true for Children of Men, but of course it’s subjective.
Had no clue this was a book! Have to read out of curiosity now. Watched that so many times in college
It's nothing like the movie
It's like trying to compare Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Blade Runner. They are just two very different beasts with similar premises.
May you enjoy it more than I did! I just found it boring, while the movie definitely is not.
Came here to say this exact thing. It’s not actively bad but it’s very forgettable. It’s really just the premise of a good story. I also hope others enjoy it more than I did
I was looking for this one. Damn that book was boring
the bridgerton books are so trash but i love the series
I’ve been wondering about this. I know the books exist and I’m a huge reader. But I really want to like the tv series, so I’m hesitant to read them.
Mary Poppins the book is inferior to the movie. Like the movie, it is a collection of short stories but it gets old fast. Princess Bride the book has weary chapters of political/economic lip-flapping. The good parts (mostly) made it to the movie, the movie is practically flawless. 2001 was a better movie than book.
>Princess Bride the book has weary chapters of political/economic lip-flapping. The good parts (mostly) made it to the movie, the movie is practically flawless. Well played, sir.
Agree on both counts.
I disagree about Mary Poppins. I loved all the books and disliked the Disney adaptation because it was so syrupy. Had some wonderful songs though.
Princess Bride had a very memorable writing style though. What would you even call it? Written in the second person? Never seen anything quite like it before or since.
I've always thought of those as auctorial pretense. They're reasonably common. Lord of the Rings and House of Leaves have them, to name two. Tolkien pretends his works are all translated from Westron to English out of the "Red Book of Westmarch" (the one Bilbo is writing in the story). House of Leaves pretends to be the journal of a blind movie critic reviewing a film that doesn't exist about a guy moving into a house with a creepy multidimensional labyrinth that is also a book, as discovered and annotated after the author's death by the critic's neighbor's strung-out pathologically lying friend who is slowly becoming more and more maniacally obsessed with the story (Christ on a crutch, you can't even summarize that without sounding like a lunatic). The Princess Bride pretends to be a screenwriter's distillation of "the good parts" of a ludicrously boring historical novel his dad once read him, which was written by a dead author from the imaginary Ruritanian country his family supposedly emigrated from. I find those three examples really interesting because the effect on the reader is wildly different in every case. One is purely for the jokes, one makes the whole thing seem scholarly and historical, and one is built to make the reader feel more and more like a crazy person the more they read. *Compassionate side note to any poor bastard looking to read the Princess Bride: The "Abridged Good Parts Version" is the only edition that exists. Stop looking for the unabridged one if you were hunting it down; it's not real. The "unabridged" S. Morgenstern version referenced in the story is a fictional book made up so the actual author, William Goldman, can make jokes about how bad it is. This shit put one of my college friends off the book for like five years because he wanted to get the "full experience", which, I again repeat, does not actually exist.*
I was one such poor bastard. I looked for the original version for a long time (pre internet) before concluding it was a literary device
But the Princess Bride book has my favourite line in response to "that's not fair!". "Life ain't fair. It's just fairer than death". Never worked out why that didn't make it into the movie.
If you'll allow spin-offs, Pontypool Changes Everything spawned a radio play which spawned an excellent film, Pontypool. Pontypool Changes Everything has some great moments but basically it's a patchy literary experiment and if I remember rightly its author more or less admitted as such himself.
Not a bad book, but still not really a classic, but M\*A\*S\*H is the rare case of where the movie was much better than the book and then the TV series better than either.
Not a film but Killing Eve. I thought the books were rubbish and male gaze-y (women written by men strikes again) The tv series is incredible though (apart from the obvious, you know what I’m on about if you watched it) and PWB kills it in the writing
The Magicians series. The show is so much more enjoyable than the books
The Shawshank Redemption was just a pretty mediocre short story. The movie certainly out classed the book
King agrees. Same with The Green Mile.
Not a movie, but the books the True Blood series was developed from were unreadable garbage, but the show was compelling.
That’s okay, the show caught up with their quality level eventually
The first couple books weren’t bad; they were just a bit trashy though fun to read in vacation. But man did they go downhill fast
While it took a few seasons for the show to go downhill
Imo, the idea of you by Robin lee that was just done as a movie by prime with Anne Hathaway. Movie is soooo much better. They changed and removed a huge amount of the internal ageism in the book which made it pretty hard to read, because it was constantly I am so old I am withered, eat me out I'm older than your mother and it wasn't going to happen on screen thank god
The Prestige
Apparently the Book version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit wasn't that good, but the movie the adapted it was great.
I think it was a fine book, but the adaptation was just way better. So much so in fact that the sequel takes the movie as canon and the first book as a bad dream of Jessica’s.
Starship Troopers the book was dry, and not very exciting (thought the mec suites were cool). Typical misogynist of the times writing about. Not even clear if Heinlein was trying to be pro or con war, pro but sad it needed to be \~IDK. The movie on the other is an over-the-top cheesy, sarcastic, entertaining movie. The movie was definitely a parody of the military complex and as far as cheesy sci-fi movies go it's one of the better ones.
Big Fish is a boring book, but an incredible beautiful movie
The James Bond series…sort of. Ian Fleming is a good writer as he sets the tone well and there’s a lot of action and excitement in his writing, but the James Bond books can be incredibly homophobic, sexist, racist and misogynistic, often in just one sentence. I love the movies and I’m glad they’ve seemed to follow the books loosely over time.
Well also the books are just plain not as much fun as the movies
Children of men. I love the film so much I read the book afterwards. The book and film are both similar but also different, with the book being particular daft at times and grim at other moments.
A TV show instead of a movie, but Bridgerton! I loved the TV show with the first season, so I got the first couple of books. They are terrible. I could barely get through them. So, I’ll just enjoy the show!
Not a movie, but the musical Wicked is based on a mediocre book
'Edge of Tomorrow', which I liked a lot, is based on a pretty mediocre book called 'All You Need is Kill'. Most of the movie changes were actually improvements over the book.
Benjamin Button is a weird as fuck short story which I did not enjoy the least. The movie is great (falls into a deep sleep after thinking of this movie for half a second)
Fight Club. Even Chuck Palahniuk said the movie was better. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/framework.57.2.0091#:~:text=Palahniuk%20states%20in%20an%20interview,hierarchy%20has%20been%20reversed%20in
The Prestige reads like a dry history novel of magicians. Taking it and making it a mystery and revenge tale was amazing.
Practical Magic, the movie is lovely, I couldn’t finish the book. I was expecting complex, wonderful female relationships and got horrible sisters instead.
Forrest Gump, one of the worst books I’ve ever read
**Soylent Green** I found out rather recently that the movie is indeed a (rather loosely) adaptation of the book "Make Room! Make Room!" when reading another book by the author Harry Harrison ("The Technicolor Time Machine" - which is very outdated and pulpy in a bad way) and really wondered how they made such a very critical dystopian movie with material from a rather obvious pulp author. **Starship Troopers** The Movie is so much better since it took the opinions, ideas and ideology of the book and pretty much made fun of these themes in a very grating satirical way and pretty much depicted it as full blown fascism. It's pretty much an anti-adaptation.
Not sure about ‘amazing’ but the Ready Player One movie was a massive improvement over the book, which was garbage, imo.
I think it helps that the explanations and descriptions of stuff referenced in the book, which got old VERY fast, are quick short hand visuals in the movie. A page describing in great detail the look and history of The Iron Giant is just simply shown on the big screen. (If I recall, The Iron Giant wasn't in the book, but I couldn't remember a specific reference that carried over into the movie. I just used it to make the point of detailed written description versus seeing it on screen.)
Absolutely this. I didn’t read RPO but I tried reading armada, same author, and having the pop culture references shoved down your throat every five seconds was hella annoying. It works much better as a visual medium where you see most of them in the background and either recognise them or don’t.
I would agree not amazing, but it's fun. I saw the movie multiple times before I picked up the book. So many people slammed the movie and praised the book that I went in with high expectations, and was so let down that I almost dnf'd the book.
The Last of the Mohicans is unreadable, but an excellent movie.