Rubbish book > Good movie

[gabi]

This question has just gone round at work for some research.

The overwhelming winner so far?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep > Bladerunner.

Now. I fucking loved that book, I love the movie too, but the book was genius. Obviously very very different to the film. I suspect a lot of the cocks who sent that response in haven't actually read the book.

Any other better examples?

 

[Reno]

Off the top of my head: Jaws, The Godfather, Vertigo. With Vertigo I may have just read a bad translation of the French Novel D'Entre les morts, but I doubt that it's a literary masterpiece.

...and more controversially, I can't stand Tolkien but I didn't mind the LOTR films.

 

[Santino]

The Talented Mr Ripley is at best a mediocre book, but a fine film.

 

[DotCommunist]

yeah puzo's rather average pedestrian mafia thriller being made into one of cinmas most clebrated works of art etc has to take the biscuit.

Most michael crichton books have made better films as well

 

[Ax^]

Fight club is a pretty meh book

Movies good on the first run thru

 

[Santino]

yeah puzo's rather average pedestrian mafia thriller being made into one of cinmas most clebrated works of art etc has to take the biscuit.

What is especially interesting is how close to the book certain sections of the film are, right down to stage directions (or the cinematic equivalent). Coppola largely ignored the approved script and often filmed directly from pages of the novel he'd ripped out and pasted into a folder.

 

[Reno]

...actually your own response to your thread doesn't make sense, gabi.

 

[Santino]

Carlito's Way is another good gangster film that improves on a pedestrian source.

 

[kained&able]

i may just have been too young when i read it but Bram Stoker's Dracula. Found the book to be very slow and very boring but the film was pretty good.

dave

 

[kained&able]

Fight club is a pretty meh book

Movies good on the first run thru

nah i preferred the book. Much better ending and it went more into the cult bit.

dave

 

[gabi]

...actually your own response to your thread doesn't make sense, gabi.

Yeh, maybe poor phrasing. just expressing my disbelief that anyone whos actually read 'androids' could think it was rubbish. I loved it.

 

[Reno]

yeah puzo's rather average pedestrian mafia thriller being made into one of cinmas most clebrated works of art etc has to take the biscuit.

Most michael crichton books have made better films as well

Michael Crichton's prose is pedestrian, but his science (fiction) is always good fun to read and that gets hugely simplified by the films. I really enjoyed his novels Sphere and Congo, but the films were unbelievably shit. I also like the novel of Jurassic Park better than the film. Much more scary and actually a lot more clever.

 

[Reno]

The Talented Mr Ripley is at best a mediocre book, but a fine film.

The film with Matt Damon was a travesty, but the one with Alain Delon from the 60s, called Purple Moon was fantastic.

 

[DotCommunist]

i may just have been too young when i read it but Bram Stoker's Dracula. Found the book to be very slow and very boring but the film was pretty good.

dave

Stokers style of writing the story through diary entries and letters was never something I could get on with. Apparently his estate sued the makers of Nosferatu for riipping him off.

 

[DotCommunist]

Michael Crichton's prose is pedestrian, but his science (fiction) is always good fun to read and that gets hugely simplified by the films. I really enjoyed his novels Sphere and Congo, but the films were unbelievably shit. I also like the novel of Jurassic Park better than the film. Much more scary and actually a lot more clever.

yeah cheers Reno, now I'm remembering having watched Congo. Oh man was that a stinker.

 

[Reno]

i may just have been too young when i read it but Bram Stoker's Dracula. Found the book to be very slow and very boring but the film was pretty good.

dave

Which film was good ? There are hundreds of adaptations, many of them rather poor (Coppola ). My favourites are the 20s Nosferatu and the Hammer Dracula, but there still hasn't been an adaptation that was really faithful to the novel (which I quite enjoyed)

 

[kained&able]

The one with gary oldman and winoona ryder in the early 90's. As in Bram Stoker's dracula!

 

[Santino]

The film with Matt Damon was a travesty, but the one with Alain Delon from the 60s, called Purple Moon was fantastic.

You are incorrect, the Anthony Minghella version is very very good.

 

[Reno]

You are incorrect, the Anthony Minghella version is very very good.

It's a watchable film, but it makes Ripley a closet gay for an easy to grasp psychological explanation. To me that is rather simplistic and it just makes him boring. In the books he is a psychopath and an amoral enigma, which I found more interesting. If Jude Law and Matt Damon had swapped roles the film would have worked a lot better.

 

[gabi]

Hmm.. actually, Revolutionary Road just sprang to mind.

The upcoming Hobbit movie can also only improve on the book really, which was a bit crap tbh

 

[quimcunx]

i may just have been too young when i read it but Bram Stoker's Dracula. Found the book to be very slow and very boring but the film was pretty good.

dave

I saw the version with Gary Oldman in it before I read the book. I liked the film but similar feelings to you on the book. Hard to imagine how it inspired a whole genre of films*.

*if it did, it's not like I've looked into it.

 

[Reno]

The one with gary oldman and winoona ryder in the early 90's. As in Bram Stoker's dracula!

That film is so shit !

Coppola thought he was doing something radical by turning Dracula into a romantic hero looking for his re-incarated love, but that is one of the oldest cliches in horror films and a complete misinterpretation of the character. It just de-fangs him and makes him cuddly. And Keanu as a "whoa" Jonathan Harker and the whole pop promo aesthetic which made it look like a Smashing Pumpkin video, give me a break !

It's what happens when directors with no affinity for the horror genre try to be clever.

 

[Santino]

It's a watchable film, but it makes Ripley a closet gay for an easy to grasp psychological explanation. To me that is rather simplistic and it just makes him boring. In the books he is a psychopath and an amoral enigma, which I found more interesting. If Jude Law and Matt Damon had swapped roles the film would have worked a lot better.

His homosexuality is implied in the book (or at least, a sexual aversion to women), but then apparently dropped for the sequels, which annoyed me. I never really see his sexuality as 'explaining' his murderousness anyway. It's silly to assume that making a character gay and a murderer must mean that the author intends you to infer a causal link.

 

[Reno]

By being more overt about it, Minghella psycholgises and humanises Ripley, which robs the character of everything that made him fascinating to me in the book. In the novel he is a charismatic void, not a tortured closet case that we are invited to feel sorry for. I don't think he has a fixed sexuality. He uses his charisma to manipulate those around him. He isn't the insecure preppy that Damon plays.

I always thought that Woody Allen's much maligned (in the UK at least) Match Point comes much closer to the character and spirit of the Highsmith novel, than the Minghella film.

 

[Reno]

...and I don't mind if adaptations change things, but I hate it when they make amoral, enigmatic or just plain evil central characters like Ripley or Dracula "relatable" and turn the whole thing into some sort of Freudian claptrap. There is nothing a little therapy and a group hug can't solve, right ?

 

[Pseudopsycho]

...and I don't mind if adaptations change things, but I hate it when they make amoral, enigmatic or just plain evil central characters like Ripley or Dracula "relatable" and turn the whole thing into some sort of Freudian claptrap. There is nothing a little therapy and a group hug can't solve, right ?

How did you find American Psycho?

 

[Reno]

How did you find American Psycho?

I thought that it was probably as good a film as could have been made of an unfilmable book and the main character stayed true to the novel, which BTW, I love.

 

[Santino]

By being more overt about it, Minghella psycholgises and humanises Ripley, which robs the character of everything that made him fascinating to me in the book. In the novel he is a charismatic void, not a tortured closet case that we are invited to feel sorry for. I don't think he has a fixed sexuality. He uses his charisma to manipulate those around him. He isn't the neurotic preppy that Damon plays.

I always thought that Woody Allen's much maligned (in the UK at least) Match Point comes much closer to the character and spirit of the Highsmith novel, than the Minghella film.

Books about amoral voids are boring though. It's just one thing happening after another. The original book is more or less a formal exercise in writing a 'thriller' without a recognisable 'good guy', or at least a lovable bad guy.

 

[Reno]

Books about amoral voids are boring though. It's just one thing happening after another. The original book is more or less a formal exercise in writing a 'thriller' without a recognisable 'good guy', or at least a lovable bad guy.

That's a matter of taste and a generalisation that I don't subscribe to. In the real world there often is neither a good guy, nor a loveable bad guy. I like enigmatic characters.

 

[gabi]

I thought that it was probably as good a film as could have been made of an unfilmable book and the main character stayed true to the novel, which BTW, I love.

Again, one of my fav books, destroyed in the film version. The violence was toned down far too much. It's supposed to be shocking, I know they had certificates to consider tho..

Bale, tho, as always, put in an excellent peformance.