J.T. Posted May 18, 2014 Share Posted May 18, 2014 What Johnny said. Rippa and Nikita are just plain ol' wrong. Both the movie and the book are top shelf but the movie is in rarefied air. I think you missed the part when Johnny agreed with us that the book is better than the movie :-) Stop asking me to read stuff when I am trying to work on blade servers. I can only understand Linux terminal commands right now. :-P Johnny is also higher than a kite just like you and Allanov. Both the movie and the book are epic but the movie is better. That's what you get for agreeing with a Deadhead and a Russian! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reed Posted May 18, 2014 Author Share Posted May 18, 2014 I'm not sure how you even compare those two. Despite being the source material, they have so little in common outside of names. The Shining book and movie is a similar deal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.T. Posted May 18, 2014 Share Posted May 18, 2014 Yeah, the movie is so not better than the novel. Kubrick totally misses the point about what makes Danny so special and the whole deal with the Overlook Hotel in general. Jack Nicholson is a great actor but was totally miscast. Jack Torrence is supposed to be a normal guy that is gradually corrupted by evil. Nicholson as Torrence already looked and sounded like a lunatic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt McGirt Posted May 18, 2014 Share Posted May 18, 2014 I think Mockingbird and Cuckoo's Nest are even in both respects. They are a tie between book and film, no winner. The only thing Cuckoo's Nest needed were the skills of a Terry Gilliam to broaden the scope in certain, er, directions Always thought Kubrick's The Shining was better. And De Palma's Carrie. Stand By Me might be another draw. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.T. Posted May 18, 2014 Share Posted May 18, 2014 Carrie was definitely better as a movie. Stand By Me / The Body is even steven. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reed Posted May 18, 2014 Author Share Posted May 18, 2014 I think it's just apples and oranges to compare The Shining book/movie. They have roughly the same plot framework and that's really about it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Fowler Posted May 18, 2014 Share Posted May 18, 2014 Which is actually a lot more than Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep have in common. As far as King goes, The Mist is a way better movie, to the point where King himself has said he wished he'd thought of the vastly superior ending when he was writing it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt McGirt Posted May 18, 2014 Share Posted May 18, 2014 Another King tie is Pet Sematary. Book scared the shit out of me, movie scares the shit out of me. I was talking about Alien being the only movie that scares me in the other thread and forgot about the old lady with spinal meningitis... woof. Both are also insanely depressing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Fowler Posted May 18, 2014 Share Posted May 18, 2014 Pet Semetary doesn't scare me, but nothing has ever made me wince in pain quite like the scalpel in that movie. Oh god. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
driver Posted May 18, 2014 Share Posted May 18, 2014 American Psycho. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skeeball Wizard Posted May 19, 2014 Share Posted May 19, 2014 I'll second American Psycho and add Rules of Attraction. I find Brett Easton Ellis' writing to be overly ponderous, both movies eliminate that aspect of the story. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt McGirt Posted May 19, 2014 Share Posted May 19, 2014 I think the book has a slight edge on American Psycho, just because it's way more hallucination-oriented and you could probably not film some of the stuff he does in it... like try and make lady sausage or some other things I will not repeat. And the turn in tone was so sudden and pronounced, which it was not with the film. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jingus Posted May 20, 2014 Share Posted May 20, 2014 Psycho Jaws The Shawshank Redemption Also, I'd say Hannibal (TV show), Manhunter and Silence of the Lambs are far more sophisticated than most of Thomas Harris' writings, which are actually pretty ridiculous when you sit down and properly read them. Automatic co-sign on everything (except Manhunter, which I've yet to see and is pretty divisive). Forest Gump. I enjoyed the book Forrest Gump, and it did have a buncha stuff which would have been cool to see (Gump in Hollywood! Gump in space!) and also didn't make the movie's unfortunate decision to kill of Jenny, as if punishing her for her lifestyle. And then there was the sequel, Gump & Co., which was... okay. Clearly written just for the money by an author who never expected this to turn into the phenomena it did (and he started it by killing off Jenny). The Godfather selection is puzzling. Loved the book and the movie. There was hardly anything left out of the movie that was in the book. The one thing the movie did better and it was a wise choice, was to ditch the whole Lucy and the gynecology stuff. The book had the Luca Brasi backstory, though. In the movie you're like, "Man this dude is such a monster the way people speak in hushed tones about him." But the only real backstory is the "offer you can't refuse" and that's not really any more monstrous than the other hoods in the film. He gets garroted in short order. Why was this man so feared? In the book you know the score on that front. There was other stuff, like Johnny Fontaine's warts impacting his singing voice. Lots of stuff which didn't fucking matter and didn't need to be in the movie. I agree with you on Luca Brasi, he was made out to be a fool in the movie. The novel is just so lurid and trashy, and it meanders quite a bit at times. But, for me, it's less "the novel is bad" and more "the movie is FUCKING GREAT." Yep. FIGHT CLUB. Palahniuk can take credit for all the catchy quotes, but the overhauled story of the movie is a signficant improvement over the book. This may be sacrilege to some, but I really think, when both are all said and done, we're going to look at GAME OF THRONES as being a much tighter, more cohesive narrative than the SONG OF ICE AND FIRE books. Agreed on both. WANTED. The comic book was Watchmen-esque garbage - like it was written by some bastard hybrid of Alan Moore and Todd McFarlane. Utterly ridiculous. I actually thought the movie was pretty damn cool. How they teased out that story from the rotten husk that was that comic series, though, I'll never figure out. Other than like two sequences, they're literally nothing alike. The book Wanted was the sickest piece of villainous wish-fulfillment trash. He brags about raping a Hollywood starlet and getting away with it. But the movie was kinda lame. I once wrote a review for it, but it's lost to the sands of time and the electricity of the unpredictable internet. Frankenstein (1931) Throne of Blood (Macbeth) Maltese Falcon Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney) Island of Lost Souls > Island of Dr. Moreau Frankenstein is a tough one, because the movie is so brilliant, but so was Mary Shelley's original book. (I actually spit on a library book when I discovered some sexist motherfucker had the gall to insist that Percy basically wrote the whole thing.) Apples and oranges. It's almost cheating to name Kurosawa's Shakespeare movies, isn't it? Ran is one of the most passionately brilliant things I've ever seen. I'm not sure how you even compare those two. Despite being the source material, they have so little in common outside of names. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? is a fascinating book, but Blade Runner blows it out of the water. Not that it's saying much but both the Redford and DiCaprio Gatsby films were better than the novel. Most Peter Benchley novels turned film/miniseries/whatever could qualify here as well, Beast especially since the book had one of the worst endings to a book I can recall. Haven't seen those movie adaptations yet, so I can't comment. But gimme a HELL YEAH on Peter Benchley's awful endings, bewildering "nature takes its course" in Beast and the pathetic "and then it died so the hero was okay" in Jaws. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jingus Posted May 20, 2014 Share Posted May 20, 2014 Yeah, the movie is so not better than the novel. Kubrick totally misses the point about what makes Danny so special and the whole deal with the Overlook Hotel in general. Jack Nicholson is a great actor but was totally miscast. Jack Torrence is supposed to be a normal guy that is gradually corrupted by evil. Nicholson as Torrence already looked and sounded like a lunatic. I haven't seen the miniseries version, but I agree with this. I think Mockingbird and Cuckoo's Nest are even in both respects. They are a tie between book and film, no winner. The only thing Cuckoo's Nest needed were the skills of a Terry Gilliam to broaden the scope in certain, er, directions Always thought Kubrick's The Shining was better. And De Palma's Carrie. Stand By Me might be another draw. I have a love-hate relationship with One Flew Over the Cuckooo's As far as King goes, The Mist is a way better movie, to the point where King himself has said he wished he'd thought of the vastly superior ending when he was writing it. The Mist had other problems, shitty CGI and unfortunate casting with the lead. I think the book has a slight edge on American Psycho, just because it's way more hallucination-oriented and you could probably not film some of the stuff he does in it... like try and make lady sausage or some other things I will not repeat. And the turn in tone was so sudden and pronounced, which it was not with the film. Oh fuck American Psycho. The worst professor in my English department forces Bret Easton Ellis down his hypnotized minions' throat. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Natural Posted May 20, 2014 Share Posted May 20, 2014 The Crow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Fowler Posted May 20, 2014 Share Posted May 20, 2014 The Crow. I like the movie quite a bit, but just no. The comic is so stark, so violently and tragically beautiful. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.T. Posted May 20, 2014 Share Posted May 20, 2014 I love the movie and the graphic novel for very different reasons and I don't really think that one work is superior to the other. I do admit that find myself reading The Crow more than watching The Crow on DVD. There are some elements in Barr's work that simply cannot translate into a movie. It makes sense that Eric is unstoppable in the graphic novel because he is supposed to be a force of nature. The Crow is all about the sad, dark, poetry of dealing with loss. The criminals that Eric fights aren't so much people themselves as they are allegorical representations of the unsympathetic and sometimes ruthless elements of our world that take away the people we love. Funboy and his gang are supposed to be overwhelmed by Eric's rage because his vengence is driven by his love for Shelly and that's what this fable is all about. Draven is imposing his will on the people who took the one good thing in his life away from him. He is able to exercise the control that we desperately want to believe we have but actually don't.. Doesn't work so well in movies. You can't have pivotal dramatic shifts in action if your hero is completely invulnurable. Even Superman is defenseless against kryptonite. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Natural Posted May 20, 2014 Share Posted May 20, 2014 The Crow. I like the movie quite a bit, but just no. The comic is so stark, so violently and tragically beautiful. I like both but prefer the film. The film grabbed me since the first time I watched it in 2000. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AxB Posted May 21, 2014 Share Posted May 21, 2014 Sin Cit... uh, never mind. Homicide: Life on the Street was both better and worse than the book. Depends which bit of it you're looking at. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt McGirt Posted May 22, 2014 Share Posted May 22, 2014 That reminds me, I still need to watch the HBO The Corner miniseries. The book was horribly tragic and I want to see if a filmed version of real events like that is as effective. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nate Posted May 22, 2014 Share Posted May 22, 2014 Oh man ... Get Shorty. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.T. Posted May 22, 2014 Share Posted May 22, 2014 This thread went three pages and I did not say Fletch. I must be old or something. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kuetsar Posted May 22, 2014 Share Posted May 22, 2014 This thread went three pages and I did not say Fletch. I must be old or something. Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree on that one. . . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.T. Posted May 22, 2014 Share Posted May 22, 2014 The Fletch novels got better as the series progressed. Fletch is a really good novel, but the film resonates a bit more with me even though it is pretty much the Chevy Chase show. Fletch Won is fucking brilliant. The rumors that Jason Sudeikis is petitioning for the role of Fletch shoud the treatment makes it out of dev hell makes me sad.. I was sorta hoping that if Fletch Won was ever made into a movie, James Roday (Psych) would be the no-brainer choice for the role. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dewar Posted May 22, 2014 Share Posted May 22, 2014 Friday Night Lights television series > Friday Night Lights book > Friday Night Lights movie. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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