Do You Ever Get Sick Of "The Book Is Better Than The Movie" bit?

Nice to meet you. I work at Dunkin.

LOL! I am actually THAT much sick of it, that i instantly roll my eyes, whenever someone is coming with that line.

If anything is "better" than a book-to-movie adaption, then it is the mind of the reader, cause people tend to imagine "good" things to be way better than they actually are, as well as they imagine "horrible" things being way more horrible usually.

So it comes, that the written stories are a "better" experience than the movie, but that evaluation is even more based on subjectivity than usual reviews out there.

Lol not even close. A lot of movies are better than the books they are based on including some of the best films ever made. Shawshank redemption, the godfather and Lawrence of Arabia (based on seven pillars of wisdom) are all better than the books they are based on.

There are so many absolutely horrendous writers who get their books adapted into films it's ludicrous to claim the books are always better. Not even remotely close to being true. Most books are absolute trash.


When it comes to books I believe probably can never be adequately captured on film, the list is pretty short. Catch 22. Gravity's Rainbow. Crime and Punishment. 100 Years of Solitude. Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Inherent Jest. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Their qualities are specifically literary, ,and so they will be fundamentally altered if put on the screen....but even in these cases, it's not like I don't think they can never be reimagined for a film effectively, as long as theyre in the correct hands. Naked Lunch should have been unfilmable, but a smart guy like Cronenberg figured out how to crack its cinematic code pretty impressively. The book is still probably better but....it's close.



The reality for me is film is just better. It's a considerably more forgiving medium for artistic expression than writing will ever be. Writers have nowhere to hide their inadequacies and, as a result of this, the vast majority of them suck. So thank god film is around to redeem the decent stories/characters/concepts so many of these bumble**** writers out there have no idea how to properly render to page.

To answer the OP. I have never been much of a reader, outside of news. Does it bother me...no

I'm much more pissed off by people saying that the film wasn't close to the book or that it changed something or omitted something or that the feel of the movie was different than that of a book.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Film is more forgiving, but it also locks you as the recipient into more absolutes: how a character looks, how they sound, the beats between spoken dialogue, the focus (as directed by the camera) in a scene, etc. I like how much I have to meet a book in the middle.

I love movies and I love books, and I don't feel the need to choose one. But I would say that in terms of being moved emotionally and engaged intellectually, it happens more often with books than with film.

I'm split on this. On one hand, I don't think that movies have some contractual obligation to be to-the-page loyal to the books from which they are adapted. Otherwise we'd never have The American Friend.

On the other hand, it is painful sometimes seeing a story/characters you love brought to life on screen only for something you loved about the original text to be altered in a manner that rubs you the wrong way. It irks me mainly when those changes are made not for artistic reasons, but as crowd-pleasing/profit-maximizing reasons.

Watching the trailer for The Dark is Rising was like someone kicking my childhood in the shin.

For example, the movie "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" I liked it more than the book.

Huh. I just found out there's a novelization of The Terminator and The Elephant Man.


I wonder what those are like (not enough to read them).

I've got a speech prepared concerning The Godfather and Narnia.

The comparison has always struck me as inherently confused. Books are better at some things and worse at others. To say the book is better, and particularly to say books in general are better, is simply to state a preference for some aspects of storytelling (depth, digressions, prose) over others (beauty, visceral emotions, density).

I agree that a general statement "Books are better than movies" is meaningless. I also agree that generally speaking, the things you gain or lose in a film adaptation (visuals, character development, brevity, etc) can lean a person one way or another in what medium they prefer.

But when I say, "The book was better than the movie," what I'm saying is "I think the book did a better job of telling this story than the film."

I wrote a lot about this in my review of The Martian, where I felt that the film's need to push the story into more "cinematic" territory frequently undercut the "based on real science" hook. While I thought that the book itself could also at times be too cutesy, it was at least consistent from cover to cover in its tone and its employment of scientific explanations.

So the book The Martian is fine. And the movie The Martian is fine. But which do I think is a better version of the story of a man named Mark Watney stranded on Mars and the rescue mission to save him? The book by a moderate margin.

I think that it can be a worthwhile thing to discuss, because if I love a story (in a movie or in a book), I am interested in knowing what others think about another version of it. (Something that is also true of film remakes of other films). Thanks to such comparisons, I feel no need to ever read Puzo's The Godfather. But on the flip side, I hadn't heard of Little Children before watching the 2006 film and I really ended up liking the book, which is more overtly funny than the film. (I would actually say this is a rare example of me NOT having a preference, because I think that the film and book versions are different but equally strong versions of the story).

I always compare To Kill a Mockingbird. I think the book & the movie are equally good. The book came first so I would give that an edge over a movie for which the storyline was already written.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

This movie seems to be universally liked.. It's hard to NOT like Gregory Peck, who is usually noble.

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Right. There’s nothing to not like.

We saw this in school in the US... I wonder about other English speaking countries since it deals with our problem.