Overall, books are way better than movies...

LW - We need to get away from this "what 2 movies did you rent" that's not the point.

My husband enjoys watching movies, and watches them all the time. When he does, about 80% of the time I put on head gear like you wear at a shooting range to block out sound, and read a book. Other times, I'm busy doing something else. Other times, I'll either watch the movie with him or pop in and out of the room after the movie doesn't capture my attention. So...that said although I can say I don't normally rent movies, they are usually around the house. If he puts one in, I might watch with him.....but I don't ever pick up one of the movies myself and put it in. I can't make it any clearer than that. If I thought about it for a few minutes, I could probably think of the names of 5 or 6 movies I've seen in the last year, and others I couldn't remember the names of.

Why do you find it hard to believe I saw House of Sand and Fog?

Why would I lie about something as stupid as that?

Yes, I did see the movie
Yes, I did read the book.....first.

I've never read a movie review of the movie.

The only time I ever even hear a review of a movie at all is when it comes up on NPR, which, as I remember, is where I heard they had made a movie version of the book, but it hadn't been released yet. So, that wasn't even a review.

LW, I am what I am. I can concentrate on many things....just not films, and I wasn't trying to make this an issue. What this thread is about is books vs. film.

Neither one is better than the other...Okay? I happen to get more out of a book, you, film.

again, to each his own....that's what makes the world go round.

You obviously read some good books -- "House of Sand and Fog" being one of the best from the past decade. I'd suggest, without sarcasm now, that you see some of the great films, a few mentioned above. If your husband is watching the typical special effects blockbuster (and, I suspect, not those which are determined as "chick flicks," some of them still great movies, some of them not-so-good), I don't blame you. Movie watching is more of a group activity. I'm not screening "Brokeback Mountain" and watching it over-and-over but if I get a good victim to sit down and watch it.

I read Misery and The Shining because i liked the films and the books were adictive.

I cant say Ive seen a a whole adaptation(if there is a whole one,they tend to stop half way through)of Wuthering Heights.
I ABSOLUTELY LOVED the book.


Cant remember which way round I saw/read Eyes Wide Shut but the film was awful, I read the book(Traumenovelle/Dreamstory and LOVED it.

Some do not care for Kubrick and the first time I saw "Eyes Wide Shut," I wasn't impressed because I had read the original story. On giving the film a chance because it was, after all, Stanley Kubrick (how could he even be capable of making a bad film?) On subsequent viewings and getting out of my mind that his adaptation wasn't trying to be anything like the book, I began to get hooked on the visuals, the sparse dialogue and the atmosphere of the movie. Now I quite like the film, much like now liking gin martinis after my first experience was, "Yuck, how can people drink these things?"

"Misery" and "The Shining" are to reall great adaptations. I got just as much out of the movies as out of the books. However, I have always felt that King writes books to be movie scripts. "Firestarter" was the most obvious.

Funny, i always felt that, apart from The Stand, all of King's books were painfully obvious as screenplay wannabes . . .

They even made "The Stand" into a mini-series. I couldn't get past the first part.

I always admired "The Shining" which seemed to be the least of the candidates for filming. It's been made more than once, but Kubrick's vision captures the terror and suspense with his typical bravado. We have a Pop artist in the gallery who has done his version of "Here's Johnny."

I have the Reese Witherspoon "Vanity Fair" on my DVR especially for my Mom to see. Since she had read virtually all of Thackery, we'll see what she thinks.

I didn't know there were a "Reese Witherspoon version" of Vanity Fair. One shudders to think . . .

Got good reviews, mainly for her portrayal. She was also great in "Walk the Line."

In my never humble opinion, American actresses almost always fail to convincing portray characters in English novels. Oh well . . .

I'll report back -- actually I saw about fifteen minutes of the film but didn't want to particularly watch the rest without company.

As a generalization, I've always been attracted to both movies and books, I think for different reasons as I look back on years of reading and movie watching.

A book sets up a scenario and lets my own mind create its own screen and its own sound system of voices of characters and commentary from myself, a rich world behind my eyes when I am very involved with a given book. The flow of the words on a page adds another layer (or if badly written, takes away a layer, if not makes me stop reading) - giving me not just the voices of the characters in dialogue amid the developments of the story, but the sounds of the sentences, sometimes joy in the exact choice of words.

A movie that I like will pull me right into space, the space of the action, or the space of the conversations. There will be visual depth of field and movement within it, changing frames of color compositions at high speed, changing implications of the last action, or the action before that one, with variations in the speed of all these changes. It is a ride, really, whether through a small intimate setting (My Dinner with Andre) or vast panorama (Dr. Zhivago, Days of Heaven).

So, it seems to me that some stories work out best as books and some best as movies - and that there is an intersection where a story could be told well by either or both.

I ran across a book that probably preceded a movie I once was crazy about, Ivan Passer's Cutter's Way; I think the book was called Cutter and Bone.

Anyway, I read the book after the movie and found out a lot more about the characters, naturally enough. I liked the book a lot too. But the movie is what has stuck in my mind all these years, for several specific visuals, for the light in Santa Barbara, for the acting, for the music, which was a little unusual at the time, involving a glass harmonica.... My memory is of being there in the movie with them all.

I suppose many writers and directors re-work the story in a way that is less satisfying than the book, that some of the new scenes are just plain dumb, and that the actors might not be so great. Script, direction, acting, all being pitfalls of any movie.

I guess I am getting at that the book and movie should be judged for their own values.
Cutter's Way

"Days of Heaven" was written and directred by Terrence Malick and is one of the most cinematic films because it was purposefully written that way. It is not a story I would perhaps get enthralled with in the written word, missing all the aesthetically striking imagery.

There are a handful of filmmakers, directors specifically, who can conjure up imagery out of books one didn't even see in the written word. I consider myself to have a fertile imagination but if the filmmaker is doing a superb job of presenting the story in the motion picture medium, I can really lose it at the movies (thanks, Ms. Kael).

Another great adaptation is "L A Confidential," just as viable as a movie as it was as a book.

I guess it depends on what kind of literature one finds attractive to them. The recent "Merchant of Venice" is a really good version of the play and succeeded in not being stage bound. Orson Welles made "MacBeth" on a shoestring and managed to keep the stagey look without calling unnecessary attention to it.

The instances in which I considered a film to be better than the book it was based on are those films that were based on very poor books, like The Guns of Navarone.

L A Confidential was a great adaptation, no question. The book was much better, however, imo. In the same vein, The Big Sleep was an exceptional adaptation which was far and away exceed by the excellence of the book.

When I refer to the Big Sleep I mean, of course, the Bogie/Bacall version and not any of the subsequent abominations.

Paasky's post, and something i posted in a thread with an entirely different subject made me think of this: The Far Side of the World is a novel by Patrick O'Brian in his "Master and Commander" series, "starring" Jack Aubrey and the frigate Surprise. For the novel, O'Brain took the indicent of the cruise of the American frigate Essex--and he does thorough research for his novels. The naval hero of the American Civil War, David Farragut, first went to sea aboard Essex when she sailed from Boston in 1812, as a ship's boy, so we know a great deal about the cruise from his memoires, apart from official documents. Essex single-handedly destroyed the English whale fisheries in the southeast Pacific, and the English had sent a frigate out to get her, Phoebe, accompanied by her consort, Cherub, a sloop of war.

In the novel, O'Brian changes Essex into Norfolk, and, of course, Phoebe becomes Surprise, commanded by Jack Aubrey. In real life, Phoebe and Cherub trapped Essex on a lee shore near Valparaiso, and pounded her with cannon fire from beyond the range of the American guns. In the novel, Surprise chases Norfolk, and finds her after a ship wreck far from the coast of South America. I won't tell any more of the story, so as not to ruin it.

For the motion picture, Essex/Norfolk becomes a French privateer, although still a powerful "Yankee-built" frigate. Aubrey still pursues the frigate, but one is not burdened with the details of the mission, the action beginning when the French privateer, Acheron, suddenly appears in a fog to pound Surprise with her powerful batteries, and then pursues the crippled Surprise in an excellent piece of cinematic suspense. Aubrey then repairs his ship and hunts down Acheron. I have read that O'Brian discussed a film with the eventual producer more than ten years before the film was made. For those familiar with the character, Russell Crowe was excellent casting as Jack Aubrey. The story was completely modified again, and worked excellently well as a film vehicle, preserving the original story of a pursuit alone of a powerful foe. The film works because it uses, but doesn't try to be the novel.

I agree. I have a personal pet peeve with the whole S. King thing. He tends to write about locations, people, etc.. in minute detail and most of that gets lost in the movies. A scar on the forehead of the villan, a black notebook on the desk in the study, the rust on the doorknob of an old house... These are all things that add something to his writing but when done on film there is usually nothing to bring your eye to those details and a lot of what makes his book decent isn't there in the movies as a result.

I'll read King's stuff but I won't go to the movies for it just because of that.

You're right, fishin' that most of the King adaptations even though he seems to have consciously written them to become movies don't make very good movies. Of course, that can be blamed on the screenwriter and director.

Thought "Master and Commander" was an intelligent and effective adaptation. Besides that the action sequences are handled by a master himself who is definitely in command. It's a totally different experience from reading the books and I enjoyed and learned from both. I thought it was daring to play up the Darwin-like character a bit more than in the book and it fit into the film seamlessly.

I dunno. What is it that movies can do that books can't? A lot of it has to do with the art of photography and directorial choices - for me, it has much to do with visualized movement through story time and story space, and the near visceral pleasures that happen when you are almost pulled into the screen, into the room or onto the sea, with the actors.

Sometimes in the process of moviemaking, a story is tweaked or truncated or turned around, for the better and sometimes it isn't, and loses a lot. But the power of movies is their visual pull of you into the emotions, or experience, of the story.