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Posted by Lale on 16/7/2001, 13:28:12
Why, most of the time, the movie is a dissappointment for a
person who has read the book first?
Very rarely I enjoy the movie after having read the book. Tin Drum
falls in to this category. Angela's Ashes was not bad.
However, I usually end up being dissappointed with the movie if I
have read and enjoyed the book before. More so if I had thought
that the book was a masterpiece.
Tess, Great Gatsby, Tom Jones, Doctor Zhivago... Lousy movies. I
was particularly enraged by the movie of Great Gatsby. How could
they have butchered such a brilliant book like that?
When I read The Last Emperor, I created the scenes in the
Forbidden City in my mind. Then of course the movie didn't do as
good a job as I had done in my mind.
Still, I am drawn to movies of the books I have read. I can never
skip one. Hoping that this time it will be better? Or knowing that it
will be as bad as always and looking forward to a good bashing?
Maybe a little bit of both, but more, I think, it is to compare the
movie of my own creation with the director's version.
Tonight, for instance, I am renting the movie of Stendhal's The Red
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Posted by Dave on 21/7/2001, 8:33:35, in reply to "The Movie vs The Book"
I would love to contribute to this discussion by saying that (and I
hope I don't offend any extreme lovers of John Irving) I really
thought that the movie Cider House Rules was great, and I would
rather watch it again than read it again. I would love to hear from
one and all on this even if you are convinced that I am a hopeless
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Posted by Anna van Gelderen on 7/8/2001, 10:29:45, in reply to "The Movie vs The Book"
Interesting point. I have often wondered why I keep going to film adaptations, when I invariably wind up thinking
the book was better. After brooding a bit about this conundrum I came to the conclusion that it is for a number
First there is of course simple curiosity that gets the better of me: what will the characters and scenes look
like? I know it is silly, but subconsciously I seem to believe that the movie is going to show me what the
scenes and characters in the book look like in reality - even though the movie is of course every inch as
fictitious as the book and even though rationally I am perfectly aware of that fact. But that's the power of the
image on the screen: it carries the illusion of being more real and definitive than the images you create in your
Of course that is also the weakness of the film version. In the first place because the image on the screen often
does not at all agree with your own mental picture, which then is a let down. But what I find most disappointing
is that the film version leaves so little room for anything else. My own mental movie may be imprecise, blurred
and ambiguous, but that also makes it a lot more interesting. It leaves me constant room for speculation, quiet
philosophizing and my own imaginings (if the book is any good, that is), which films usually don't.
However, there is one point where the movie has the advantage. Moving and talking images can be so
penetrating that a good film can move you in an incredibly direct way. It helps of course that you are more or
less held hostage in a dark cinema, and that you can't take a breather by looking up from the page and
ruminate a bit. But even at home in front of a video I have spent many very enjoyable minutes blubbering away
at particularly moving scenes, in a way that rarely happens to me with books.
So perhaps that is why I keep going to see movie versions of books, even though in the end I leave the cinema
feeling more or less dissatisfied - and happy that I can go back to reading again
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 2/9/2001, 19:41:23, in reply to "The Movie vs The Book"
Blade Runner is certainly an improvement over the book - not because the book is bad or something but simply
because film as a medium deals much better with visuals than any author ever can hope to produce. Take
Dickens - his visuals are powerful similes and metaphors which feed on the power of evocative words. Now it
would be a very special Òspecial-effectÓ to translate DickensÕs fusion of meaning and visual into a filmic
visual, and it would fail to transport the story. In other words, a good book is not a film script (and if it is, its not
really a good book) and a good film is not a good Òbook-script,Ó and if it is, itÕs not a good film. But who am I
to judge, I am only a guy who at one point in his life made a living on visuals. So I might be a tat prejudiced.
But there is a moral to this: a truly modern writer avoids to be (over-) descriptive. In that sense Proust, if he
would publish in our time, could only be a glorious failure. There is such a thing as evolution and progress, even
for the arts, and this implies not just new media and means, but different training and conditioning of present
day peopleÕs responses. Instead of bewailing these changes a good author should try to exploit the situation
to his own ends. Do I make sense?
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Posted by Lale on 3/9/2001, 0:32:45, in reply to "Re: The Movie vs The Book"
By the way, there is a movie (of Proust), French make with English subtitles, I can't remember the exact title
but it's gotta be "In Search of Lost Time", John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve... I am told that it is
completely suplementary to the book, i.e. if you haven't read the book don't expect to "get" everything in the
Thomas Hardy's Tess was like that too. I watched the movie, then read the book and then watched the movie
again. Only the second time round many of the details were cleared up.
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