Reading Books after You've Seen the Movie

[Salva135]

I always liked Jurassic Park way better than the original movie. The book is darker and more complex, and creates a more detailed story than the movie can possibly cover in a couple of hours.

In fact, I would say this applies to pretty much all of the Michael Crichton books turned into films.

[TheDudeAbides]

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The book "The Princess Bride" is really awesome relative to the movie, which I adore. Lots of awsome tangents and more depth. Really fun read.

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Really? I haven't read it in ages, but I seem to remember the movie being almost exactly faithful to the book.

[bobman0330]

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To get back on topic, one series that I read after the movies was the Jason Bourne series, and besides the name, they have nothing in common, and I prefer the movies. Maybe as a Cold War, post-Vietnam type of series they were relevant and made sense, but nowadays, a CIA trained fake assassin tasked with bringing down real communist assassin doesn't seem as plausible as the CIA being forced to track down a rogue agent.

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The Bourne books are so much worse than the movies. I ran into a guy on the subway, and we were both reading The Bourne Supremacy. We talked about it, and I remarked on how different the book and the movie were. He said, "Yeah, it's a shame they have to dumb down complex plots like this for the movies." I was too polite to say, "WTF, are you retarded, this book blows?" so I just stared at him speechlessly.

[Dids]

"Hot Pocketttttt"

Lord I hated this bit. Actually I ended up hating most of that standup, even though I like Gaffigan a lot.

[gumpzilla]

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i must say the interviewer is a pretty horrible journalist and i am surprised the article got published as written. i mean you get information from a guy under a positive pretext, then the interviewee turns out to be not at all what you expected, sure i could see being pretty shocked and commenting on it. but its entirely different to basically attack the guy after the fact, from card's perspective its a total bait and switch. furthermore, its not like he is given a chance for rebuttal or clarification in the article, in fact you read the conclusion of the interview a couple of sentences in, so readers are prejudiced before they even get to the content. he is literally compared to a Klansman before he is even quoted!

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Yeah, I went back and read it after I posted the link and it was quite a bit different than I remembered. I guess it's been a few years.

[Jamougha]

Tron the book >>> Tron the movie.

[Blarg]

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Just read "A Simple Plan" and have to say I like the movie better...

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So much of this movie was in the performances that it would take some really good writing to do the interactions as well.

[Blarg]

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I always liked Jurassic Park way better than the original movie. The book is darker and more complex, and creates a more detailed story than the movie can possibly cover in a couple of hours.

In fact, I would say this applies to pretty much all of the Michael Crichton books turned into films.

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Andromeda Strain, same. Very slow paced movie with bland characters. The book was pretty cool.

[amplify]

I read Trainspotting after seeing the movie. I didn't finish it, the book is written in a think scottish accent and it wore me out. It might be like a Scot trying to read Huck Finn or something.

[JuntMonkey]

This thread is a bit of a change-up, as it's a generally accepted fact that books are almost always better than the movies based on them. The Godfather is one obvious exception (book is a beach read, movie is a masterpiece).

Back in the 90's I read the novelization of "Fallen" with Denzel Washington. The movie has one of the biggest payoff twist-endings ever, but I wanted to see how they would translate it to book form, due to the nature of the twist. The guy did an alright job with it.