books Vs films

[Quoth The Raven]

Books: much better than film adaptations of same, as a rule.
Anyone read 'Man on Fire'? Anyone seen it? They've made it twice now, and screwed it up hugely both times. I mean, really. What mental giant thought Denzel Washington would be a good Creasy? Scott Glenn was bad enough, but Denzel bloody Washington?! When did he ever look like a crusty , 50-something merc? The changed the characters, they screwed with the story...for pete's sake, can't someone make the film properly? And then way to kill the franchise in the more recent one...kill Creasy at the end. There's 5 bloody books, why not do it right and then make the rest into movies as well?
And now the new copies of Man on Fire have bloody Denzel on the front. Gee, I hope they've changed the description of Creasy, otherwise people will be wondering why there's a tall, slim black man on the cover of a book about a bloke who looks like Tom Berenger.:banghead3
It's bad enough when they try to make a good film of a good book, and they just don't quite pull it off. When they haven't even bothered with more than a cursory resemblance, that really pisses me off.
End of rant.

 

[Smoke]

I think books are a better medium because you can get more in -- you just can't distill a full-length novel into a two-hour movie and do it justice -- and because reading involves the audience more. To read a book, you have to enter into it. Reading is an art in itself, and so you have a kind of dialogue between the writer and the reader. There are people who can watch a film in the same way, but most of us don't know enough about film to have the tools for that kind of active viewing.

On the other hand, film is a better medium because it reaches more people, and it allows members of the audience to share the experience as a group, instead of just one at a time. Most adults don't read to each other anymore, most aren't that good at it, and a lot of people never read a book if they can help it.

I think the presence or absence of sight and sound is a neutral thing, and it's up to the artist to know his medium. The filmmaker must know how to work with sight and sound, and the writer must know how to evoke them or how to get along without them.

It's hard for a movie to do justice to a book, and vice versa. It's not really a fair question.

The makers of the movie Housekeeping really did a great job. It's one of the best at doing justice to the book. But for me, it will never have the richness of the novel by Marilynne Robinson.

The makers of the movie Fried Green Tomatoes made a great movie; I think their technical skill as filmmakers is probably greater than Fanne Flagg's technical skill as a writer. But they bowdlerized the story, apparently under the impression that a general audience finds cannibalism less offensive than lesbianism. I don't have much patience with that.

The Lord of the Rings films seemed to please fans of the books pretty well. Neither the books nor the films appealed to me very much, so it's hard for me to judge.

I've seen a number of film versions of The Count of Monte Cristo. Gerard Depardieu's Le Comte de Monte Cristo is by far the best, but a 6½-hour French film isn't for everybody. The 1975 version starring Richard Chamberlain has notable flaws, but is still the best film version in English. The 2002 film starring Jim Caviezel completely trashed the book. It's not a bad movie, but like the makers of the Steve Martin film Cheaper by the Dozen, they really should have called their film something else to avoid unflattering comparisons with a classic. It's a decent movie as far as it goes, but it's not The Count of Monte Cristo.

On the other hand, novelizations of films are done well even more rarely than film versions of novels. The two media just aren't interchangeable.