My roomie and I just watched Circle of Friends. We've been wanting to watch the movie since we both read the book recently. (She recommended it to me and I've happily recommended it since.)
The movie was cute and enjoyable, but definitely not as good as the book. I find this is almost always the case since books are so much more detailed than movies can be.
So, it got me thinking about whether or not a movie is ever better than the original book. Nothing came to mind immediately...
How about it-- can anyone think of an instance where the movie is better than the book?
"Into the Wild" was close to as good as the book. Emile Hirsch did a fab job.
ReplyDeleteGenerally, I think books are better than the adapted movies, but there are movies that are better than the underlying books (The Godfather, being the first that springs to my mind). I think, though, the comparison between books and movies suffers from three different elements: self-selection bias, a timing issue, and a knowledge issue.
ReplyDeleteI think people that read the book before going to see the movie are people that inherently think books are better than movies. Readers and movie-goers fall into two different camps in my mind, so I think those who favor the book over the movie are those who will favor books over movies, broadly speaking.
The second and third points are somewhat correlated. Readers' opinion of a book is built on a number of different things - the story itself, the character development, the quality of the writing - but not all of these things will be at the forefront of the mind when the reader views the movie. The author may write with incredible detail, and the reader may really enjoy that in the writing. But when they come around to watch the movie, the reader might not notice the effort the director has put into replicating that detail on screen; they might be staring at the actor or actress. It's also pretty hard to remember the exact level of detail that the writer put into a book when you're looking that same scene on screen. For instance, I know that a lot of people love Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings,' but I think it was probably really hard for the movie to replicate the level of detail in the movie as Tolkien did in the book. (I really wouldn't know, because science fiction freaks me out on several different levels.) So I think it's hard for the reader to absorb the same information from a book and a movie, and if they read the book first, the reader is inherently going to like the book better simply because they don't / can't notice the level of detail in the film.
Which brings me to my third point; most people don't have the knowledge or understanding of film to realize that the director is putting the same level of detail on screen. When I watch a movie, I don't pay attention to the camera angles, the lighting, the attention to wardrobe, etc. I just watch the character interaction. Someone like Teo, though, probably picks up on all that stuff. So I think it's tough to catch the subtleties that exist in movie when you don't know a lot about filmmaking (and I assume most people don't know a lot about filmmaking).
So, that's that. It's an interesting discussion, though, and I bet The Godfather is way better on screen than it is on paper (although I've never read it, but I just can't imagine the book is better than The Best Film Ever Made.)