It amazes me how many movies will have a small note somewhere in the credits, “based on the novel by…” It seems that a very good percentage of the best movies started out as books. I can think of a few off the top of my head: Lord of the Rings, the Notebook, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Pride and Prejudice, and that epic series about that boy wizard (we all know who I mean).
It also amazes me how many people whine and complain when the movie differs from the book in any way, shape, or form. Yeah, the book is going to be better. It’s the original… worded exactly how it was supposed to be. Or maybe you imagined this character or that to look completely different. I guess that’s sometimes the case, especially with classics and best-sellers.
There’s been a lot of movies, though, that are based off of books I’d never heard about, and caused me to later look for the book and read it… and it seems like those lesser-known books are made into movies that people don’t tend to complain as much about.
Do you think the book is usually better? Is there any book-turned-movie in which the movie was way better than the book? Worse?
I don’t think the book is ever “better.” It’s just a more detailed version. Different things happen in the movie, usually, because they have time constraints and novelists don’t. They can write as many pages as they want. A movie can’t go on for too long. You can bore your readers in a novel and they won’t get upset too easily - so they’ll still be reading when the good stuff picks up again. In a movie, if the good stuff doesn’t happen just about every 10 seconds, people are going to walk out. Movie goers are a tough crowd. They’re impatient and usually have a two-sided philosophy on what they watch: “Either it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen, or else it’s total crap.”
Another reason why I don’t think the books are “better” is because the author almost never makes the movie. Let’s face it - they write. They can’t film, direct, act, or produce. So who makes the movie? Somebody who has read the book, like you or me. They have interpreted it a certain way, with characters looking a certain way, action and romance scenes happening a certain way, and the parts of the novel that were a bit too vague, fleshed out in an amazing ‘certain way.’ Just like how your interpretation is different from mine, theirs is too, and now it’s been made into a movie. So why should it “suck” just because it wasn’t the way you imagined it. Believe me, if it was the way you imagined it, a lot more people would have hated the movie than just you and the other ones who felt that strongly after reading the book.
If you really think about it with an open mind (that means without your preconceived notions of how the story goes, based on the novel) you’ll realize that most of the movies out there that have been based on something are actually quite amazing. No, they’re not exactly like the books, but they hold their own and that’s exactly the point. The movies are movies, books are books, and overly critical people ruin both for all of us.
-so ends my weekly column in the Melilyn Times
(I really gotta get my own blog.)
–Andrew
January 22nd, 2008