Last movie/book combo i've read/seen was Clear and Present Danger.

Read the book first then saw the movie....when the movie was over i was like WTF they left out half the story.

It depends. I'm risking crucification now, but I will probably never read George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire", but I'm glad that "Game of Thrones" exists to spare me reading about 5,000 pages. I don't have the time for this. Likewise, "Lord of the Rings" isn't very readable, really. It's been an admirable effort on many levels and has been a treasure trove for both epigonal and original fantasy writers, yet it has a deeply racist undertone (Yes, I know, they're Orcs, not people! ... still, the body counting during the combat scenes wasn't exactly to my liking) and above all, all the singing and elven poetry - Aaargh!
As literature it's close to a failure. What's saving it is the grandiose vision, I very much like the fact that it's not just about slaying Sauron but also the "ruined" home-coming to the Shire, which elevates it above a simple heroic tale. The movies, on the other hand, were fantastic. I acknowledge that not everything could be saved from the books, that adaptations had to be made, but all in all it's very enjoyable to watch, so thank you, Peter Jackson.
"2001: A Space Odyssey" is another example where the movie is much better than the novel simply because the novel delivers certain needless and materialistic explanations where the movie was about the metaphysical struggle of technology itself against its impending obsolescence which, among other things, made it a masterpiece. The book - meh.

IMO, one of the best transposition of a book into a (popular) movie is The Princess Bride. The humor in the book and in the movie work on different levels (yet, as contradictory as it may sound, are very similar in technique and intent). Both are very appropriately chosen for the respective medium, and I couldn't say which was better.


That said, comparing the two is great if you have the time, and all in all I think that movie producers have learned to respect the original source much better than the butcher jobs that were the norm until well into the late 1970s, and I'm glad for that. Not saying that you always have to be faithful to the original in order to make a good film. "The Blade Runner" comes to my mind as an example for a very, very good film based on a pretty good book that doesn't have much in common with the original source, yet it's not a butcher job either. They share a common theme, yet they are both good works that can coexist as nearly independent pieces.

LOL I would have been appalled to watch Dune after reading the book, don't get me wrong I have a soft spot for the movie since my brothers and I loved it as kids. But the book series is so different and so many key story points were changed for the movie. The mini series was better in keeping truer to the book but had god awful production value.

I too agree with others that it largely depends on the book/movie sometimes I prefer one over the other other times I think both versions stand out on their own for different reasons.

I have George R.R. Martin's books queued up to read on my kindle, I've seen season 1 and just recently season 2 of A Game of Thrones and really enjoyed them, so has my son. he won't read them and I know it will take a while to get round to reading them for myself.
Lord of the Rings is a very easy read, and I have gone back and read it over again a few times, but I have not read it to analyse it. I never got this deep racist undertone in the book that you mention, for me it was two antagonistic cultures and neither one reminded me of anything other than that. Oh and yes the films were great too, almost the same story.

Now I did read 2001 a very long time ago and I'm still trying to work out what it was all about, the film was good and I'm old enough to remember it being released but it is not one in my collection and I do have 2010 although on VHS.

Never read Princess Bride but the film is great, and lead to some great moments in my life with a Dutch/German young lady standing on the cliffs over looking the North Sea and quoting lines from the film one that will always be in my heart.

On the whole I prefer reading but I'm passionate enough about film that I built my own cinema at home to watch films in.

I don't know how one can possibly miss the fact that the Orcs in LOTR are culture-less, cannibalistic, violent, ugly, faceless sub-humans whose only possible way to deal with it for civilization is to smite them (and when they bleed, it's black, not red). Don't get me wrong, I understand that they don't stand for a specific human race or anything, but the whole attitude towards them from the main characters is fundamentally genocidal. Of course they have to be cruel minions of Sauron who is the embodiment of evil with whom no compromise is possible - only submission into slavery and death. I also understand that in a war you don't test every single one of the other side about his intention and willingness to defect and join "the good side". But there's not a single incident in more than thousand pages where an Orc showed the potential for being anything else than a subhuman whose sole purpose was to kill or be killed.

Don't want to make a big fuzz about it, really. In a way the Orcs back then are cartoons just like the Zombies of today. It's the last group of the world population where it's politically not incorrect to suggest genocide.


In a nutshell: Human evolution was guided by a mysterious alien civilization, sending the monolith and transforming the brains of the proto-men that touched it. This starts a cultural evolution of technology from club to space travel. Once that mankind has become a space-faring species and discovers the other monolith on the Moon (when it receives sunlight), it transmits a "success" signal to Jupiter where a third monolith is waiting in orbit. As it turns out, it's a wormhole/teleport device that "beams" David Bowman to that alien civilization's "zoo" which, we can surmise, is based on radio and TV transmissions that the moon monolith collected, analyzed, and transmitted. Bowman then lives in that zoo until he dies of old age ... or undergoes a rapid transformation into the next stage of evolution, the "space embryo" which then disarms the nuclear powers and eventually helps the rest of mankind to evolve beyond their current state of tool-wielding super apes.
Kubrick's film isn't less explicit and leaves more room for interpretation, which alone makes it better than the book. Kubrick suggests that the epitome of technology, HAL 9000, who is smarter than the humans who built him, figures out that the end of the journey will also mean the end of himself and of technology as such, and therefore attempts to sabotage the expedition of the Discovery. The book, on the other hand, suggests that Hal is simply malfunctioning due to a programming error/conflicting mission goals. To that extent its still locked in the frame of mind of technological progress rather than Kubrick's vision of transcending technology.
There are of course more layers in that movie. I haven't yet figured out why all food shown in the movie - and there's quite a bit of it shown throughout - is disgusting (though its different kinds of disgusting) ... with the possible exception of Bowman's last meal (although it's not shown in detail). I suppose he wanted to tell the audience something with that, I just haven't yet figured out what it may be.

Basically I`m a bookworm since my early teen days. I was in the public library every week to get new books. I read around one book a week nowadays.

OTOH I like movies, unfortunately the local cinema closed and was broken down 2 years ago, so I always have to drive to the next town. This situation will last at least another two years I think, but there are serious plans to build a new cinema here.

There are books I really need to see in the movies, where I read the book first like LOTR, tere are movies like James Bond, where I don`t bother to read the book. There are rare occasions, where I see a movie and buy the book afterwards.

Movies have better visuals, sound effects and characters and I hate reading unless it actually has an actual purpose such as providing intriguing information.

I'm fairly certain there's no deep metaphysical meaning behind the food portrayed in the film. Most of the time you see food that has been heavily processed for consumption by astronauts so naturally it will not look appealing. As for Bowman's last meal inside the monolith, it was exactly just that: his last meal before his transformation. I think the details of what that food was is immaterial.

A little interesting side note, Bowman accidentally knocking over the glass of wine was due to Keir Dullea's improvisation and Kubrick liked the idea so he kept it in the film.

Maybe there is no deeper meaning in it. But there's also quite a bit of movie runtime spent on showing the proto-humans feasting on raw meat, so it created the impression of a recurring theme to me (in me? Dang it, I'll never master English prepositions). Showing the various meals didn't appear as progressing the story (except maybe that in the book the proto-humans were starving as they didn't hunt the animals around them ... only after receiving the intelligence boost by the monolith did they start to hunt; but the film doesn't explicitly show them starving).

Most of the books I've read have not been made into movies, but of those that have I prefer to read them first. Reading is far different from watching.both are good in their own way.I'm reading great expectations on my smart phone, a chapter a night, and that pace gives me something to think over the next day.

2001 the film emphasizes that the Monolith introduced the idea of warfare as opposed to hunting in the book, with some competition. Both methods involve killing, but one puts the slant on exploiting all your resources in new ways while the other on limiting your competition for those resources.

Oddly I've never been concerned with the "plight of the orcs" in LOTR any more than I was the "plight of Al Qaeda" being hunted to extermination. The book was about progress/technology epitomized by Sauron and especially Saruman's conversion of Orthanc into a death factory vs nature epitomized by the elves, who were themselves dying off.
The orcs were elves in the distant past, but Morgoth corrupted and tortured them and crossbred them with other creatures to make a new race that was basically enslaved soldiers with evil minds.

http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Orcs



The Jedi Master

Both for me. Some movies make me want to read the book, and some books make me want to watch the movie. Prime example of the first: The Master and Commander movie. For me it opened up the most amazing literary world I've ever visited And the other way around: LOTR. Always loved the books, and thought the movies were fantastically well done overall!

I use a third way ~ unabridged versions of the audiobook, or a radio play ~ this allows me to 'digest' the whole much more easily than *only* reading the book, allows the 'better' images that you sometimes get from the written word than technologically or artistically 'limited'/broken film visualisations, and it is more portable and 'dippable' than either. I often have a paper copy to read more slowly/at my leisure for those bits that 'catch me'.

Similar, but slightly between book and film is radio-play, where some aspects are abridged, expanded, modified to suit the medium or the artistic vision of the writer/producer/artists... At their 'purest' these are basically 'full-cast' audiobooks, but this is often modified slightly to replace 'the sound like...' with sound effects ~ though this sometimes reduces the humour of an appropriately inappropriate metaphor or simile.

I can't remember a single movie that was better than the book (LOTR was an excellent trilogy, but it was not the books). But there's a difference in experiencing them. The movie is to sit back, have a beer and some snacks, and be entertained for a few hours. The books are there to be savoured (and sometimes just a time filler).

Easy one for me,
Fight Club.

One and only, probably.
Maybe Alien, too.

First Blood... Liked the movie ending better.
Even though it brought us that horrible Rambo II and III...

Um, Alien was not based on a novel. It had an original screenplay. There may have been a novelization of the film that came out aftwards but that's a totally different issue.

That is like my son, he is dyslexic and has great difficulty reading, what we have found is that if you read to him he remembers it, but if he tries to read none of it sticks. His older sister is at Leuven University at the moment going for her masters in political science and she reads and can retain the information.

Now my niece is a year or so ahead and studying pharmacy, she is doing another masters degree on top of the masters she already has, she has an audio based memory and has to read out loud to get the info to stick in her memory, she is not dyslexic and is in the top 1% of students at Leuven.

For me, I have to read it or see it then it sticks, I've had difficulty picking up voices from noise for a long time, my 16th birthday to be exact, when I was too close to the speakers at a Mungo Jerry concert.

I stand corrected.

Good thing I put Maybe... LOL!

I'd rather listen to the audio book whilst working on the pc. Started listening to audio books from amazons Audible a few months ago,some books are 8 hours long.It's great because you rewind if there is an important point you've missed whilst working on the pc.Although some of the books are expensive,for the basic package you get one book a month very cheaply.

I'd rather watch the film or listen to audio books. I read too slowly and also go back and forth too much to do most books any justice.