[Leftcoast]

When I love a book I approach the movie guardedly.    How will the director envision the thing I love?  What plot elements will he necessarily change in order to transfer it to a different story-telling medium?  What role will the limitations in budget, film time, talent and movie technology play?

Anyone else love Dune and hate the movie?  How about Starship Troopers?  The Time Travelers Wife or Water for Elephants? Or more recently, Where the Wild Things Are and The Great Gatsby?  The jury is still out on the Hobbit trilogy but so far they have been disappointing.

For me Blade Runner and the Philip K. Dick novel it was based upon are rare examples of the movie surpassing the book.  I'd add The Godfather and, for a Stanford reference,  One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to that short list.  In each of these the director's vision added texture that I did not get from the books alone.

In the last two examples I read the book AFTER seeing the movie.  Does first exposure shade which creation you see as preeminent?  I suspect my kids prefer the Lord of the Rings movies they saw first to the books.  I regard the movies as well done in their own right but limited compared to Tolkien's world building vision that drove the seminal novels. 

[Leftcoast]

When I love a book I approach the movie guardedly.    How will the director envision the thing I love?  What plot elements will he necessarily change in order to transfer it to a different story-telling medium?  What role will the limitations in budget, film time, talent and movie technology play?

Anyone else love Dune and hate the movie?  How about Starship Troopers?  The Time Travelers Wife or Water for Elephants? Or more recently, Where the Wild Things Are and The Great Gatsby?  The jury is still out on the Hobbit trilogy but so far they have been disappointing.

For me Blade Runner and the Philip K. Dick novel it was based upon are rare examples of the movie surpassing the book.  I'd add The Godfather and, for a Stanford reference,  One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to that short list.  In each of these the director's vision added texture that I did not get from the books alone.

In the last two examples I read the book AFTER seeing the movie.  Does first exposure shade which creation you see as preeminent?  I suspect my kids prefer the Lord of the Rings movies they saw first to the books.  I regard the movies as well done in their own right but limited compared to Tolkien's world building vision that drove the seminal novels.