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Here's a thread for comparing film adaptations to their source material! I was inspired to do this thread because I just read the novella Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis, originally published in Japan in 1991 and eventually spawning the cult classic animated film adaptation Perfect Blue.  Released in Japan in 1997 and arriving in the US in 1999, the movie recounts the psychological breakdown endured by an entertainer named Mima when a crazed fan turns violent over her decision to transition from a squeaky-clean pop music singer to an actress appearing in risque erotic thrillers. The book features most of the same characters, but for the most part it is a much more straight-forward tale of a pop star and her stalker: Mima does not try to become an actress (here the fan-stalker's fury is derived from Mima releasing a book of nude photos); she is a solo artist and not the lead of a girl group; her assistant, Rumi, is a lot more subservient than her film counterpart; the book features no surprise second villain as the movie does; and most strikingly Mima never suffers a breakdown. That's what the book doesn't have from the movie, but it does have a couple unique things the movie doesn't: most notable is a rival pop star who flaunts a sexy "bad girl" image and schemes to derail Mima's career. The stalker's intentions in the book eventually become nastier than in the movie, and by the end it feels more full-on horror than the movie ever got. The verdict: I'd say the movie is superior to the book and it's not even really a contest. It's true they're coming at the story from completely different angles: the book focusing on the stalker's psychosis while the film is more interested in the starlet's mental state. But the latter proves much more compelling and a lot of it has to do with the viewer hoping Mima finds her way out of it. In both versions the stalker is mostly just a pathetic, crazy jerk. The book probably should've tried making the psyhotic fan the main character and risked making him a bit more sympathetic, because its Mima arguably has her head on her shoulders better than any other character in the story and is a complete bore because of it. She arguably doesn't even have a character arc. In fact, the book feels almost helplessly naive about how well a teenage girl can adjust to fame, to be frank, and there's precious little in the way of commentary on the entertainment industry itself. I got the distinct impression the author was himself a fan of young female pop musicians - he confirms as much in his afterword - and that he simply had too much affection for the j-pop scene to present it too critically: like, a barely legal musician can TOTALLY release an erotic photo book due to industry pressures and this is COMPLETELY okay as long as it's still cute and tasteful and not like that OTHER rival pop star over there who is in fact a total skank. This might be the most quintessential example of a movie adaptation improving on its source material ever! Anyhow discuss amongst yourselves.
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Aug 9, 2019 22:06
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Certain auteur directors like Satoshi Kon or Stanley Kubrick have definitely made films I’ve liked more than the books. It’s when you get to the lower tier of directors that things get sketchy.
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Aug 10, 2019 02:47
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I really dig this thread and super appreciate the effort put into it, but I'm going to be a twat and not put that equal effort in. But I'm being supportive of the thread! Fight Club is a difficult movie to analyze through a modern lens. It's more-or-less a blueprint for current toxic masculinity. That being said, the movie is far better than the book. Unlike in the movie, in the book Tyler Durden is an explicit murderer, a small change that nonetheless completely reframes his entire arc. Without the lethal aspect he plays into a romantic anarchist fantasy. Once a bodycount develops a much darker and more insidious narrative begins to develop. And that narrative might be interesting, but it doesn't work with what the larger message of both the book and movie are trying to convey (however poorly). Tart Kitty fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Aug 14, 2019 |
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Aug 10, 2019 03:03
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Ccs posted:Certain auteur directors like Satoshi Kon or Stanley Kubrick have definitely made films I’ve liked more than the books. It’s when you get to the lower tier of directors that things get sketchy. I've always wanted to read the books that Die Hard and the Warriors were made from. A couple of my more favorite book to movie adaptations are Requiem For A Dream and Battle Royale. Are movie to book adaptations part of the discussion? Because if so, the Gremlins adaptation is pretty bonkers. Turns out Gizmo comes from an ancient alien race?
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Aug 10, 2019 03:51
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ruddiger posted:Are movie to book adaptations part of the discussion? Because if so, the Gremlins adaptation is pretty bonkers. Turns out Gizmo comes from an ancient alien race? Piers Anthony wrote the novelization of the movie Total Recall, based on a story by Phillip K Dick, which is the most photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy thing you'll ever experience. Piers Anthony posted:“He looked at her. He noticed that she had three full breasts, prominently displayed in a special bikini top. For any man who got his kicks in that department, here was extra measure!”
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Aug 10, 2019 04:26
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:What about novelizations of movies that are adaptations? Didn't Street Fighter: The Movie have a game made of it? Also last time I went thrift shopping at an old book store I got the novelisation of Aronfsky's Noah, which seems like a redundant thing. Didn't it start off as a graphic novel before the film was greenlit?
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Aug 10, 2019 05:49
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ruddiger posted:I've always wanted to read the books that Die Hard and the Warriors were made from.
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Aug 10, 2019 09:00
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:What about novelizations of movies that are adaptations? Max Allan Collins wrote the novelization to the film "Road to Perdition" which itself was an adaptation of the graphic novel "Road to Perdition" written by ... Max Allan Collins.
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Aug 10, 2019 19:35
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I think I prefer Rope as written by Patrick Hamilton to Hitchcock's production. The differences in the characters as written are mostly slight, but transplanting the movie to the 50s as Hitchcock does means we lose Rupert Cadell being a WWI veteran, and consequently lose my favourite dynamic of the story. In Hitchcock's telling, the crime of Brandon and Philip is to place themselves above others, and thus violate American equality. As Hamilton writes it, the conflict is between nihilisms. Cadell came to the conclusion of the cheapness of life through his experiences in WWI, and consequently his whole intellectual project is trying to reconstruct some humanity. To Brandon and Granillo, the cheapness of life is entirely an aesthetic to be enjoyed. They (well, Brandon) revel in the cruelty. To them the cheapness of life turns them into the sort of people who committed WWI, rather than those who suffered through it. I just find it much more interesting. I could talk about Hamilton's Brandon for hours. Hitchcock's Brandon not so much.
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Aug 10, 2019 21:19
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Hitchcock's Rope is fine but it feels like more weight was put on filming long takes than making the characters dynamic. Never read the original story but now I wanna give it a shot.
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Aug 10, 2019 21:32
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The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal are both vastly superior to Thomas Harris' books.
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Aug 10, 2019 22:09
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The movie The Prestige is much better than the book The Prestige. Basically the book is much more straightforward in its narrative and also has a, quite frankly, bizarre bookend plot set in the present day which has a bonkers bit with Angiers being basically trapped as a ghost after the machine malfunctions. It also isn't as morally interesting as in the book the Tesla machine leaves lifeless duplicates instead of exact copies.
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Aug 10, 2019 23:14
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I watched A Clockwork Orange right after I had finished the book by Anthony Burgess and I loving hated it. Not for the reasons Burgess hated it either, I thought the ending was actually OK. Rather I found the whole look of the film too stagey and artificial and certain sections like the prison to be too comedic. To me, the book was real and the movie was a fantasy. This is very clearly a subjective feeling but I think that is more often the case. That we generally prefer the media that we ingested first. So are there any examples where it was the opposite for you?
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Aug 11, 2019 01:14
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Tart Kitty posted:I really dig this thread and super appreciate the effort put into it, but I'm going to be a twat and not put that equal effort in. But I'm being supportive of the thread! Oh, your contribution is more than fine, I don't expect everyone to make a blog post. I'd just gotten through reading the Perfect Blue book recently so I was in the mood to write a few paragraphs.
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Aug 11, 2019 01:34
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I thought Annihilation the movie was way better than the book. Not sure if that's a common sentiment. To be fair, it is quite different really. Who Framed Roger Rabbit! Carpenter's The Thing is by far the best version of the original short story. (Who Goes There? afaik) Dr Strangelove was based on a generic book called Red Alert. Movie is way better. I think The Godfather is better than the book. I like No Country for Old Men better than the book but that's because I like quotation marks. Cuaron's Harry Potter is really good too imo. I think Jaws was a book first but I haven't read it. The movie would be hard to top tho.
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Aug 11, 2019 10:50
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Spite posted:I thought Annihilation the movie was way better than the book. Not sure if that's a common sentiment. To be fair, it is quite different really. Jaws and the Godfather books were both trash
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Aug 11, 2019 12:12
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frankee posted:Jaws and the Godfather books were both trash I've read a bunch of Peter Benchley and I think his best book is the non-fiction one he wrote advocating for shark and ocean conservation.
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Aug 11, 2019 12:42
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Spite posted:Carpenter's The Thing is by far the best version of the original short story. (Who Goes There? afaik). They Live is also better than Eight O’clock in the Morning. Probably. Eight O’clock is pretty fucken good too
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Aug 11, 2019 14:20
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frankee posted:Jaws and the Godfather books were both trash The godfather movie(s) is for sure a masterpiece but that's a little harsh?
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Aug 11, 2019 15:34
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I've read "Make Room! Make Room!" which is the basis for Soylent Green and it does not have a lot to do with the movie. The book is mostly a warning of the dangers of overpopulation and while it has a murder it isn't really a mystery. Also all the stuff about "soylent" is completely above board and there's nothing about cannibalism.
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Aug 11, 2019 16:35
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Crimpolioni posted:The godfather movie(s) is for sure a masterpiece but that's a little harsh? Well, there was that subplot of that one woman who underwent surgery to reshape her vagina. I remember reading that and thinking 'now what the fu-'
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Aug 11, 2019 16:36
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Jurassic Park the film is vastly superior to Jurassic Park the book
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Aug 11, 2019 16:50
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I read the Jurassic Park novel before I saw the movie. The book definitely has some cooler set pieces (most of which eventually showed up in the sequels). Crichton has a lot of flaws as a writer but I think it’s impossible for me to dislike the book due to the nostalgia I have from reading it a billion times as a kid. He really likes stopping the story in its tracks for a character to do an exposition dump and the ending to the book felt like a mess. The movie is one of the top-tier summer movies ever made and its unrelenting energy makes you completely overlook all the minor technical errors (visible crew, etc). I think it’s undeniable the movie is better even though I might fantasize about an impossible 3+ hour R-rated version that merges the best of both. Edit: lol I wrote this post before I saw the previous one
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Aug 11, 2019 17:03
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Samovar posted:Well, there was that subplot of that one woman who underwent surgery to reshape her vagina. I remember reading that and thinking 'now what the fu-' Oh yeah, that was a thing, wasn't it. Wierd what authors feel they have to spend a couple pages on in the middle of a gang war.
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Aug 11, 2019 17:24
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jaws has an unnecessary mafia subplot (it's why the mayor wants to keep the beach open, they also kill the brody's cat in front of one of the sons if i'm remembering correctly) and hooper and brody's wife hook up and she relays a fantasy of a black handyman bending her over the sink or something. reading that book as a 12 year old was an experience.
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Aug 11, 2019 17:27
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david_a posted:I read the Jurassic Park novel before I saw the movie. The book definitely has some cooler set pieces (most of which eventually showed up in the sequels). Crichton has a lot of flaws as a writer but I think it’s impossible for me to dislike the book due to the nostalgia I have from reading it a billion times as a kid. He really likes stopping the story in its tracks for a character to do an exposition dump and the ending to the book felt like a mess. The movie is one of the top-tier summer movies ever made and its unrelenting energy makes you completely overlook all the minor technical errors (visible crew, etc). Same 100%. The 2001 and Fantastic Voyage novelizations were written by Clarke and Asimov respectively, which put them a cut above most, although 2001 is really more complimentary to the movie than "better than". The plot is certainly more coherent in written form, at any rate. Fantastic Voyage is much cooler as a novel though, Asimov went as far as he could to explain how much would be different for miniaturized people/things at that scale and it comes off much more interesting and exciting than the film's relatively straightforward adventure.
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Aug 11, 2019 17:39
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Crimpolioni posted:The godfather movie(s) is for sure a masterpiece but that's a little harsh? I really hated the book but I only have read it once so maybe I should give it another go
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Aug 11, 2019 17:45
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puzo wrote it for money and i don't think even he liked it.
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Aug 11, 2019 17:58
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McSpanky posted:Same 100%.   2001 is an interesting one since the movie wasn’t really based on the book; Clarke wrote it during the movie and it’s basically his interpretation of what the story is. Kubrick kept his concept more hidden (I assume; I haven’t read all the biographies and stuff about him) but I doubt that the details line up very well. Or maybe they do, but he would never spell them out that clearly. On the subject of Benchley, I’ve read White Shark (Jaws with a Nazi sharkman) and seen the TV adaption of The Beast (Jaws with a giant squid) so I have no doubt whatsoever one of the greatest movies of all times is superior to the book.
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Aug 11, 2019 18:59
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white shark was made into a tv movie (as the beast was) called creature and they re-named the book that.
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Aug 11, 2019 19:02
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Groovelord Neato posted:white shark was made into a tv movie (as the beast was) called creature and they re-named the book that. 
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Aug 11, 2019 19:13
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I've always been cold on Last Temptation of Christ. I like a lot of the choices it makes and most of the casting, but there's something detached about it. The book is very personal and about the nature of enduring through pain and failure. I feel like Dafoe's Christ never really gets to the vulnerability I would want in an adaptation. muscles like this! posted:I've read "Make Room! Make Room!" which is the basis for Soylent Green and it does not have a lot to do with the movie. The book is mostly a warning of the dangers of overpopulation and while it has a murder it isn't really a mystery. Also all the stuff about "soylent" is completely above board and there's nothing about cannibalism.
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Aug 11, 2019 19:34
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Blade Runner's weird. I like the movie (the cut I prefer at least) and it has fantastic visuals and a great performance by Hauer. The presentation of the philosophical aspects works for me despite subject matter that doesn't always engage me. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a different story, and comparing the two straight up isn't totally fair to either. They're both a little meandering and thoughtful about how artificial people change society by existing. Otherwise the focus is largely different. The movie plays into questions on what makes people people and humanity's treatment of itself and, to be honest, Blade Runner is one of the only films with this area of attention that I really like. But I do really like it! The book is more concerned with the impact on society that occurs and how organized religion and personal experience inform how someone engages with society at large. It does have a Philip K Dick ending?? of sorts but it's not in the company of his worst conclusions. I prefer the book most days but it's not something I argue about
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Aug 11, 2019 20:21
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I know it's played out, but The Shawshank Redemption is a better movie than a short story (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, from Stephen King's Different Seasons). King is my favorite author, but frankly, he's batting .100 on movie adaptations, and that's being generous. The headspace his best novels put you in is a very hard thing to translate to screen. Sometimes incredible directors pull it off, but at the expense of character (Kubrick and The Shining); sometimes incredible actors can pull it off, but at the expense of becoming a meme (Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile); sometimes a combination of both of those things makes the sort of film that becomes a subgenre so solid it becomes a focus of weaponized nostalgia 30 years later (Stand By Me/Stranger Things) - but mostly nobody can pull it off and the result sucks hot turgid poo poo (Under the Dome, Dreamcatcher, a dozen others). In re: Shawshank - the movie and the story are both very similar in structure and tone, but Darabont is a fine enough director to know the differences between what makes a good movie instead of a good story. Warden Norton is a good example; in the screenplay Norton is the primary antagonist instead of the number of different wardens in the book, giving the audience a single person to root against instead of many. Darabont also makes small changes to the story that add to the humanity but don't take away from the theme (Brooks and Jake; in the story, Brooks leaves the prison and nobody hears from him again, but his pet bird Jake dies because he'd been institutionalized - same theme in the movie, but the movie had a better take). He got rid of some unnecessary backstory (prison breaks) and made Andy's suicide/fakeout a far better payoff than what was in print. And he called in Roger Deakins to do the cinematography, which (along with Thomas Newman's score and Morgan Freeman's narration) gives the movie a feeling it wouldn't have had otherwise. Story's good, don't get me wrong. But the movie improves on it in the translation, which is a pretty rare thing. Asbury fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Aug 12, 2019 |
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Aug 11, 2019 21:18
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Timeless Appeal posted:
If you want some classic examples of a movie studio just taking the name of a story and the germ and then crapping stuff out... First there's Tim Powers' "On Stranger Tides" where the only thing it and the movie in common is they are about looking for the fountain of youth and that Blackbeard is involved. Unlike the Pirates movie the book is actually interested in fitting in actual history to its fictional world. The stuff about magic is interesting because the book has it that magic only works if you believe in it and it went away in modern times simply because too many people stopped believing. The other is Alan Moore's "From Hell" which was a meticulously researched comic about London around the Ripper killings while the movie is just a crappy whodunnit (the comic makes no secret that Gull is the killer the entire time.) One of the most bizarre changes in the movie is combining two real people (Fred Abberline and Robert Lees) into one character who is also addicted to opium. The funny thing about the movie is that in combining the characters they give Johnny Depp's Abberline the psychic powers of Robert Lees but the comic has Lees admitting that he's a fraud and does not actually have psychic visions. The movie also cuts out the most striking sequence of the comic when Gull is dying in a madhouse and he starts traveling through time, both forwards and backwards interacting with future serial killers.
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Aug 11, 2019 21:22
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Groovelord Neato posted:jaws has an unnecessary mafia subplot (it's why the mayor wants to keep the beach open, they also kill the brody's cat in front of one of the sons if i'm remembering correctly) and hooper and brody's wife hook up and she relays a fantasy of a black handyman bending her over the sink or something. That sounds dope, guess I gotta read jaws now
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Aug 11, 2019 21:28
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It’s been a while since I’ve read H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man and seen the 1933 movie so I can’t do a thorough comparison, but the movie expands the scope of the book and improves the pacing. I was dragging my feet on seeing the film since I seem to remember that for most of the book the titular Invisible Man locks himself in a room, but the movie speeds things up a lot and throws in more action scenes at the end to raise the stakes. I remember being really impressed by the movie; maybe someone whose read/watched them recently can chime in.
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Aug 11, 2019 22:34
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Blood Boils posted:That sounds dope, guess I gotta read jaws now it's not!
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Aug 12, 2019 00:16
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Pretty much every change Field of Dreams makes from the book is for the better.
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Aug 12, 2019 02:03
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Wrageowrapper posted:This is very clearly a subjective feeling but I think that is more often the case. That we generally prefer the media that we ingested first. So are there any examples where it was the opposite for you? I've preferred just about any on-screen Shakespeare to the original text but that probably just means I'm not a Shakespearean theater kind of guy. Expanding to adaptation-vs-adaptation, I preferred Dangerous Liasons (1988) to Cruel Intentions despite watching the latter first. I dug the way Cruel Intentions brought the story to a new setting (and of course the cast was actually sexy by modern standards), but Dangerous Liasons has WAY better actors, and in the end that storyline really just makes a lot more sense in 18th century Europe.
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Aug 12, 2019 02:15
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