Books

I prefer Perks of Being a Wallflower and Silver Linings Playbook. Good books, great movies

Fight Club, American Psycho

Honestly Jurassic Park. Michael Chrichton (sp?) was great at imagining and building thoughtful metaphors but his literary voice is mediocre at best and the structure of his novels are honestly pretty poor and almost written from a movie perspective.

Forrest Gump. Can't remember if the book had the same title; I didn't finish it. It was dreadful.

Psycho. The book is a good read - but the film is iconic.

The Rainmaker.

While not bad, the book takes a lot of liberty with how the law operates. While in the movie the judge likes Rudy but is not overly biased, in the book, the judge is overtly biased towards Rudy. In the end, the book suffers because of it, because Rudy is just a guy who has things happen to him, instead of making things happen.

The film is just that good.

The movie versions of "A clockwork orange" and "Fight club" are both better then the books. Mostly because they both have top notch directors and actors at the top of their game. But also both movies change the ending significantly. It's kind of amazing

Lord of the rings trilogy

This may be slightly cheating, as they're both based on short stories, but After Yang and Drive My Car are both so massively better than their source material. Everything Alexander Weinstein writes feels pretty unremarkable to me as far as sci-fi goes, but After Yang builds upon his work beautifully. Drive My Car is especially astonishing as a work of adaptation in the way it takes a handful of middling (unrelated to each other) Murakami stories and stitches them together into one of the best screenplays of recent years. The screenwriters take the best elements of Murakami's work and pair them with elements that fill in the gaps of his failings.

Lee Chang-dong's Burning is another great adaptation of a Murakami short story, but the story that's based upon may actually be my favorite of Murakami's, and it's one I feel stands alone much more strongly than those that inspired the Drive My Car film.

The Hunt for The Red October and probably Jurassic Park and I love those books. But the movies are just more classic and the pacing is better.

The Bourne Identity.

It’s extremely slow, and he kidnapped a woman, slapped her a few times, threatened to kill her, later saved her from a rapist and voila she fell in love with him.

Annihilation is boring and unfocused and maybe even a little self-indulgent, and the movie is creepy and weird and never overstays its welcome. In my opinion

Fight Club

Bridges of Madison County

Breakfast at Tiffany’s, maybe, Mickey Rooney excepted

I'm not saying the book is bad, but Stardust is a much better movie than the book.

Call me by your name. The director did an amazing job

Jurassic park

The screen writers did a great job condensing a lot of the book into a 2 hour perfect movie.

The book has a lot of boring parts, the character of John Hammond doesn't work for me and most of the worst parts where used for the second movie and the third. (The whole dinos escape to mainland and the river scene)

Also a lot of emphasis on caos theory

I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Th Casual Vacancy. The BBC mini series was brilliant. I found the book difficult to keep track the characters and I liked the way the movie modified the ending.

Ready Player One.

The book was not good at all. I enjoyed some of the concepts, but it was badly written and used narrative extensively to tell the story. It's one of those books that, after reading, I thought, "If this can get published, I can be an author, too."

The movie was so much better. It kept the intent and spirit of the book, but it was obvious that it was produced and directed by someone who actually knew what they were doing (Spielberg).

The Devil's Advocate by Andrew Neiderman

I think DaVinci Code was better as a movie. I found the book to be a linear slog through a series of deus ex machina puzzles that each lacked any kind of sufficient solution that a clever reader could see ahead and in a book that takes a day to read that's much less fun than a 2 hour movie with the charisma of Tom Hanks driving it.

Fight Club

First Wives Club. I do like the book, but the film changes almost everything for the better in terms of the interpersonal relationships and character development.

Starship troopers! I loved the book as a kid, the movie (even missing the power armor) is amazing! But I went back and re-read it years later...that book is one long, very thinly veiled political rant. Heinlein would totally be yelling on Fox News about the Woke mob ruining America because they don't spank kids anymore. Haha

13 reasons why, even though it's a show instead of a movie. I think the story talks about a super important topic, but the show is poorly executed and the book is even worse. Hannah Baker appears to be incredibly whiny and entitled in the book and it's plainly exhausting to read her character voice. It took me almost a week to finish this book, even though it's rather short and back then (line 6 years ago), my attention span wasn't as bad as it's now. Normally, I would've needed probably 2 days at best for a book this length, but because of Hannah Baker's constant whining and complaining and her just being a super exhausting main character, it took super long.

Stephen King's book Cujo. While it was still a good book, the ending of the movie when Tedder lives made all the difference to me.

Not a movie but a series: The Expanse. The series couldn’t really resolve the timeline hopping, but it’s still better than slogging through Corey’s droning writing style.

Call Me By Your Name. The best part of the movie was how sensual it was, it made you feel like you were really spending the summer in Italy. The book has some of that, but no quiete. The last fourth or so also gets weird with their trip to Rome, if I recall correctly was someone giving monologues about desire. The book also has a flash-forward with Elio looking back at the events of the book from his adulthood, which doesn’t work as well as the fireplace scene in the movie.

Lastly, the book doesn’t have a Sufjan Stevens soundtrack.

No Country for Old Men. I love Cormac McCarthy. While it is still a good book, I think it is one of his weaker books (which is not an insult when he's one of the greatest novelists in history), and the movie was just cast perfectly.

Cloud Atlas. One of my favorite movies, but the book was kind of boring and weird.

Lord of the Rings! Not sorry. Also The Count of Monte Cristo, liked the movie better.

Harry Potter. Rowling needed an editor badly, especially in the middle books, and the house elf stuff with Hermione was awful, cringy, and kind of racist.

Interview with a Vampire is much better as a movie or TV show than it is as a novel.

Arrival.
The book goes much more into the concepts but the presentation of the aliens is pretty lackluster. The movie is much better at conveying a sense of awe.