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 Pacific wrote:
LoTR - it's a book that is a product of the time at which it was written, I think something that a lot of people forget when they are reading it.

Mehhhhh... that only excuses it so far. I took English Literature as my optional extra course for my exams back at school - we read the likes of Chaucer, Thomas Hardy, John Steinbeck, Shakespeare - so I'm more than familiar with dealing with older writing styles and compensating. But I still bounced off LoTR hard, and compared to Chaucer and Shakespeare in particular it isn't that old. In terms of publishing, a lot of those lessons about pacing had already long been learned.

I never had problems reading LotR
have to say I read it first in German (by the time the first movie was released got from first trailer to release thru all the 3 books), and than in English

have read it now 2 times in German and 3 times in Englisch with The Hobbit and the Silmarilion in between

never found it a hard read or difficult but because you cannot keep your concentration all the time while reading, each time I catched other details and found something new
(which makes re-reading more interesting while other books are just boring after the secound time)

'Tis funny, I love LotR the book and I think the movies are kinda boring in comparison, and drag unnecessarily much. Of course it is much more evident with 'Hobbit' movies. I just don't think Jackson is any good as a director. He should have stayed a producer and a primus motor of his visions and leave actual execution to others.

That said, there are some parts of the books which definitely can be a slog - opening trip to Rivendelle is certainly slow, and Frodo's and Sam's walk to gates of Mordor is a bore - Tolkien noted he had to force himself to write it.

'Hobbit' is as said, much more compact prose and some people think it's a superior work, and I can totally understand it.

I suppose the issue around style of writing can ultimately be very subjective. So, what one person will find overly meandering or turgid, another person can enjoy. Think there is still some objective measurement of it otherwise we wouldn't have best sellers and that shared experience of just not being able to put a book down.

To Super Ready's point above, you could say that it was the age of the book and style of writing of that era, plus Tolkein's own style (which not everyone will enjoy, especially modern readers who are used to very different styles of prose).

Going back to Blade Runner, I think you could arguably make a case that it's not even based on the book, the plotting and events being so far apart (and remember that Dick had disavowed the film when it was released shortly before his death).

 insaniak wrote:
On the other hand, the movies also accentuate the fact that the ring, the Ringwraiths, and Sauron himself never really actually do anything.

Saying Sauron never really actually does anything in the War of the Ring is a lot like saying Churchill never really does anything in WWII. He's the ultimate leader, it's not his JOB to be out there doing things personally, he sends people to do things for him.

Being stuck in an immaterial form will do that just as thoroughly as trying to control a war across an entire world involving literally billions of people.

On the other hand, the Ringwraiths are out there doing things much of the time. They're just not terribly effective at doing them, which is different from not actually doing anything.

 Super Ready wrote:

Funny you should mention OotP in particular... my girlfriend was dead set on finishing the books before she watched the movies, but eventually caved and switched when she got stuck on that book for almost a year. She just couldn't be bothered to keep reading it because - and I quote - "Harry's just such a whiny brat".
That was almost a year ago now that we finished watching the rest of the movies, and she hasn't picked the books back up since.

Harry's bad, but a big problem with the book is its just past the point where things can't really be fun anymore but rather than that being an opportunity to write tighter stories rather than the mystery novel styled "nothing happens until the last 100 pages" the filler just got mean spirited instead. I know I REALLY struggled to get through the third scene in which Umbridge was forcing Harry to Bart Simpson blackboard carve things into the back of his hand. It happens once in the film and.... point made.

 Vulcan wrote:

On the other hand, the Ringwraiths are out there doing things much of the time. They're just not terribly effective at doing them, which is different from not actually doing anything.

Yes, my comment was a slight and deliberate exaggeration. A couple of them hit a couple of people here and there... but for the most part, all that they do throughout the story is loom in a menacing fashion. In the books, that wasn't as glaring, because the book did a good job of either building up the suspense when they appeared, or using them 'off camera'. The movie showed them a lot more, which accentuated the fact that they were just riding around and not actually doing much.

Backfire wrote:
Of course it is much more evident with 'Hobbit' movies. I just don't think Jackson is any good as a director. He should have stayed a producer and a primus motor of his visions and leave actual execution to others.

Jackson WAS only supposed to be the producer, virtually every problem with The Hobbit came from the production studio and their lack of money which caused delay after delay after delay and then forced an overly rushed filming schedule once it finally began. It's actually kind of an incredible testament to Jackson's ability that the movie was as good as it was, he mostly salvaged a complete dumpster fire. While it's pretty mediocre compared to the original LotR trilogy, that's partly because LotR was so incredible. There's a very candid interview on youtube where Jackson (and others) go into the ridiculous issues he faced making the film, all stemming from the fact that he never was supposed to direct the movie to begin with while also facing immense pressure from the studio execs to just push on ahead regardless. The Hobbit was a Guillermo Del Toro movie, and Del Toro was in charge of pre-production for over 2 years, but the studio kept stalling and caused so many production delays that Del Toro ran out of time and had to pull out right as filming was about to begin. Jackson stepped in, looked at the script and the sets and props Del Toro had made & realized none of it would work without Del Torro at the helm (Del Torro had planned a whimsical fairy tale with completely different casting for many of the main roles and very different aesthetic for monsters and such). Jackson had 2 months to cast the movie, re-write the scripts AND oversee props & sets reconstruction, while the studio convinced him to keep pushing ahead because they had money issues, they never gave him the chance to actually do a real pre-production of his own. Jackson started filming the movie with an incomplete script, no storyboards for the scenes, unfinished props and sets and costumes and no time plan out the shots, Jackson had to do everything on-the-fly. The only reason they turned it into a trilogy instead of 2 movies is because they just couldn't do the Battle of 5 Armies that way, Andy Serkis was actually filming un-choreographed random action scenes as a second unit director hoping they could be edited into something usable, making a 3rd movie allowed production to shut down just long enough to actually plan out the battle.

There's a bunch of fan-edits for The Hobbit that are REALLY good and turn it from a mediocre film into a great film. I have the "There and Back Again" edit that cuts everything down to a single movie more closely matching the book, I usually watch that if I'm in a Hobbit mood.

 Kalamadea wrote:

There's a bunch of fan-edits for The Hobbit that are REALLY good and turn it from a mediocre film into a great film. I have the "There and Back Again" edit that cuts everything down to a single movie more closely matching the book, I usually watch that if I'm in a Hobbit mood.

http://www.maple-films.com/jrr-tolkiens-the-hobbit

The Orchid Thief into Adaptation.

Adaptation is much, much better!

What the problem with the LOTM book?

Legend of the Monkey?

Jaws,

Godfather

Shawshank redemption

Honourable mention to 'the last legion'.

I would say MCU is far better (and much more consistant) than the comics - although the latter do vary hugely in style, content and quality.

 Mr Morden wrote:
I would say MCU is far better (and much more consistant) than the comics - although the latter do vary hugely in style, content and quality.

The MCU is an odd scavenger of its comic book source material and I'm fine with that and never got the "it's not like the comic" which given both marvel and the distinguished competition retcon reboot and generally jiggle the status quo so often that change is the only constant, i.e. "my" infinity story, the mid(ish) 90s included The Surfer, Adam Warlock and a whole heap of characters stuck Fox limbo but what we got was good enough,

I mentally put MCU/DCU movies in the same folder as, say, Robin Hood movies or King Arthur movies. They are usually not direct adaptations of one source, but rather a highlight reel or reinterpretation of a story everyone kind of knows already. Same thing with Mythology. I don’t consider Troy to be an adaptation of the Aeneid.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I mentally put MCU/DCU movies in the same folder as, say, Robin Hood movies or King Arthur movies. They are usually not direct adaptations of one source, but rather a highlight reel or reinterpretation of a story everyone kind of knows already. Same thing with Mythology. I don’t consider Troy to be an adaptation of the Aeneid.

Nerd Alert!

You mean the Illiad, not the Aeneid.

End Nerd Alert!

Jaws the movie may be slightly better than the book which has some unnecessary sidetracks which don't add anything to the story. I prefer the book ending, though Spielberg's ending is better for a movie.

However on the subject of shark movies, Meg the movie is much better than the original book. You might think that the movie is pretty silly, but it has NOTHING on how ludicrous the book was. I have not read the sequels, but supposedly they're even more stupid.

 Easy E wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I mentally put MCU/DCU movies in the same folder as, say, Robin Hood movies or King Arthur movies. They are usually not direct adaptations of one source, but rather a highlight reel or reinterpretation of a story everyone kind of knows already. Same thing with Mythology. I don’t consider Troy to be an adaptation of the Aeneid.

Nerd Alert!

You mean the Illiad, not the Aeneid.

End Nerd Alert!

m
Crap, you’re right. The Aeneid is the one about the founding of Rome, right? I “read” them both in middle school.

Backfire wrote:
Jaws the movie may be slightly better than the book which has some unnecessary sidetracks which don't add anything to the story. I prefer the book ending, though Spielberg's ending is better for a movie.

However on the subject of shark movies, Meg the movie is much better than the original book. You might think that the movie is pretty silly, but it has NOTHING on how ludicrous the book was. I have not read the sequels, but supposedly they're even more stupid.

I'm gonna back this up. I actually read the meg book and good ghawd it was stupid. The way the meg reached the surface was just "GIMME A BREAK!!!"

The way the meg was killed in the book was just unbelievable, and the way the meg just made me groooooaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnn.

As to another book movie adaptation, I'm gonna go with "Soylent green". If you read the novel it was based on, "MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM!" You'll know that it was actually more depressing that SG. (Yes, it was.) SG worked better as a movie, the novel MRMR would have worked better as a miniseries.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I mentally put MCU/DCU movies in the same folder as, say, Robin Hood movies or King Arthur movies. They are usually not direct adaptations of one source, but rather a highlight reel or reinterpretation of a story everyone kind of knows already. Same thing with Mythology. I don’t consider Troy to be an adaptation of the Aeneid.

Nerd Alert!

You mean the Illiad, not the Aeneid.

End Nerd Alert!

m
Crap, you’re right. The Aeneid is the one about the founding of Rome, right? I “read” them both in middle school.

Yes, but the Aeneid does tell the story of the sack of Troy and Trojan Horse. Which aren't covered in the Iliad. So you probably deserve some partial credit.

Kodos mentioned Dune, and that’s a weird one for me. I read that book for the first time in high school, while going through a lot of my dad’s favorite authors. A lot of what is in Dune the book—mind powers through advanced self-knowledge, special children igniting revolve against insidious canals, weird far-out futures, silly tropes about hardship, willpower and the military—were common at the time, which made the book feel less special to me.

However, the film had such a distinct style that it added flavor to the book and made the book better in my mind. The weirdness of the movie added to the limited weirdness in the book to make both more memorable. The Dune sequels add a lot more of a unique flavor to the setting, but if not for the movie I never would have been invested enough in the first book to want to learn more.

Any thread where I can exclaim my love for David Lynch's DUNE from the rooftops is a good one!

Better than the book? Probably not to most people, but it was for me!


It was for me......

Damnation alley.

There was a short story about a biker hired to run a shipment of medicine thru a post apocalypse wasteland to save a lot of lives. The movie, tho hokey, was better and gave us a classic SF vehicle, the landmaster.

https://youtu.be/Q9QCnV9SRlU

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
...insidious canals...

Damn those canals! Always sneaking up on you!

The first of the 50 Shades of Grey films. While the film itself is not spectacular or anything, it is a massive improvement over the book as it was made with care by the director and cut out a lot of the garbage from the book (to the fury of the author who was much more controlling over the sequels, resulting in much worse films).

Folding Ideas did a really good video series on the films, covering the origin of the books as fanfiction and how that determined their structure as well as what changes were made in adaptation.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

The first of the 50 Shades of Grey films. While the film itself is not spectacular or anything, it is a massive improvement over the book as it was made with care by the director and cut out a lot of the garbage from the book (to the fury of the author who was much more controlling over the sequels, resulting in much worse films).

Okay, that's one film I thought would not get mentioned in this topic as I have only seen the movie and have assumed that the book can't possibly be any worse.

Backfire wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

The first of the 50 Shades of Grey films. While the film itself is not spectacular or anything, it is a massive improvement over the book as it was made with care by the director and cut out a lot of the garbage from the book (to the fury of the author who was much more controlling over the sequels, resulting in much worse films).

Okay, that's one film I thought would not get mentioned in this topic as I have only seen the movie and have assumed that the book can't possibly be any worse.

Imagine the film, but with a voice over letting you know that the main character is completely oblivious about the world around her and mentioning her "inner goddess" every 5 minutes.

It really says a lot about the book that removing the insight into the female leads mind actually makes her a stronger character with more agency.

I mean obviously no adaptation of 50 Shades is going to top the Gilbert Gottfried version, which is, it should go without saying, both NSFW and dangerously erotic.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XkLqAlIETkA

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
It really says a lot about the book that removing the insight into the female leads mind actually makes her a stronger character with more agency.

From the excerpts that I've read... I very much get the impression that if the book were written by a male author, it'd be rightly lambasted as misogynistic. I guess just being written by a female author doesn't make it not misogynistic.
I know that many people have very specific and justified beef with its abusive portrayal of the BDSM scene too.

 Super Ready wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
It really says a lot about the book that removing the insight into the female leads mind actually makes her a stronger character with more agency.

From the excerpts that I've read... I very much get the impression that if the book were written by a male author, it'd be rightly lambasted as misogynistic. I guess just being written by a female author doesn't make it not misogynistic.
I know that many people have very specific and justified beef with its abusive portrayal of the BDSM scene too.

Its written by someone whose knowledge of... more complex sexual practices... comes directly from the Twilight fanfiction community. Which is to say, mostly teenagers writing fairly terrible stories about what they think happens when something other than their own hand is involved.

And the source material itself holds up stalking, taking suicidal risks to 'feel close to' your stalker, and 'soulmates' between adults and infants as high-tier 'romance.'

There was zero way something with that starting point was going to handle BDSM well. Or in a healthy fashion.
Or produce strong or believable female characters.