h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If books are better than the movies, why don't cinemas offer the use of a darkend room, a reading lamp and the book?
The reason is that they are differant mediums, and it's like saying is paper better than light.

I agree that they are different mediums, but that doesn't make it any easier to bear when Hollywood takes a great book and turns it into populist drivel (possibly with Nicholas Cage in a leading role). And if they are different mediums, where do you draw a dividing line between them? We all feel annoyed when a story that we've played out in our head is re- done badly in a movie because, different medium or not, they've got it wrong, somehow they've desecrated the book and you just know you won't be able to read the book again without drawing comparisons. It isn't a matter of one medium being better than the other - cinema can do things and raise emotions that books can't. It's just as easy to turn the question around - are book adaptations of films ever any good? They can often fail to capture the spark of life that made the film so good. When there is so much cross- breeding between the two industries, there are bound to be runts in the litter.

There are a few cases where the movie has been better than the book.
BLADE RUNNER - The Director's Cut is far better the Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and HACKERS, though very untrue to Gibson's Neuromancer, is a wonderfully pre-modern expression. I also believe that the movie TRAINSPOTTING was based on a book aswell.

I think Hollywood gets away with it by inserting the words "based on the book by ...."

Well, since there are few original Hollywood movies that turn out well, they have to turn to novels and old TV shows for inspiration.

I think one of the main difficulties is that when you read a book, your imagination paints pictures, in vivid detail, of what the people and places look like. When you watch the film, the director has done the imagining for you, and the pictures he sees may be completely different to what you see. That makes the film simply feel wrong, and you don't enjoy it. In some ways, watching the film first can be better, because you can use those pictures, and the difference doesn't occur. Of course, you may then find yourself arguing with the book over how things happened...

With the Lord of the Rings, I didn't read the book, but I liked the movie. With Babe, I read the book and found the movie to follow it exactly.

Almost