My opinion: None of the novels by Jane Austen can successfully be converted into movies. The reason: these novels are 95% dialogues. The movie adaptations do not have time to reproduce these lengthy dialogues. People today are looking for special effects and lots of activity.
I remember doing an exercise on my teaching course we were given texts and asked to cut at least 10% of the words We cut at least 10% and more from these texts and every one of the texts was "improved" by cutting text Some of the works were classics - and it opened my mind to the benefits of editing and the skills of editors like for example J. K. Rowlings' Harry Potter series and how the series got less edited as it went along.
This was fun. Especially Les Liaisons. I have been having heated arguments with fans of that snoozy tome for some time now. Just one minor thing: technically the film is an screen adaptation of a hit play by Christopher Hampton, based on Laclos' novel, and probably the better for it. I'm quite the Stephen King fan, but tend to agree about the film being the better Misery. I'm also not sure that the theme of miserable writers should be off limits for successful novelists. Aren't more or less ALL writers who feature in fiction miserable/blocked/misunderstood failiures, not just King's?
As a resident film bro, I have to chime in: Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes?!? My god, Steve, I would post a facepalm emoji, but it doesn't do it justice to how dissapointed I am. That ending where they have the monkey head on the Lincoln Memorial literally makes ZERO sense. I think the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy was much much better than both adaptations. I'm actually in the minority, especially among Kubrick fans, but, I'm not a huge fan of Clockwork Orange. Give me Kubrick's adaptations of Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut, any day! I agree on Misery being a superior film adaptation. I loved Richard Farsworth's performance as Buster the Sheriff. I also am a firm believe that Stand By Me is worlds better than King's novella. Speilberg's Jurassic Park is hands down better than the book could ever hope to be. And Jim Carrey's Grinch, never happened! Stick to the 1966 version, people!
I love the book of To Kill a Mockingbird, and I love the movie just as much-despite the fact that it cuts out my favorite subplot (reading to Mrs. Dubose).
My list of movies that are better than their source books also includes _The Wizard of Oz._ I remember in the book, the Wizard put needles into the Scarecrow’s head to make him “sharp”. Corny. Last year I read Graham Greene’s novel _The Third Man,_ which was essentially a working draft of his screenplay. Naturally, the story had many improvements by the time it reached the silver screen.
I think it was Steve Allen who caught some flak back in the 60s when he said most rock music was bad but then he pointed out most of any anything isn't very good
I think Jaws is my favorite example. The book is about a failing marriage, which could have been good but the resolution of that plot was just poor. The movie adds suspense and gives the story a satisfactory ending. The only downside is that it probably caused the death of many real life sharks.
Austen is an exception. Every word counts. It comes from the discipline of letter writing in her time. The sender paid for receiving the letter so the writer wanted to justify their writing!
29:45 this might be the first time I’ve heard you drop an f-bomb and it was in relation to Boris Karloff. This is truly one of the happiest moments of my life.
When they both taught at City College, Joseph Heller was rather jealous of Anthony Burgess because A Clockwork Orange was such a success while Catch-22 sank without trace.
Nice list! I agree with a good many of these. A Clockwork Orange is something I watch probably once a year because every once in a while, you need to see a little ultra violence. 😂
This is always a fun topic. Your comments on American Psycho remind me how even David Fincher told his daughter to stay away from a boy that said Fight Club is his favorite movie.
I agree with your basic point. I've only both read the book and seen the movie of a couple choices you made. A Clock Work Orange, and the Exorcist are the two and I wholeheartedly agree the movie was better in both cases. I also read and saw Ben Hur. I thought the book was deservedly popular, and not too preachy. Like a lot of 19th Century novels, it is a bit hard to read for some people. But the difficulty, I think is in the language. The movie is also very good and Gore Vidal wrote the screenplay. My favorite case, and I suspect you may not agree with me, is Doctor Zhivago. As a novel it was compared to War and Peace when it first came out. I read the book and was not very impressed. The good doctor was more or less of a bystander during the Revolution and in his own life as well, unable to make a choice between his wife and his mistress. Robert Bolt wrote a much more focused screenplay and I thought the movie much better with Omar Shariff as the somewhat bewildered and indecisive Zhivago. Perhaps, I'm being a little harsh but being an American I find it hard to accept a hero, though perfectly decent, who is unable to make a choice when the chips are down. Choosing between two antagonists both of which are brutal is certainly not easy, but the inability to do so seems to be a failing of Russian heroes. Clearly Zhivago is in the mold of Tolstoi's Pierre. (But I have trouble with him, too.) Your mention of De Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons interests me. I never saw the movie, but I had no trouble reading the book. It was adapted to the Stage in 1830s by Ancelot, and again by Noziere in the 1920s. Both versions were effective. I also read Christopher Hampton's stage adaptation which I though good, too. I translated both versions, but have only published Noziere's version. DL was also made into an effective French movie with Simone Signoret. Cheers
I was invited by this gentleman for a night of drinking, and he suggested that we afterwards continue drinking in his apartment so he could show me his extensive CD collection. He seems to be a huge fan of Huey Lewis and the News.
WOW! I was thinking about The Exorcist at the beginning of your video. I did enjoy the book. It has some good parts. I felt uneasy reading it. But I eventually realized that it's just not written very well. I also think Kinderman is super annoying in the book. For my own pick, I'll go with Jaws. I liked the book and all the extra stuff that's not in the movie. I've just always enjoyed watching Jaws more than reading the book.
30:41 ok but does the Exorcist count? Sure the movie is a better product but I mean it was written almost exclusively to be movie-bate. And I didn’t think that the movie deviated from the book much at all.
25:14 idolize Patrick Batman? I think you’re right. There’s no way they read the book. I think the director did an amazing job capturing the “humor” of the book as well.
This argument is easily demonstrated by the number of hugely popular movies which most people don’t even know are based on books. Remember that great book ‘Forest Gump’? Me neither!
I have to say that I disagree with you about How The Grinch Stole Christmas. My family and I loved watching Jim Carrey play the Grinch. He did an amazing job and he was funny. We watch it every year.
I think it goes without saying that Crichton, Grisham, King, Ludlum et al transfer better to the screen as films tend to be a better medium for anything that is suspense/thriller/plot driven. Have to disagree with you on Lord of the Flies. I would have swapped that out for No Country For Old Men personally… When you flip the exercise and do 10 films that are infinitely worse than the books you see the other side of equation, i.e. where film as a medium is limited. E.g. Naked Lunch, Goldfinch, London Fields, pretty much every film adaption of a Victorian novel ever made, the Lord of the Rings films (which are ok btw, not bad, just not nearly as good), Midnight’s Children, Oscar and Lucinda etc etc
Great list - apart from that crazy Planet of the Apes entry 🤣 Fate is the Hunter is a great book, and Masada was a great mini series. It's on youtube actually 😉
Regarding your Stephen King bashing would you mind doing a deep dive into why you think he's so bad? I don't disagree but would be curious what particular things jump out to you over his career as the main issues.
Agree completely with a clockwork orange. I would have said The Shining for a Stephen king choice as the book is so dull.i would add Blade Runner,the film is one of my favourites, but the book (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) is hugely disappointing.
@@saintdonoghue He is compared to Verne - who's prose was purely journalistic. Nobody will mistake Wells for Henry James but he at least made an attempt to be lyrical. The images of bucolic desolation in "War of the Worlds" etc. The final sentence of The Time Machine.
The Max Von Sydow I would have chosen is Three Days of the Condor. Other good examples are The Graduate, The Searchers, Get Shorty, Jules and Jim, Gone With the Wind, just about every Hitchcock movie (except Rebecca, which is excellent but not better than the book), and every adaptation I’ve seen of Little Women is better than the book. I disagree about LaClos. I read Les Liasons Dangereuses in a college French class and quite liked it. Can’t compare it to the film, but I think it’s better than you give it credit for. Completely agree on Lord of the Flies, but the bar there is really low. Dreadful book.
Personally I'm a fan of both the book and the film. But I would say that if you haven't read the book the film just seems like a psycho movie with pretentions
Regarding American Psycho - I’m going on 4 years since having read the book - the movie is absolutely better, but the book was much more effective for me. Those sound contradictory, but I haven’t had another fictional reading experience like it that has elicited such a high amount of disgust for the things it examines. The movie, inversely, strikes me as the object of all unironic worship of Patrick Bateman. I don’t know anyone who has read the book and come away feeling anything but revulsion. The movie on the other hand…
It’s a shame that Ellis isn’t a better writer, because I think American Psycho in the hands of a Virginia Woolf/Yukio Mishima hybrid would win out against any social novel about the eighties - it would beat Bonfire of the Vanities. Now I’m just fantasizing though.
@@MaximusStetich Well, as you know, I think "Bonfire of the Vanities" is pretty tough to beat - but yes, I agree completely: "American Psycho" in the hands of Mishima (or even an under-control Burgess)(the key, I think, being: not an American!) would have been epic ...
I was wondering if 2001: A Space Odyssey was going to be on here. Then again, they were created at the same time, I guess. Anf perhaps you don't think the movie is that great, either?
I thought for Stephen King you’d say Shawshank Redemption. What a film!
If a literary work is great to begin with then it has qualities that are unique to the medium.
Hyde Cottage is a madhouse! A maaaadhooouuuusse!!!!!
Hee - had a feeling those "Planet of the Apes" comments wouldn't go over well at the Manor ...
My opinion: None of the novels by Jane Austen can successfully be converted into movies. The reason: these novels are 95% dialogues. The movie adaptations do not have time to reproduce these lengthy dialogues. People today are looking for special effects and lots of activity.
I remember doing an exercise on my teaching course
we were given texts and asked to cut at least 10% of the words
We cut at least 10% and more from these texts
and every one of the texts was "improved" by cutting text
Some of the works were classics - and it opened my mind
to the benefits of editing and the skills of editors
like for example J. K. Rowlings' Harry Potter series
and how the series got less edited as it went along.
There would have been no better choice for Misery than Kathy Bates. She’s brilliant in everything she does.
This was fun. Especially Les Liaisons. I have been having heated arguments with fans of that snoozy tome for some time now. Just one minor thing: technically the film is an screen adaptation of a hit play by Christopher Hampton, based on Laclos' novel, and probably the better for it.
I'm quite the Stephen King fan, but tend to agree about the film being the better Misery. I'm also not sure that the theme of miserable writers should be off limits for successful novelists. Aren't more or less ALL writers who feature in fiction miserable/blocked/misunderstood failiures, not just King's?
As a resident film bro, I have to chime in:
Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes?!? My god, Steve, I would post a facepalm emoji, but it doesn't do it justice to how dissapointed I am. That ending where they have the monkey head on the Lincoln Memorial literally makes ZERO sense. I think the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy was much much better than both adaptations.
I'm actually in the minority, especially among Kubrick fans, but, I'm not a huge fan of Clockwork Orange. Give me Kubrick's adaptations of Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut, any day!
I agree on Misery being a superior film adaptation. I loved Richard Farsworth's performance as Buster the Sheriff. I also am a firm believe that Stand By Me is worlds better than King's novella.
Speilberg's Jurassic Park is hands down better than the book could ever hope to be.
And Jim Carrey's Grinch, never happened! Stick to the 1966 version, people!
I stand by Marky Mark!
Now do 10 books that are better than there movies
Ben Hur was adapted in the 1920s, where 150 horses died and also members of the production. It also flopped horribly.
anthony burgos wrote ‘a clockwork orange’ in one sitting, over the course of a few days.
The Simpsons version of planet of the apes is better than the movie. It works as a musical very well! The Exorcist is one of my most favourite movies.
Deliverance and The Godfather immediately come to my mind. Solid list, Steve.
I love the book of To Kill a Mockingbird, and I love the movie just as much-despite the fact that it cuts out my favorite subplot (reading to Mrs. Dubose).
“To Kill a Mockingbird” is a tricky case! I deeply love both versions, but yes, the movie leaves out SO much
My list of movies that are better than their source books also includes _The Wizard of Oz._ I remember in the book, the Wizard put needles into the Scarecrow’s head to make him “sharp”. Corny.
Last year I read Graham Greene’s novel _The Third Man,_ which was essentially a working draft of his screenplay. Naturally, the story had many improvements by the time it reached the silver screen.
I think it was Steve Allen who caught some flak back in the 60s when he said most rock music was bad but then he pointed out most of any anything isn't very good
I think Jaws is my favorite example. The book is about a failing marriage, which could have been good but the resolution of that plot was just poor. The movie adds suspense and gives the story a satisfactory ending. The only downside is that it probably caused the death of many real life sharks.
No “probably” about that, I think.
Oliver! I would put maybe not as better but I go back to the toe tapping tunes more readily than Dickens' prose.
You need to make more movie videos
Hah! I make multiple videos a day, for Pete’s sake! And a lot of them are 30 minutes long!
@@saintdonoghue They are not enough!!!!!!
Why do so many people dislike Stephen King's writing? What exactly do you guys dislike about it?
His prose thuds. His characters are names on a page. Deus Ex Machina endings.
I'd add The Enchanted April and 84 Charing Cross Road. I love the books, but the movies are better!
Totally agree on both counts!
Austen is an exception.
Every word counts. It comes from the discipline of letter writing in her time. The sender paid for receiving the letter so the writer wanted to justify their writing!
29:45 this might be the first time I’ve heard you drop an f-bomb and it was in relation to Boris Karloff. This is truly one of the happiest moments of my life.
When they both taught at City College, Joseph Heller was rather jealous of Anthony Burgess because A Clockwork Orange was such a success while Catch-22 sank without trace.
Nice list! I agree with a good many of these. A Clockwork Orange is something I watch probably once a year because every once in a while, you need to see a little ultra violence. 😂
The only good Jurassic Park movie was the first one. The other ones were not my favorite. The last movie was awful.
I tend to agree, although I have a soft spot for parts of the second one …
This is always a fun topic. Your comments on American Psycho remind me how even David Fincher told his daughter to stay away from a boy that said Fight Club is his favorite movie.
I agree with your basic point. I've only both read the book and seen the movie of a couple choices you made. A Clock Work Orange, and the Exorcist are the two and I wholeheartedly agree the movie was better in both cases. I also read and saw Ben Hur. I thought the book was deservedly popular, and not too preachy. Like a lot of 19th Century novels, it is a bit hard to read for some people. But the difficulty, I think is in the language. The movie is also very good and Gore Vidal wrote the screenplay.
My favorite case, and I suspect you may not agree with me, is Doctor Zhivago. As a novel it was compared to War and Peace when it first came out. I read the book and was not very impressed. The good doctor was more or less of a bystander during the Revolution and in his own life as well, unable to make a choice between his wife and his mistress. Robert Bolt wrote a much more focused screenplay and I thought the movie much better with Omar Shariff as the somewhat bewildered and indecisive Zhivago. Perhaps, I'm being a little harsh but being an American I find it hard to accept a hero, though perfectly decent, who is unable to make a choice when the chips are down. Choosing between two antagonists both of which are brutal is certainly not easy, but the inability to do so seems to be a failing of Russian heroes. Clearly Zhivago is in the mold of Tolstoi's Pierre. (But I have trouble with him, too.)
Your mention of De Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons interests me. I never saw the movie, but I had no trouble reading the book. It was adapted to the Stage in 1830s by Ancelot, and again by Noziere in the 1920s. Both versions were effective. I also read Christopher Hampton's stage adaptation which I though good, too. I translated both versions, but have only published Noziere's version. DL was also made into an effective French movie with Simone Signoret.
Cheers
Heh. Well, for what it’s worth, I didn’t think the language of “Ben-Hur” was difficult, and I had no trouble reading Laclos…
One movie trilogy and one miniseries that were as good as the books: The Lord of the Rings and Lonesome Dove, though I may be risking heresy here.
I was invited by this gentleman for a night of drinking, and he suggested that we afterwards continue drinking in his apartment so he could show me his extensive CD collection. He seems to be a huge fan of Huey Lewis and the News.
If Phil Collins comes on, run.
WOW! I was thinking about The Exorcist at the beginning of your video. I did enjoy the book. It has some good parts. I felt uneasy reading it. But I eventually realized that it's just not written very well. I also think Kinderman is super annoying in the book.
For my own pick, I'll go with Jaws. I liked the book and all the extra stuff that's not in the movie. I've just always enjoyed watching Jaws more than reading the book.
30:41 ok but does the Exorcist count? Sure the movie is a better product but I mean it was written almost exclusively to be movie-bate. And I didn’t think that the movie deviated from the book much at all.
Fight club? Books better then movies Lonesome Dove
33:57 😱 WHAT?!!!!
You forgot Psycho by Robert Bloch.
I offer The Bridges of Madison County which was an insufferable, wet weekend of a book and a charming and undeniably sexy movie adaptation.
This is a good video concept, Steve, but did you have to put The Rings of Power at number one? You could've kept that to yourself!
The oyster scene in Ben Hur? Don't you mean Spartacus?
25:14 idolize Patrick Batman? I think you’re right. There’s no way they read the book. I think the director did an amazing job capturing the “humor” of the book as well.
The English Patient film is stunning.. I love the book but I thought the film was better
My favorite is Jaws. I think the book is just terrible.
A great video steve Ben hur is much better than lew Wallace but can anyone film a decent version of dune
Ok here’s a challenge, do the same but with movies, let’s say AFTER 2016, even 2012.
Also, what about superhero movies? Better than the comics?
I’ve heard some hot takes in my day, but the one of Kubrick being a largely bad director takes the cake
This argument is easily demonstrated by the number of hugely popular movies which most people don’t even know are based on books. Remember that great book ‘Forest Gump’? Me neither!
On behalf of film bros, :O
Hee. Like I said, these comments are REALLY tempting me to make a movie/Tv channel …
@@saintdonoghue if you can make a separate romance channel why can't you do one for movies and shows?
I have to say that I disagree with you about How The Grinch Stole Christmas. My family and I loved watching Jim Carrey play the Grinch. He did an amazing job and he was funny. We watch it every year.
I think it goes without saying that Crichton, Grisham, King, Ludlum et al transfer better to the screen as films tend to be a better medium for anything that is suspense/thriller/plot driven.
Have to disagree with you on Lord of the Flies. I would have swapped that out for No Country For Old Men personally…
When you flip the exercise and do 10 films that are infinitely worse than the books you see the other side of equation, i.e. where film as a medium is limited. E.g. Naked Lunch, Goldfinch, London Fields, pretty much every film adaption of a Victorian novel ever made, the Lord of the Rings films (which are ok btw, not bad, just not nearly as good), Midnight’s Children, Oscar and Lucinda etc etc
Very interesting to see “The Goldfinch” there … all these comments are really tempting me to start a movie channel …
Great list - apart from that crazy Planet of the Apes entry 🤣 Fate is the Hunter is a great book, and Masada was a great mini series. It's on youtube actually 😉
33:42 HOW DARE YOU, SIR!
Regarding your Stephen King bashing would you mind doing a deep dive into why you think he's so bad? I don't disagree but would be curious what particular things jump out to you over his career as the main issues.
Agree completely with a clockwork orange.
I would have said The Shining for a Stephen king choice as the book is so dull.i would add Blade Runner,the film is one of my favourites, but the book (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) is hugely disappointing.
Oh my, yes, “Blade Runner”!
I’ve always thought Chrichton was more of a Jules Verne type. Wells was literary.
If Wells is “literary,” there’s hope for every ape in Africa!
@@saintdonoghue He is compared to Verne - who's prose was purely journalistic. Nobody will mistake Wells for Henry James but he at least made an attempt to be lyrical. The images of bucolic desolation in "War of the Worlds" etc. The final sentence of The Time Machine.
The Max Von Sydow I would have chosen is Three Days of the Condor. Other good examples are The Graduate, The Searchers, Get Shorty, Jules and Jim, Gone With the Wind, just about every Hitchcock movie (except Rebecca, which is excellent but not better than the book), and every adaptation I’ve seen of Little Women is better than the book.
I disagree about LaClos. I read Les Liasons Dangereuses in a college French class and quite liked it. Can’t compare it to the film, but I think it’s better than you give it credit for. Completely agree on Lord of the Flies, but the bar there is really low. Dreadful book.
Personally I'm a fan of both the book and the film. But I would say that if you haven't read the book the film just seems like a psycho movie with pretentions
Give us hundreds of examples, for Christ sake!!!
Well, speaking of Christ, for example …
@@saintdonoghue ha!
Ah Satire…..had me going for a minute
The Commitments is a much better movie than the Roddy Doyle book
Legit the most controversial video you have ever made.
Don’t cancel me, bro!
Stop asking for it!
Wizard of Oz not a children's movie?! Millions of kids would beg to differ! Return to Oz, on the other hand...
Millions of QUIETLY TRAUMATIZED kids, that is!
Meh, I turned out OK. [QUIETLY weeps]
Regarding American Psycho - I’m going on 4 years since having read the book - the movie is absolutely better, but the book was much more effective for me. Those sound contradictory, but I haven’t had another fictional reading experience like it that has elicited such a high amount of disgust for the things it examines. The movie, inversely, strikes me as the object of all unironic worship of Patrick Bateman. I don’t know anyone who has read the book and come away feeling anything but revulsion. The movie on the other hand…
That doesn’t sound contradictory at all! There are dozens of movie/books where I could say the same!
It’s a shame that Ellis isn’t a better writer, because I think American Psycho in the hands of a Virginia Woolf/Yukio Mishima hybrid would win out against any social novel about the eighties - it would beat Bonfire of the Vanities. Now I’m just fantasizing though.
@@MaximusStetich Well, as you know, I think "Bonfire of the Vanities" is pretty tough to beat - but yes, I agree completely: "American Psycho" in the hands of Mishima (or even an under-control Burgess)(the key, I think, being: not an American!) would have been epic ...
Masadaaaaa !🥰
I was wondering if 2001: A Space Odyssey was going to be on here. Then again, they were created at the same time, I guess. Anf perhaps you don't think the movie is that great, either?
Is there anyone who sincerely thinks the movie is even good, much less great?
@@saintdonoghue yes there is 😁..