Books and Movies

I think pretty much everyone is in agreement that when you have a movie made from a book, the book is generally better.

From time to time, you find a movie that stands well on it’s own, which is just as good as the book. The Godfather comes to mind. It was a great book, and also a great movie. Both works can stand on their own and don’t really need to be compared. Most of the many productions of A Christmas Carol fits this category as well.

It is more rare that a movie surpasses the book. Field of Dreams comes to mind. If you like the Forrest Gump movie, you’d be advised to leave the book alone. Eddie and the Cruisers, the movie, leaves the book in the dust.

Most recently, the Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy have come to the screen. I liked them, and decided that I was going to read the Bournce Trilogy by Robert Ludlum. The books were truly awful.

Ludlum comes up with some really intriguing ideas, such as this highly trained special agent with memory loss, but fails to execute. His characters are wooden, the dialog is terrible, he doesn’t know when to end a story. I continued to read just to see how bad it could get.

I wonder what a good writer, like John LeCarre (Smiley’s People) could have done with those ideas.