Books vs. Movies

I don't consider myself a movie buff by any stretch of the imagination, but I have been watching this whole "books-to-movies" trend develop with some interest. If you've seen the latest Archdale-Trinity Magazine, you know what some of my favorite books-turned-movies are. That piece got me thinking, and I'd like to explore the idea in more depth here.

A lot of movies throughout cinematic history have a text foundation, being adapted from either novels or plays, but it seems like it's a much more common occurrence lately. Which raises some interesting conversation points ...

... My friends and I often have movie-versus-the-book debates. As a general rule, we tend to prefer the book to the movie, thinking the story is stronger and etc. But in some cases, I find I definitely prefer the movie to the book (The Princess Diaries comes to mind), and this has led to some really interesting conversations.

For me, reading a book and watching its movie are two totally separate experiences: one is a personal, lost-in-my-own-imagination experience, and the other is a broader, visual experience. There are countless decisions and interpretations that have to be made when shifting a story from the page to the screen. Someone else is responsible for creating the images and filling in the "gaps" your mind fills when reading -- and their interpretation is most likely very different from yours or mine. (In much the same way, my impression of a book may be worlds different from that of my best friend or the guy down the street.) Does that make the movie story weaker than the book version? Not necessarily. It just makes it different, more dynamic. And I don't know about you, but I usually do not have awesome music scores "playing" in my head when reading, which is a definite perk of watching movies!

I'm one of those people who'd rather read the book before I see the movie -- to know what I'm going into, but also so that when I read the story, I don't have movie images in my head. There have only been two times that I remember seeing the movie before reading the book, and both involved Nicholas Sparks books (you'd think I'd have learned my lesson after seeing A Walk to Remember, but nope, I did it again with The Notebook). So I'm decidedly in the "read the book first" camp, and then when I see the movie I know and understand the story -- but am still able to separate the experience. I can appreciate a movie for its awesomeness, even when it leaves the original story far behind (case in point: Prince Caspian!)

That's the key, I think: being able to fully separate the experiences. There's never going to be a movie that's just like reading the book. Conversely, when you read a book that a favorite movie was based on, it's going to be totally different. So long as you can keep the reading and the watching in their own unique realms, you should be able to appreciate books and their movies equally (unless one is just truly horrid).

What about you? What camp do you fall in: books-first or movies-only or any other combination? And what are your favorite book-movie transitions?