View Full Version : Movies and Books
Which of the two are better? I think it's music.
Shaun
12-21-2007, 06:02 PM
Books! Books are the best. And music wasn't an option! But books are always better than movies.
Rafael Domination
12-21-2007, 10:02 PM
Personally, I prefer both...books allow to ou picture what's going on yourself, but movies let you enjoy how other people pictured it IN a physical fashion...
I enjoy books just a tiny bit more than movies because some movies really ruin good books.
Shaun
12-22-2007, 01:49 AM
I agree Nyx. Plus, movies, for me, have a higher likelihood to suck!
Unfortunately, in books, (due to different publishers) there are some grammatical, spelling mistakes. Movies correct them and even add more thrill in it. I agree that books are really good but with the lacking of special effects, music and cutting out of the boring parts, movies are better.
Shaun
12-22-2007, 03:32 AM
Gasp! Blasphemy!
No blasphemy. Personally, I prefer books but I got more information against it! :D
No blasphemy. Personally, I prefer books but I got more information against it! :D
Isn't that a little hypocritical?:P
Shaun
12-22-2007, 06:35 AM
Books tend to have more room for detail than a movie does. Movies have a lot of problems addressing character history. Sure, you can use flashbacks, but they sometimes really suck, well most of the time they suck, but in a book you can weave little tidbits of info about a character into the prose without wasting time going into a flashback. So I'm more partial to books, although I can admit that movies can be a lot of fun too.
Books tend to have more room for detail than a movie does. Movies have a lot of problems addressing character history. Sure, you can use flashbacks, but they sometimes really suck, well most of the time they suck, but in a book you can weave little tidbits of info about a character into the prose without wasting time going into a flashback. So I'm more partial to books, although I can admit that movies can be a lot of fun too.
True but let's say we say, she was singing sweetly. Suddenly, a loud roar tore through the room. It isn't exciting as you make it into a movie and show a person singing sweetly and suddenly a roar was heard.
Shaun
12-22-2007, 05:29 PM
Well true, but the difference is that a book asks you to turn on your imagination, whereas a movie simply says "look, it's happening, no imagination necessary". I love movies, don't get me wrong, but movies rarely spark my imagination (except 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, which got me interested in writing a zombie/sf novel). I find books infinitely more appealing because of the whole imagination thing.
That's very correct but there are special effects movies take to make the movie more appealing than books. When something went wrong with the ship, and Trillian raced in shouting “Zaphod? What did you touch!? Button’s aren’t toys!” and Zaphod responds automatically, “Buttons aren’t toys!” like a trained three-year-old. But when reading, the sentence have absolutely no meaning. Also, when the reader comes across a sentence which he does not know how to feel, the expressions and tones of the actor would help too.
That's very correct but there are special effects movies take to make the movie more appealing than books. When something went wrong with the ship, and Trillian raced in shouting “Zaphod? What did you touch!? Button’s aren’t toys!” and Zaphod responds automatically, “Buttons aren’t toys!” like a trained three-year-old. But when reading, the sentence have absolutely no meaning. Also, when the reader comes across a sentence which he does not know how to feel, the expressions and tones of the actor would help too.
Actually that's what great about books, your background about the characters tell you how to feel, and everyone feels something different when reading the very same sentence. That's the magic of books, there's no right way of seeing it.
True, but books, unlike movies, tend to make you imagine. Usually the wrong things the author is trying to express. It's like poetry. Books do the guessing, movies, the correcting. It spoils the whole meaning and purpose of a paragraph, section, sentence etc. by guessing the wrong meaning and interpretation of it. Movies, however, give you a chance to guess too by having lulls between exciting clips and through dialogs, we can also guess what is going to happen next.
Shaun
12-23-2007, 01:38 AM
Movies get it wrong a lot too, though, especially in book-to-film adaptations. And movies almost entirely remove all necessity for imagination. You can watch a Bruce Willis film and not need to imagine anything. Everything is flashed before your eyes and in the end, for most films, all your questions are answered and you didn't have to imagine anything. Books force you to imagine things. You have to visualize everything within your head.
That is very right, Shaun. But in books, ideas have come a bit too far fetched, unrealistic. Movies edit them to make them more real. The emotions and characterisation are all down to earth. Movies also edit them to improve the story. To make it more exciting. Take HP for example. I have friends who prefer the movie than the books. It is not that they do not like reading, quite the opposite, in fact.
Shaun
12-23-2007, 01:50 AM
Goodness, you need to watch more movies. I've seen far too many movies that were too unrealistic to the point of being ridiculous.
Really? :D All the movies I watched aren't like that. I go for Classics. Maybe that's why.
That is very right, Shaun. But in books, ideas have come a bit too far fetched, unrealistic. Movies edit them to make them more real. The emotions and characterisation are all down to earth. Movies also edit them to improve the story. To make it more exciting. Take HP for example. I have friends who prefer the movie than the books. It is not that they do not like reading, quite the opposite, in fact.
You used a great example, : Harry Potter. The books aren't far fetched, they're detailed. If your friends think they're far fetched then they probably have completely misunderstood the creative writing and how the details challenge one's imagination.
Also, everyone has a favorite part in books like Harry Potter, can you say that everyone's favorite part is the movies? Not very likely.
Movies often makes books LESS realistic with cheesy special effects and such:rolleyes:
Shaun
12-23-2007, 03:24 AM
Well book-to-movie adaptations tend to suck tremendously. There are exceptions. I personally think the first two HP movies were well done, although obviously they cut quite a bit out of them, but of all the films I think they cut the least and changed the least. Then there are the LOTR movies, which were done in such a magnificent way even with the changes, that you were simply pulled into the world. The Chronicles of Narnia movie wasn't half bad either and I actually really enjoyed it (it's one of my favs). But a lot of other adaptations have been horrible. The Eragon movie, which should have been a piece of cake to do because the book isn't really all that complex or hard to understand to begin with, turned into the most horrible book adaptation suck fest I have ever had the displeasure of viewing in a theater. The third HP movie was put together so horribly by possibly the worst director I've ever known (some weird Spanish guy who sat there proclaiming some nonsense about adding his own creative touch, which is absolutely retarded because...HELLO...it's not your work to begin with you moron...leave the creative touches to the author). That film ended up having all the action rushed in the very end leaving you all this open space earlier on where little to nothing happens and then bombarding you with all the answers, unlike in the book by the way, and leaving you at the end going "what the hell happened" and being completely confused because elements that were presented in the end simply didn't have a foreshadowed cohesiveness.
The problem with movies in general, though, is they are generally incapable of taking already used ideas and making them new and refreshing. Books can do that. If you had any idea how many times a fantasy story had already been told you'd probably have a seizure, but what authors are able to do is take something that has been done to death and make it seem new and interesting so you don't realize its historical element. Movies can't do that, as can be seen in the countless retarded, idiotic, moronic attempts to make horror movies in Hollywood. The only way they could make them seem new was to turn up the violence and gore, which makes it just disturbing rather than scary. The 70s, 80s, and early 90s knew how to scare the crap out of you, using suspense to surprise you. Horror rarely does that now. Probably the only original horror film, or seemingly original, are the Ring movies, which managed to take horror to a different level. We all remember the creepy girl coming out of the TV...that scared the living crap out of me. That's what horror is supposed to do. You're supposed to nearly wet yourself or be so freaked out that you don't want to walk home alone in the dark...
You also have to realize that a lot of characterization that is in a book is lost in a movie. We don't get a lot of good back-story to a character, or any sort of understanding of who that character is inside and out. We only get the outside. We can't be in the character's head because movies aren't written or filmed like that and the movie wouldn't work if they were. In books we see and feel more for the character because more is given to us. We know how he/she really reacts to a certain situation rather than simply seeing the physical. What is the character actually thinking when the evil bad guy throws a hostage into the pit filled with man-eating sharks with lasers on their heads? We don't know in the movie because all we see is his/her face.
Hence why books are more powerful!
Madmike
01-06-2008, 08:26 PM
I like books a lot more, because for one, there are a lot of books that are not movies. Also, movies cut off a lot which means that you miss a lot. Such as in... Eragon, is a good example. The whole trip in the book was about 100 pages or something, but in the movie it took 5 min. I'm talking about when he was with Brom.
P.S.
Did you guys hear about the four books thing with that?
Shaun
01-06-2008, 08:39 PM
Oh, yeah, we heard, and all of us who are fans were pissed and all those that weren't fans are pissed too...
The Eragon movie was an abomination. I can't believe they wasted film to make that...
vBulletin® v3.8.4, Copyright ©2000-2012, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.