/lit/ - Literature

American Psycho

>>4578038
Never read it
Seen it on the stand for like 3$

It's a close call though.

>>4578048
$3 more than it is worth.

Cool movie, average book

dadcore gtfo of my /lit/ and tell pretentious moccasin wearing hipsters to come bak

>>4578084
Someone always posts this before I have the chance to

>>4578084
I borrowed it for my project about roles of martial arts in literature, movies and video games. Loved the movie to death, but haven't started the book yet.

Don't get why the book is even considered great in the first place.

>>4578031
>comparing a book to a film despite them being two completely different mediums

>>>/tv/

A Clockwork Orange, 2001, American Psycho, Fight Club, LOTR, The Godfather, Jaws.

>>4578133
>implying that you can't compare different mediums

>>4578301
It's pretty dumb to compare Starship Troopers with Starship Troopers. They're not even remotely the same story. You may as well compare The Mona Lisa with Beethoven's 5th.

>>4578306
>You may as well compare The Mona Lisa with Beethoven's 5th

One flew over the cuckoo's nest.

>>4578168
>A Clockwork Orange
>LOTR
I disagree.

>>4578168
>LOTR
kek

>>4578129
>>4578168
A Clockwork Orange is perhaps Stanley's only film that was not better than the book, and that's saying something because it is an excellent film none the less.

>>4578306
Beethoven's 5th

>>4578309
One's the medium of music and one's the medium of painting. If we called them both the same thing, they'd still be about as comparable as Starship Troopers the film and Starship Troopers the book.

>>4578038
nope
>>4578084
yes
>>4578129
yes
>>4578168
>LOTR
absolutely not
>>4578324
lel

Anyway:

>Apocalypse Now (kind of an imprecise comparison, but it does much better than H.o.D. w/ conveying the key themes IMO),
>True Grit (pick any version)
>every Stanley Kubrick film (except for Lolita)
>The Rules of Attraction (the only B.E.E. adaptation that does it right)
>The Silence of the Lambs
>No Country for Old Men (by just a hair)
>The Trial (gets extra points for completeness and doing Kafka's humor better than Kafka)

>>4578338
I bet you are fun at parties man

>>4578363
Your mom certainly thinks so.

>>4578367
:OO

>>4578338
You watch movie X. Afterwards you feel in awe, inspired, you call the book a masterpiece.
You finish a book Y. Afterwards you feel like you've just wasted your time, it was so mediocre.

There. You say, X was good, Y was not. Therefore, X is better than Y.
Different mediums, subjective evaluation - yes, but the thread is exactly about that.

>>4578317
Loving
Every
Laugh

>>4578384
Their mistake was calling something a masterpiece before first getting to know it. How can you watch a movie and call a book a masterpiece? You lost me there. I am an idiot.

>>4578384
So is Beethoven's 5th better or worse than The Mona Lisa?

>>4578031

I REGRET NOTHING

>>4578401
Better obviously, the Mona Lisa is overrated as fuck. It's just a fucking woman with a half-smile, give me a break

>>4578401 et supra
We need instead to make a slight adjustment and compare Beethoven's 2nd with Beethoven's 2nd. On the one hand, I don't think Beethoven's 2nd was the supreme achievement that was his 6th, but it's still rather good. On the other hand, in Beethoven's 2nd Charles Grodin sort of phoned it in, but on the plus side of course are all those puppies.

>>4578413
Hah, okay. What's better, a cup or a clock? A frisbee or a tambourine?

>>4578425
Clock and frisbee, respectively.

>>4578338

Actually music is the only inherently abstract art form. All others revolve around communication of ideas outside of themselves, where music communicates only itself. Therefore, comparing music with a painting makes little sense. You can still do it, but your grounds would be fragile. Comparing a book with a movie isnt a problem. They both share enough elements that they can be translated from one to another seamlessly. An appropriate comparison would be a piece of music with an impressionist or expressionist painting.

>>4578425

Cup, i already have the time on my phone.
Tambourine, to have fun with a frisbee i need another person. I can have fun with a tambourine all by myself.

>>4578321
A Clockwork Orange was a fantastic film and a pretty OK book. The book gets pretty annoying sometimes, and the neolanguage could have been done better.

Still

>Lolita film better than Lolita

Nigger for fuck sake

>>4578358
>The Trial

Is it seriously better than the book? It's one of my favourite books, and I'm afraid it destroys it.

>>4578491
You have a clock on your phone.
This is silly. Look, nothing is objectively better than anything else - it can only be measured in how it is fit for a purpose. A clock is better than a cup for telling the time, and a cup is better than a clock for drinking tea from. Starship Troopers the book is really bad at being a film, and Starship Troopers the film is a poor book. The Mona Lisa is much nicer to look at than Beethoven's 5th, but the 5th sounds better.
It's meaningless to say
>X is better than Y
the statement needs to be qualified as
>X is better than Y at Z

The Dune book was terrible. I couldn't even get through the first 50 pages. But the movie was amazing.

>>4578168
>LotR
Oh come on be serious now

>>4578499
The ending is... odd.

>>4578485
The existence of lyrics and cover art makes you wrong. Normalfags are obsessed with lyrics and some super obscure Black Metal with no lyrics is still gonna affect you via coverart/song titles

>>4578485
Music isn't inherently abstract.
All art forms can be abstract and all art forms can be concrete.

>>4578038
no way

Drive.

Here's the book:
>He drove the rest of the way down to the pier, bore Bernie’s body to the edge of water and released it. From water we come. To water we return. The tide was going out. It lifted the body, carried it ever so gently away. City lights spackled the water.
>Afterwards Driver sat feeling the fine roar and throb of the Datsun around him.
>He drove. That was what he did. What he’d always do.
>Letting out the clutch, he pulled from beach parking onto the street, reentering the world here at its very edge, engine a purr beneath him, yellow moon above, hundreds upon hundreds of miles to go.
>Far from the end for Driver, this. In years to come, years before he went down at three a.m. on a clear, cool morning in a Tijuana bar, years before Manny Gilden turned his life into a movie, there’d be other killings, other bodies.
>Bernie Rose was the only one he ever mourned.

Forrest Gump. The book is negative, angsty boomer whining about "the man" keeping main character (which is a lot like the writer by his background) down.

The film is mediocre boomer self-congratulation filled with some boomer-perspective history lessons. Mediocre is better than "bad".

>>4578522
I'd say the opposite. The book was really sweet for me because it left a lot of the technology and terrain described dependent from reader's imagination.

>>4580565
damn, I loved the Driver movie but I had no idea it was a book. Is that really an excerpt? Sounds like garbage.

>>4580623
Yeah it's based on a book called Drive.

There's also a sequel book called Driven that came out in 2012.

>>4578306
I'll take the 5th.

>>4578517
How exactly did you arrive at the conclusion that we were speaking about objective values? Also, Beethoven's 5th is more interesting to watch (aka read) than looking at the Mona Lisa is. Starship Troopers the book would be a shittier movie than Starship Troopers the movie would be a book.

Harry Potter

Game of Thrones.
It's a series, not a movie, but whatever.

>>4578318
>>4578319
>>4578358
>>4580321

The LotR had a great story, but it didn't read well. The name drops and lore dumps were tiring, and at times the prose was so dull. Whether or not the movies are better is subjective, but they did trim the fat and present the story in a fairly well and faithful way given time constraints.

>>4583709

>faithful

Not really. Books are about Frodo and the Shire, movies are all about a retarded hero's-journeyfied version of Aragorn's story which is occasionally derailed by a clumsily "spiced-up" edition of Frodo's story almost totally robbed of weight by Wood's sappy performance. Basically exactly what you would expect from a Hollywood LotR, it is an action movie dragged out to the length of an epic. It doesn't miss the point as badly as, say, John Boorman's LotR script, but at lest that would have had a life of its own. Jackson's movies are just bad. Fellowship has its moments, and when we were all teenagers they looked cool enough, but I can hardly stand to rewatch them.

>>4578031
Requiem for a Dream

Children of Men. Not even close.

>>4578063


Summed up this thread perfectly.

>>4583732
Oh fuck. I waited more than twenty years for them to make movies of those overwritten fantasy books and they did them justice.

>>4578071
>movie omits Mercer, Buster Friendly, Kipple, Iran, The Magic Flute, and turns the opera house into a strip club
>superior
>mfw

>>4578389
Is that really what lel means?

>>4584029
>not knowing what lel means
I bet you didn't even know that "lulz" is a corrupted form of "lol" (laugh out loud)

>>4584022
>book has shit prose
>movie has amazing cinematography

>>4578358
>The Trial
Which one? I thought the Welles version was dreadful.

Apocalypse Now is significantly better than Heart of Darkness.

Then again, I'm one of those people that disliked HoD so it doesn't take much to beat it in my eyes.

>>4578031

But that's wrong. The novel is far superior to the movie.

>muh irony
>muh satire
>muh muh muh

It's the coward's way. The movie is a satire of American military and neocon politics. The novel wasn't a satire.

>best military sci-fi ever to be read

>>4584510
>The novel wasn't a satire
That's why it's terrible and the movie was brilliant though.

>>4585412


the director was so pluged into the matrix he couldent comprehend the possibility of heinleins sincerity. this is not a point in his favor obviously, because while the movie is indeed funny, it is also banal and myopic compared to the book.

>>4578358
>Apocalypse Now
>Better than Heart of Darkness
>Same themes

You're fucking retarded.

>>4585412
No man, he makes such a great convincing case for facism that's what I think people really enjoy about it. Like, the arguing for the death penalty, the tests of strength & courage to show one worthy of a voice in society are actually quite inspiring in a world where like today we are actually growing larger, a population generic, everyone replaceable and anonymous. Why not sort the good ones out?

Hey bros /tv/ here just another reason why movies are better than books.

>>4580565

AND A REAL HERO, REAL HUMAN BEING

>>4585456
Because that's the mentality of a 10th grader.

>>4584510
>>best military sci-fi ever to be rea
>muh magical power armour!
>nobody ever thought about IFVs!
>Psychics!
Yeah. no.

>>4585467
yes, but what a world man

>>4585459

>reading a book
>character is watching a movie in a theater

Eh I hate it when books do this shit, mention the character watching a movie, listening too music, it happens a lot in Murakami novels.

Pages just listing albums and or movies he's liked.

>>4585483
fuck that annoyed me a lot too. a lot especially in kafka on the shore, he couldnt stop talking about fucking prince and radiohead and mozart and shit

>>4585495

I just hate it when a medium mentions other mediums, it just makes me want to go and watch that movie or listen to that album.

Same goes for films when they mention books or music.

But in books I just hate it when they basically just list whatever bands they are into or films they are into.

I'm reading South of the Border and it's just Murakami listing a bunch of old classical music or jazz music I've never heard of.

>>4585512

It worked out OK in A Clockwork Orange the film because you can use music and mix it with visual and it looks good, but not in books. In books it just doesn't have the same appeal.

>>4585520

For instance, when Alex in the book got home and was listening to classical music, that scene in the book was nothing compared to how it was done in the film.

In the book that scene was boring as shit but in the film it was one of the best scenes.

>>4585483
i really like in the unconsoled where he's watching 2001, only the details of the movie it describes are completely wrong, like at one point he mentions it's the bit where clint eastwood is dismantling HAL with a screwdriver

>>4578071
nope

>>4585524

Are you kidding, the movie is shit compared to the book. That movie has not aged well. Movies rarely do age well, but the Kubrick A Clockwork Orange is trivial.

>>4578088
you and me beth, frand

>>4578425
cup, tambourine. fuck time and students

>>4585443
No, the movie is a clear satire of the book. Shitty education producing gung-ho teenagers with flies in their eyes, unnecessary people are sent to die in make-believe wars with space bugs, public values determined by propaganda. The movie is about the reality behind Heinlein's wet political dreams. It is in no way less thought through than the book, which doesn't really say much anyway.

Any book this man has made into a movie

inkheart!

>>4580565
That's absolute trash. Is this really from the book?

>>4578031
I love that movie so much :')

>>4587413
>lolita
fuck no

>>4587413
That reminds me that I need to get around to watching Barry Lyndon.

>>4587527
Yeah, but I did hear that even Kubrick disowned that movie. May be wrong.

>>4584073
I thought lel was a corrupted lol too.

come on guys

>>4587591
John Carpenter is amazing, totally underrated director/composer.

>>4587413
A Clockwork Orange and The Shining were better books

I really liked Eyes Wide Shut but I haven't read Traumnovelle so I can't judge.

>>4587599
The Thing is my favorite movie of all time

Flatland.
That book was crap. The movie was too, but somewhat less.
I'd say Flatterland would have been a better movie, but what it contains is difficult to show without words and diagrams.

>>4587603
I'd say Halloween would be my favourite from him, The Thing being a close second.

Prince of Darkness and They Live are great as well.

The Fog is the only film of his that I've actually disliked.

>>4587599
The Thing is the only movie of his I think is any good :s
Even They Live wastes it's potentially interesting premise on a completely mediocre story

>>4587603
bro-tier confirmed

Lel >>4578422

>>4578129
Because it was written like a gay pschopaths fairy tale in 3 days for drug money
>>4578321
Faggot hipster

The Descendants.

Matt King in the book is a pompous asshole.

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
Atonement (although McEwan is still one of my favourite modern British writers)

>>4583235
Agreed. The books are a bit verbose.

LOTR

and Im dead serious now

>>4586081
So you never read the book. Because Military service is openly discouraged in Heinlan's novel. In fact, when Rico goes to enlist, he's confronted with two crippled veterans who's very job is to discourage those who nothing about the realities of war from enlisting. Johnny nearly berks out before he finds his resolve. Not to mention that the infantry has a massive dropout rate, not every serviceman is infantry, most work in support units and branches, only the elite finish infantry training.

I find most haters are butthurt about the politics because it sows a serene world that doesn't involve liberal dick sucking in it

I think so

>>4578038
I agree.

It works better as a movie. The book just runs out of steam.

>>4589423
The only part of that movie I liked was Mizuhara Kiko, because she's so damn gorgeous.

>>4587614
Apparently They Live is intentionally silly?

>this scene is only pretending to be retarded!

But, eh.

>They Live
shoestring budget, memorable social commentary, silly action scenes.

>The Matrix:
budget: $63 million, some social commentary, memorable action scenes

>Inception:
budget: $160 million, no attempt at social commentary, silly action scenes.

for me 'The Prestige' is the ultimate example. I got way into that movie for a while after it came out. The book is fucking god-awful. It actually made me appreciate Nolan more that he was able to take the premise of the book and turn it into something that is so much better.

also, Jurassic Park. Chrichton is so fucking bad

>>4589530
Escape From New York>The Thing>Halloween>They Live>Escape From LA>Ghosts of Mars

I feel like a pleb because I still haven't gotten around to watching his other films

satantango

>>4578425
Which frisbee? Which tambourine?