/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11690776]

Are books (always) the best medium? Is their a case when movies are better? (name an example)

[Anonymous No.11690784]

Every Kubrick except Lolita

[Anonymous No.11690791]

>>11690776
Film is a good way of escaping the language trap, e.g. Koyaanisqatsi

[Anonymous No.11690794]

>>11690776
Lynch’s Dune

[Anonymous No.11690796]

>>11690776
Forrest Gump

[Anonymous No.11690798]

>>11690776
The Shining

[Anonymous No.11690799]

If you direct a film with full knowledge and understanding of what makes a film good, you will do a great film, same as how you would write a great book by knowing what makes for a good literary work. Every artistic medium has entirely different merits and flaws, different ways of doing things, and none are inherently better or worse than the other.

Except video games. Video games are inherently shit.

[Anonymous No.11690801]

>>11690776
fight club

[Anonymous No.11690812]

>>11690776
Awful books can make great films because they often lack the psychological and conceptual sophistication normally found in great books that would almost necessarily become lost in translation from word to image. Where there's nothing to be lost in the first place, there's no foul.

[Anonymous No.11690820]

>>11690776
Barry Lyndon
Clockwork Orange
LOTR Trilogy
No Country for Old Men

[Anonymous No.11690821]

>>11690799
The Metro 2033 game is better than the book

[Anonymous No.11690826]

>>11690821
It only manages that because the book is garbage.

[Anonymous No.11690836]

>>11690821
>>11690826
Both are pretty good, but I'd say the book is better for the atmosphere and supernatural stuff.

[Anonymous No.11690840]

>>11690794
No.
>>11690812
See the Hunger Games. While certainly not great movies, they were okay movies and barely removed anything from the books because the books were so barren and simplistic that they were essentially screenplays.
>>11690784
>>11690798
>>11690820
Stop echoing Kubrick over and over. iirc, he stated that he only made movies out of bad books because he knew that he could never effectively translate a good book to a good movie. This implies that the best movies are not as good as the best books, even if the best movies are better than the worst books.

[Anonymous No.11690857]

>>11690840
Do you have a source for that Kubrick quote?

[Anonymous No.11690866]

>>11690799
Video games are not art. Comparing them to art is retarded. Might as well say football is a shitty art form too.

[Anonymous No.11690876]

>>11690857
I don't really care enough to Google it. If you care enough, feel free to Google it.

[Anonymous No.11690898]

I just think books are more fun to read than movies are to watch. Everything is already done for you in a movie. Reading requires a little more involvement in that you have to imagine the scene and the characters yourself.

[Anonymous No.11690924]

>>11690898
Real kino is an entirely different thing to experience than just flicks or trash movies. I disagree that everything is already done for the viewer with a movie. You would be right generally, as the majority of movies are trash, but there are some films that are genuine art. 2001 is a good example.

[Anonymous No.11691178]

>>11690799

I think videogames are too varied to be broadly classified.

Some games are more like pseudo-interactive movies, and some are just a gameplay loop.

I wouldn't say that either Life is Strange or CoD are art, but I would say that LiS is more art than CoD, if you know what I mean.

[Anonymous No.11691181]

Stalker

[Anonymous No.11691244]

>>11690776
No, video games are better. Instead of reading Nietzsche play Xenosaga I and III, same themes and messages delivered more effectively.

[Anonymous No.11691315]

>>11690776
Master and Commander

[Anonymous No.11691366]

the best movies-based-upon-a-book can only hope to distill the full truth found in the source material
books will always be more comprehensive than movies.

[Anonymous No.11691391]

>>11690801
>fight club
Correct.

[Anonymous No.11691406]

>>11690876
>Kubrick is bad becuase [fact]
>where did you find [fact]?
>the burden of proof is not on me dumbass
Truly an intellectual

[Anonymous No.11691422]

>>11690776
Captain's Courageous the 1930s movie was much better than Kipling's book.
And The 39 Steps Hitchcock movie was better than John Buchan's book.

[Anonymous No.11691427]

>>11691366

I think that's mostly the issue, is that movies cut out parts of the book, and if the book is any good, every part is important. The movie is just the book, but less.

The same could be true in reverse, though. A book adaptation of a movie might skim over some details, or have to make them up for length, something else.

I'd say each medium has it's own merits and flaws, and that an adaptation of anything is worse than the original, if the original was ever worth anything in the first place.

[Anonymous No.11691477]

When it comes to story telling. Then people go on and on about how books are an outdated medium, and then I chime in

‘Well, if you don’t read any non-fiction’.

Then the pseudo shut the fuck up about books going away. There is no faster way to convey that large amount of information, and there never will be

[Anonymous No.11691535]

>>11690776
>Is their a case when movies are better?
Gone with The Wind
The Godfather
Forrest Gump
Rosemary's Baby is a semi-direct adaptation, but is good as the book. The only changes are some missing scenes that couldn't not be adapted due time restraints.

[Anonymous No.11691555]

>>11690776
Good movie adaptations have to be pretty heretical to be a good movie in their own right. So I don't think textual comparisons are worth much. One thing we can see is that genre films are often much more impactful than the books (The Shining, Stalker, Blade Runner).

[Anonymous No.11691561]

>>11690791
That movie is great.

>When the end credits shouted out to Ellul and Debord

[Anonymous No.11691578]

All kubrick's
>>11690840
Autism.

[Anonymous No.11691590]

>>11691477
>non-fiction
>storytelling
?

Also,
>There is no faster way to convey that large amount of information, and there never will be
Soon we can upload data directly into our brains, in just a few seconds. Beat that, bookfags.

[Anonymous No.11691613]

>>11690776
Psycho

[Anonymous No.11691638]

>>11691613

The best thing about that movie was not needing to read the product monologues. Several pages of consumer information read to you over visual stimuli is so much better.

[Anonymous No.11691743]

>>11691244
What about II? Im not familiar with the franchise other than blade

[Anonymous No.11691758]

>>11690776
Jaws

[Anonymous No.11691769]

>>11691590
That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Nothing even remotely significant technologically has happened in the last three years to make that feasible.

We have gone forward significantly in the last year or so as a human race, but morally not technologically.

[Anonymous No.11691786]

>>11691477
Tell me the best non fic stores you have read, sound interesting.

[Anonymous No.11691808]

>>11691769
>human race

[Anonymous No.11691811]

>>11690840
That is not the question Dumb ass, its if the book is always the best medium and Kubrick clearly shows you that its not.

[Anonymous No.11691820]

>>11690794

[Anonymous No.11691847]

>>11690898
In the case of The Shining, you're missing out. The movie is far more nuanced, terrifying, and haunting than its source material.

[Anonymous No.11691850]

>>11690799
Video games are shit when they try to be something other than games.

"muh gaymes r art!" faggots have been ruining vidya for almost two decades now.

[Anonymous No.11691875]

Roadside Picnic is great but Stalker is literally Kino

[Anonymous No.11691900]

>>11691875
Comic version is even better.

[Anonymous No.11691928]

>>11691769
>We have gone forward significantly in the last year or so as a human race, but morally not technologically.
Would you elaborate on what this is supposed to mean?

[Anonymous No.11691943]

Literature does not have the interactivity of games which can reveal in the process of playing the psychological makeup of someone's character, though literature does provide a mirror of sorts to reflect upon one's self.
Literature is not better than the visual arts for conveying pure imagery, as they are not placed in the filter of language, though literature (writing) can illuminate the thoughts felt from imagery in a deeply understandable way.
Literature, even in regards to poetry, cannot convey the harmonious pluck of a harp, the synthetic heartbeat of a drum, the jagged youth-in-sound of a guitar, though through knowledge of sound and its effect upon literature may give writing a musical quality.

All mediums must be understood by their capabilities to in order to truly excel in their usage; to imitate the fluidity of paint in pencil with the same understanding of a paintbrush is to deny the pencil itself.

[Anonymous No.11691944]

>>11691928
It means we're okay with trans people now.

[Anonymous No.11691948]

>>11691944
So what's next?

[Anonymous No.11691950]

The Martian

[Anonymous No.11691966]

>>11691948
Agefluids.

[Anonymous No.11691977]

>>11691966
n-nani?!

[Anonymous No.11692018]

>>11691366
The best movies-based-upon-a-book not trying to say what the book said in the first place and are instead independent works. They're not distilling, they're creating something new, they almost always butcher the story, add as much as they take away, focus on something that the book barely touches upon, etc.

[Anonymous No.11692035]

>>11690776
Drive

[Anonymous No.11692187]

>>11690857
I don't think he ever said that. The coauthor of The Shining's script did state something close, although nothing as radical as Kubrick only wishing to adapt bad books.

>[Kubrick] always said that it was better to adapt a book rather than write an original screenplay, and that you should choose a work that isn't a masterpiece so you can improve on it. Which is what he's always done, except with Lolita.
>Diane Johnson, as quoted in Kubrick : The Definitive Edition (1980) by Michel Ciment, p. 293

[Anonymous No.11692275]

>>11691406
I didn't say Kubrick was bad.

[Anonymous No.11692375]

Prose based book never do good as movies because you are losing the thing that made them good in the first place. If anything it's creating a different work of art entirely/

[Anonymous No.11692390]

One thing I think a movie can to better than a book is some subtle things in the background or symbols and references
In a book you have to describe all of this which deletes all subtelty

[Anonymous No.11692707]

thing about movies and games is they're a business. it's about making money. however this does not dismiss the art involved. there is no reason actors get paid millions besides business.

[Anonymous No.11692752]

>>11690840
That's not the implication at all. The implication is that there are certain features of books as a medium that can't be translated to other media. Imagine trying to make a novel out of a Tarkovsky film, for example.

[Anonymous No.11692779]

The gay romance movie Desert Hearts is infinitely better than the book. The book crams a bunch of feminist talking points in, even during a fucking sex scene, which absolutely ruins the story. Romance books are almost all garbage, but romance movies can be very good. It's weird.

[Anonymous No.11692903]

>>11690821
When I think of Metro 2033 it's spooky stuff from the book. Bourbon's death, the weird shit at the Kremlin station, and the red star.

When I think of the game it's just faint images of a mindless shooter sending hordes of those big rat dog things at me. It was ok.

[Anonymous No.11693145]

Movies do a much better job when the scenery is important and not important at the same time.

Pic related is a great example of this the environment has nothing to do with the story and is never really referenced at all. However it sets the tone for the whole thing and is almost a character in its own right.

I also love feature length documentaries and watching them on the big screen and I always make an effort to watch a few at the local film festival each year.

[Anonymous No.11693211]

>>11691943
stop