Should some books be made into movies?

[Andrew Meechan]

When I heard that Looking For Alaska was permanently on hold I was kind of happy about because unlike books along the lines of Happy Potter I was more attached to the idea of the characters in that book rather than the characters them self and no actor or director could ever reproduce MY Alaska Young, or MY Pudge so on screen they would just feel like phonies (Sorry, I couldn't resist)

I had similar thoughts about Catcher in the Rye and that would also just make a really bad one.

But yea. I was wondering what everyone else thought about this and if you had any books you wouldn't want adapted.

[Abreo]

Should some books be made into movies? Dude, Stanley Kubrick is the greatest director of all time and all the movies I've seen by him were based on books. He actually is my go to director to prove the whole "the movie is never better than the book theory" because I definitely preferred the movie versions of A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. You could try to argue that Stanley Kubrick should have just made up his own stories but seeing as the dude pretty much invented everything cool about pop-culture by himself I'm glad things went down as they did. 

Movies have a lot going for them that books don't. In particular music and visuals. I know some people like to imagine everything while they're reading the books but you can't imagine this. 

Well I guess you can imagine it but the author can't effectively write it. You have to see it and you have to hear it. A lot of movies don't effectively utilize all the tools their given but neither do most books. It's an absolute guarantee that almost everything in any art form sucks. However if someone reads a book and can figure out how to use the tools that movies have and books don't to tell the story than it's cool for them to make it into a movie. Maybe I'm biased because I think in general movies and tv shows are better formats for telling stories than books (which are better for recording information and ideas) but I'm all for adaptation. 

Speaking of adaptation sometimes adaptations of books use books to tell stories that are completely fucking different and weird. 

Charlie Kaufman was hired to adapt a book with no real story so he freaked out and wrote a movie about him adapting the book into a movie. It's weirdly good. 

[blue_dreamer]

I kind of agree with you Andrew.

I do not have a great knowledge of film-making or books so I may not go into as much depth as some, so here's my tuppence worth. (yes, I'm a Brit)

While I like films and new media, I am more of a fan of origional story-telling. Stories written as novels could well work in other forms of media, however it is the 'artefact' of the story as a book that helps make my mind up as to how well I like the story.

I think sometimes stories are just turned into movies for the sake of it and it can really devalue the creativity of a story if much abstract detail and relationship depths are left out. Take HP for example. One of the really  stellar things about what made it so Awesome was JKR's awesome descriptions and narrative writing which, to me at least, just got lost in the film.

At the moment, I am admiring my three lovely copies of Phillipa Gregory's 'The Cousins' War' series. Undoubtedly it will someday get made into a motion picture, and I will be curious to see what it made of it. Yet at the moment I love them in their purest, original form: the book.

Now as yet I haven't read any of those books 'of' films or TV serieses. I believe I have witnessed the story in the way it was origionally intended to be portrayed. Reading the books of a story I have already seen would be like re-reading a book. Now new experience would be gained in the way reading a novel for the first time broadens your literary scope.

At the end of the day we all rightly have our own opinions on these matters: films and books are different forms of media and ought to be critisied as such. More often than not these days the book comes before the film.

[Grace]

I think should is a pretty strong word i this context. Could is a better one. Some books could not be made into good movies. Books, for instance, that mostly revolve around the mental and emotional development of a character. Things like that rarely can be made understandable without narration, and I find narration in movies to be annoying most of the time. So some books, in my opinion, can become really great movies. The lord of the rings, for instance, made really great movies, because they could have been great movies on their own, they can exist without the book. (Not that they should.) I believe, if the effort was made, than Artemis Fowl could be really good movies, or a mini series. The Hunger Games made a good movie, as did the Narnia movies. Because in the end I believe that the movie is just that. When you go to the theater or pop in a DVD, you are watching the movie, not reading the book, and they should not be held in equal hands.