Do you usually prefer books or movies?

Answer 1

Books.

Invariably the experience of reading the novel is broader, richer, more detailed, etc. I feel like I know the characters in a book, because it has opportunity to make them well-rounded and real.

A movie has only a couple of hours and is limited to what the audience can see and hear. It's difficult to show the audience anything else without it seeming forced, like a character telling another character about his tragic past or his fantasies.

A novel has all the time it wants, and can share thought, emotion, experience, the past, hopes and dreams, fantasy, and more, in a way that seems consistent with characters who would not tell a living soul some of those secrets.

Answer 2

Books.

Answer 3

Books.

Answer 4

Personally I cannot get enough of reading and although I seldom read the same book twice and perhaps even the same author twice I much prefer to read - although I do follow up at times with the movie of the book and opinions differ from movie to movie - although on the whole the book often outshines the movie - and when I see a movie which I have not read the book first I enjoy the movie - sounds complicated but rather easy for me.

Answer 5

If there is a book that the movie is based on...the book everytime. A book can explain so much more detail than a movie, and because most movies screenplays are whittled and retooled there are usually big chunks of the story missing or rewritten that work well for on screen but not so well in the book. And sometime the casting director chooses a person so wrong for the role you can't help but wonder what they were thinking. (Two examples come to mind...Audrey Hepburn in Bloodline and Wesley Snipes in Rising Sun)

Answer 6

It really depends.

There are some books that have great stories but are poorly constructed. Then someone comes along and makes a film that distills it down to what it ought to have been. An excellent example of that, to my mind, is The Magic Christian. Terry Sothern had a great idea. Thakery would have danced in the streets for joy, had he thought of it. Sothern's gift, however, was for the broad concept, not execution. The book is a muddled mess of semi-literate goo. Then along came the film. A talented team of writers took the gems out of the book, organized them better, and connected up the dots. Then Peter Sellars was cast in the lead and some of Britain's greatest comic talents of the time took smaller roles. Result? A film that is far, far better than the source material.

There are other cases, however, where the book is more or less used for its title and one or two character names and the story is completely gutted at the expense of any semblance of artistic merit or authorial intent. These are no good to anyone. All subtlety is lost, all meaning stripped. I won't name names, but we all know several of these films having seen favorite books subjected to this treatment.

Then there's a third possiblity, which I have seen successfully done several times; it's possible to have a film which works as a companion piece to the book. Events or characters may be excised or conflated for the purpose of fitting the story into that two to three hour slot, emphasis may be reorganized to fit the more visual medium, but the soul of the book is left intact. My favorite examples of this form are The Princess Bride and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, both of which give visual and auditory texture while keeping firmly to the spirit of the source materials. These are the cases where you can enjoy whichever medium is better for your current mood, but you'll keep the other available, too.

In short, it really depends on the book and on the film made of it. The vast majority of films of books, I think, fall somewhere in the second category, but when you find one from category one or category three, it's a wonderful feeling.

Answer 7

I prefer the books because It does not leave out little details, like in the movies. When you read a book it is complete and how the author really wanted it to be. There are no missing parts.

Answer 8

A book is better, at least in my opinion. It gives better details and sometimes you understand it more than you understand a movie. i personally love movies, but i love books too, i really like to read the book first and picture them in my mind, then when you see the movie it's like you have a big moving picture book and you're seeing what happened in the book. i have to say that i was dissapointed in a movie or two where they left big parts of the book out, and whoever saw the movie and never read the book coudn't see exactly what happened and sometimes it can take a while figuring out what happened there. so i think books are better.

Answer 9

It depends. If I read the book first, the movie never seems to be as good. If I watch the movie first, I have a hard time staying into the book. Most generally, I'd have to say books are better.

Answer 10

Almost every time books. But it depends majorly on whether the book or the film was made first; I find that if a book is made about a movie then the movie is better (eg, they should NEVER have made a book of pirates of the caribbean) and if a movie is made about a book the book is better. But yeah, basically books.