Some of us are under the delusion that the Universe (aka the movie studio) that optioned the book is speaking to us directly when movies are made of our favorite books. We think they get it when we our favorite characters’ lives flickering to life in front of us on a 50 foot screen. When we finally head to our neighborhood googleplex we leave disappointed, angry and, sometimes, tormented.
Today, we’re gonna hip you to some movies that were actually better than the book. Books like “The Lincoln Lawyer” (trailer below) or Steven King’s “The Body” aka “Stand By Me.”
Keep on reading these here words to find out what did or didn’t let the air out of your souffle.
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“The Body”, a novella published in 1982 by Steven King, was the original title of “Stand By Me,” a 1986 film made by Rob Reiner. Told in the first person, the story is about four friends who discover, one summer, that their town will not offer them a future. They discover this after setting off to find the body of a missing kid from their neck of the woods. A few things changed in the film version, including the location and the year the story was told.
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Author Philip K. Dick said that Ridley Scott did an awesome job with “Blade Runner,” the film version of his 1968 sci-fi novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and that the cities rendered on celluloid were exactly what he envisioned while writing the book. Scott was rumored to have said that he never read the book.
Set in 2019 in a smog-ridden and wet Los Angeles the story is about an android hunter in pursuit of terrorists automatons and who want freedom and independence after they are threatened with extinction. Along the way the detective, played by Harrison Ford, falls in love with his prey.
Blade Runner has been released, re-edited, re-released, re-re-edited countless times. Another, newer version of the film has just been optioned.
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Originally a book about the evolution of football and how Lawrence Taylor changed the game, “The Blindside: Evolution Of A Game” by Michael Lewis, published in 2006, became much more when it was turned into an Oscar winning film starring Sandra Bullock in 2009. The book was split into two sections, one featuring Taylor and another featuring Michael Oher, an offensive linesman for the Baltimore Ravens who, as a kid, was adopted by wealthy family after escaping poverty.
