Fight Club. Even the author preferred some of the changes made for the movie.
The reveal for example.
Been a while since I read the book, and the reveal was similar, but a lot better in the movie
The Stargate movie was good, but SG-1 far surpassed it.
Indeed!
Agreed
Ti’u
Starship Troopers - the book was extremely meh - the movie is excellent (and very relevant to modern day).
Clue - an excellent movie based off a fucking boardgame… ditto for Barbie now as well!
Mage the Acension is a TTRPG love letter to Ars Magicka and it blows it out of the water.
Paul Verhoeven really upped the ante on that one.
How would Hannah Arendt be relevant here? I read a short blurb about her philosophy especially in regards to authority but I haven’t seen starship troopers
A hexbear or lemmygrad user could better explain this one, but its a deep-cut satirical comment on how nations that market themselves as “free” (but aren’t), promote philosophies that group and demonize all their enemies into a single camp, and prop up writers like Arendt, who was one of the main ideological peddlers of western moral supremacy during the cold war.
Losurdo has a lot of good articles on this and Arendt specificaly, and also Gabriel Rockhill has some good articles about this too.
Ahhh, thank you. I’ll give that link a read
No probs! I also recorded that one recently as an audiobook here. torrent link is also there.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Im subbed to your youtube lol, thanks for the think though
I recently started reading Eichmann In Jerusalem, because I was aware it introduced the phrase “banality of evil” and always think of that in moral/ethical discussions about the real world (versus hypotheticals), and was immediately struck by how uncritical she was of zionism when it crops up in her reporting/writing. It’s almost like just a quirk of some of the heads of state that is used to explain their politics, rather than anything with more sinister implications.
Perhaps this comes from some immature SJW-ish ideal that an author should always negatively represent harmful ideas—or maybe she does later and I’m just impatient—but it still strikes me as ironic that in the seminal work on The Banality of Evil, genocidal colonialism is treated as, well, banal.
Helldivers 2 is heavily inspired by the movie… And I would say it’s better than it.
PS: Mage - The Ascension ♥️
While I like the theme etc. of Helldivers 2, I do wish they went a bit further than that. This kind of satire is best when it forces small bits of unease on the audience, like the ending of Starship Troopers - “it feels fear!”, and everyone celebrates. There are bits and pieces surrounding the gameplay loop (e.g. something like “never talk to the enemy, destroy them for democracy”, forgot the exact line), but it’s rare enough to be easy to ignore.
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Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt
Trent Reznor even said it’s no longer his (Trent’s) song
I don’t know what Reznor and Cash’s relationship was, but that has to feel so surreal for Reznor. You never see older artists cover newer ones in general, let alone such a legendary country artist cover a young alternative rock artist. If I were Reznor, that would be the thing that lets me die happy.
Yeah he really brings feeling to this song
I had never heard Trent Reznor’s original or Johnny Cash’s cover so thank you for mentioning it. What an incredible music video!
Arcane, the animated Netflix show that was based on League of Legends.
TBF that was a low bar to clear. They just had to make sure the show was better than a bunch of screaming children.
However it is truly fantastic
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The Mist
That ending was one of the most brilliant gut-punches in film history. Stephen King himself said he wished he had written it.
Came here looking for this.
Controversial, but Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote great stories, but his writing style always seemed kind of lackluster.
I encourage you not to view him as an author but as an imaginative creator confined by language.
Also a racist
I can’t fault him for any of his depth and character building and poetry and storytelling and descriptive environments it was all very thorough and for the right person wonderful. I think the movies did a giant justice to making his work accessible. There are a lot of people out there that can’t manage to make their way through his poetry sections. And you can’t not read the poetry sections because there’s definitely content in there you need.
I came to this thread expecting to see this, and even with that expectation it makes me sad to see; to me the books are unarguably superior, to a large degree because Tolkien is such an excellent writer. I’d encourage anyone who’s bounced off the books a time or two to go back to them and try reading them aloud, even quietly to yourself: even though it’s prose, the text has meter and flow almost as strong as poetry. It’s undeniably a slow read, but it’s just such a beautiful one that the films, fun as they are, don’t hold up.
Plus, Jackson’s Two Towers is garbage.
It being better when read aloud actually nails what I dislike about it and, far more so, The Hobbit. They read like they were written to be told as tales around a fire, not to be read. So they don’t work particularly well as books that you read quietly to yourself (imo, obviously).
This was mine, but I’m assuming you weren’t referring to the BBC radio play, which is the best version of LotR ever made. The films had major distortions on the themes of the story and completely unbelievable characterization that destroyed all suspension of disbelief.
Sure, the CG was nice eye candy… but Gandalf getting into a shouting match with Elrond? Really? We’re okay with that?
Plus, skipping the correct ending of Frodo and Sam coming back to the Shire in industrialized dystopia missed key parts of their character growth and Tolkien’s anti-industrial themes.
And the massive over-focus on a love story that was barely relevant in the story? And a half hour epilogue of useless wide shots showing how amazing the wedding was and how everyone is doing so great now that they won? What a waste of time. They skipped one of the best parts of the book for that shit.
I could go on if I had watched the films more than twice and could recall all the other huge problems.
The books don’t hold up, either. Ain’t nobody got time to read 3-page info dumps of dense descriptive writing about plot-irrelevant details, or dense blocks of ancient history that demolishes any semblance of pacing left over.
He founded a lot of tropes of fantasy, so I know why he included all those descriptive details, but it just doesn’t hold up. Elf, big tree house, got it. You’ve got me for two paragraphs to fill in the descriptive details, but then let’s move on with the plot, tyvm.
If you’re a fan of LotR, give the 13-hour BBC radio play a listen. And of you’ve watched/listened to/read all three and disagree with me, I’d love to hear why (out of interest). Full disclosure: you probably won’t convince me, but I’m still waiting to hear someone who knows the source material justifying why the movies are so adored.
The Muppet Christmas Carol
I wasn’t sure what the right answer to this question would be until I saw it.
Only version to actually feature a Dickens character that acts as a narrator. It just works better even if the narrator is Gonzo
Pretty much everyone who’s discussed it agrees The Godfather (film) blows the Puzo novel it adapted away.
Runner up is Adaptation, an adaptation of the novel The Orchid Thief that expands its scope significantly.
Adaptation was one of those movies I watched and then caught myself thinking about it through the year…a very well done movie.
The movies made me want to read the book. I still haven’t yet though.
I still get chills when I hear “you’re nothing to me now, Fredo.”
The Godfather book has a lot of great character nuances but it also has a subplot of Sonny’s enormous dong being the only thing that could satisfy his wife’s bridesmaid’s enormous vagina.
The sequel to Trump screwing Stormy Daniels…Stormy Daniels screwing Trump.
The Princess Bride was a pretty good book but an amazing movie.
One thing that always stuck out to me about the book is the introduction of certain editions. The author writes about himself researching the history of the country the story takes place in and describes it as real, saying he took his son to a museum with Inigo’s sword and everything.
I was Googling furiously when I read it because I was so confused. I was astounded that the place (and people) was “real”. It took a bit of research to find that the author just does this bit and hasn’t let it go since he wrote the book
I’m still so charmed that he tricked me. It made reading the book that much sillier, for me
I had a teacher that worked for the publisher and talked about how they’d have a series of responses for people who wrote in for the part of the book where the author says he wrote his own fanfiction scene and to write in if you wanted it.
Like maybe the first time you write in they’d respond that they couldn’t provide it because they were fighting the Morgenstern estate over IP release to provide the material, etc.
So people never would get the pages, but could have gotten a number of different replies furthering the illusion.
I have a similar story from a different medium:
Frank Zappa has an album called Francesco Zappa. On the back of the sleeve, Frank describes finding out about a distant relative who composed and played music during the 18th century. After telling some friends about it, I got to thinking that Frank had invented another character (á la Ruben and the Jets), because that’s the kind of thing he would do, and felt very foolish for repeating this information uncritically.
Years later I looked the album up on Wikipedia, and it turns out Francesco Zappa was a real musician in the 18th century (who was not actually directly related to Frank).
He got me twice with one album.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), at the time of its release, was based on a short story called The Sentinel by Arthur C Clarke. In that story, the roots of the Tycho Monolith plot segment of 2001 of is sketched out, and then expanded as both a screenplay and a full-length novel.
Oh, and then I guess it inspired Bowie’s single, Major Thom
Ill be killed for this but…Lord of the rings. Like, im sorry book purists but even after reading the books twice. Tolkien, is and always will be, THE high fantasy author, the one who basically made things we take for granted today. But the music from Howard Shore. So many scenes like from how fellowship began, to DEEEAAAATTTTHHH to Sam just being the broest bro to ever exist. I dont mind all of the cuts and changes they did, i happily return to the movies all year every year, the books? not so much.
The movies are awesome, but as a bookworm I would rather say they’re doing justice to their source material. I’m rereading more than rewatching, but I guess I’m not normal (And no worries, we book purists don’t kill people who have actually read the book)
I am an avid reader of books, and not a movie buff, but I stand on this hill with you. The LOTR movies are better than the books.
Jimi Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower
In 1995, Dylan described his reaction to hearing Hendrix’s version: “It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn’t think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day.”
heres a controversial opinion: The American Office vs the UK Office.
While I respect the original, Gervais’ external antics and the much meaner, darker humor just don’t create as good a comedy vehicle that enables the viewer to laugh and have fun and enjoy themselves watching the show
On that note, wasn’t Whose Line is it Anyway originally British? Because Drew Carey’s was peak!
Huh, so it is! Growing up in the UK, the US version seemed to be on more, and I’d assumed that that was the original.
That’s funny. Growing up in the US, Comedy Central would run marathons of the original Whose Line so I ended up watching the UK version more than the US one.
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There’s a certain chemistry between Ryan, Colin, and Drew that just cannot be replicated
Can’t forget Wayne!
The American office is watered down drivel.
Agree to disagree - to me the Uk office was a Gervais vehicle with the Tim/Dawn romance Christmas special episode as a nice bonus and Gareth as an occasional funny victim of his own hubris. Keith and Finchy having a couple of good scenes. Neil, Donna, Rachel, Jennifer, Jamie, Ralph… all very forgettable.
In the US office, as mentioned, I think its a well rounded ensemble comedy where you can feel it’s a collab of a writers room and a complicit cast. Everyone has their favorite moments from pretty much any character…
In the early 2000s I probably would’ve liked the UK office more because I was an edgy teen. 25 years later and after an 8 year run, 200 episodes vs 14 - I feel like I’d much rather turn on the US one if I wanted a laugh.
I guess it depends if you want light entertainment or groundbreaking comedy.
