Films versus Books

The other day Stephen Fry was tweeting about his guest role in one episode of 'Bones' and I was looking forward to seeing it sometime in the future the new series are not on freeview channels. To my surprise I saw it was on Sky 3 on Friday. It was good to see and Stephen was good. The episode got me thinking about how different the series is from the books by Kathy Reiches. The only thing that is common to the books is the name Temperance Brennan and her profession as a forensic anthropologist. Other than that the TV series is totally different. If I had not read the books I would still like the series as the story lines are good. I definitely like Booth and the team is eccentric too.

For those of you who have not read the books I would suggest reading them. Totally different and Tempe is a much more human and down to earth person. She generally works alone in the lab and with the police rather than the FBI. She is a divorced, recovering alcoholic with a daughter who is in college in the last book. She is tenacious and thorough in her work and caring about her friends. Many of her 'cases' are in Montreal where she works part of the year. The books I find are always more exciting as there is so much more one can imagine. The concrete pictures on the film do not allow you to imagine the happenings in people's lives as one can from descriptions in a book. In fact every time I read a book (generally I read the books again and again over the years) I can find new things to concentrate on, imagine things differently, may pick up things I missed the last time for often I can get hasty and skim over the detailed descriptions. This makes reading the same book exciting and different every time.

While I agree that films might reach more people than books I still feel that it is better to read the book. If one sees the film before reading the book it is not so bad but the other way round and I am generally disappointed. I am looking for the things that intrigued me and fired my imagination but they seemed to have been totally missed in the movie. I have read most of the Agatha Christie books (last week it was a celebrations of her crime writing) which are fairly well translated into the films and TV series. I am happy seeing the movies over and over again too. I must say that with authors like Colin Dexter I have not read many books but just seen Inspector Morse. Have read some of Ruth Randell and P D James but not seen many episodes of the books I read.

What about the James Bond films and books? I have read all the books and again some things that are in the book would, I guess, be hard to film and tend to get omitted. But I have enjoyed both the books and movies. Maybe what the books portray are total make believe worlds and so the characters can do things which might not be entirely feasible in reality. So for films I guess one has to work out what can be realistically achieved and is within human capabilities. As my favorite reading includes thrillers, crime and murder mysteries it would be difficult to be exact and true to the book. But I think same applies to most films from books, be it something like the Bourne series or the Harry Potter movies. Books always seem larger than life. I have yet to find a film as more gripping than a book. Take Da Vincie Code as another example. The movie is good albeit a bit dark and not so smooth. Having read the book I could make the links between different parts and follow the plot in a much clearer manner.

Well my view is only from a fairly small list of books and their movies as am sure there are many many examples. Also other people might have a totally opposing view. For some might finding reading tedious and so enjoy the visual aspect more. I was first aware of this difference when I read the book Coma by Robin Cook and then saw the film on TV. After than whenever there was a book and a film (in the themes that I liked) I tended to read the book and film and over time the opinion that books are better than films has become firmly entrenched. Maybe One of these days I will do short blogs on the differences between the books and films of my choice.