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.”
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.
Battlestar Galactica (2003) -Originally a mini-seris to pay homage to the original idea through the lens of current events exploded into to what is my favorite show to ever be on television. Informing so much of what TV sci-fi could be after it.
I’d say the reboot falls apart about 2/3 of the way through. The last cylon reveals felt very Lost/Lindelof where they’d painted themselves into a corner and hadn’t planned out the ending.
Even the author agrees Fight Club the movie is better than the book.
Is Interesting that in the Chinese version of Fight Club, its end with a message saying that after the final scene the narrator was arrested and institutionalized and the movement disbanded, making it more faithful to the original ending of the book.
Can’t be giving anyone ideas now can we?
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.
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.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Pretty sure that movie is what set me on the path to radicalization…
Yeah, that’s a good one. Better by a large margin.
The Magicians: The books were good, but the TV show really was in a class all its own. And it did away with using obscure words just because, that was annoying.
Game of Thrones: At this rate, ASOIAF is never getting done, so I’m by default giving it to the show for actually finishing the job.
Good Omens: The first season brought the book to life, but there wasn’t source material beyond that. The second season did a great job fleshing out the characters and moving the story forward into the final season.
I’d rather the five released ASOIAF stay as they are, perpetually unfinished than anything close to the hatchet job that was the GoT show ever be released in book. For me, sometimes just finishing isn’t enough. The books > than the show 10,000 times.
Okay, fair. I’m mostly just frustrated that GRRM is taking so damn long.
I totally agree. The dude is aging, and not the greatest candidate for advanced years, we’ll say. He’s worth 9 figures. Please just hire someone to ghost write it and supervise their direction closely. He would more than recoup the financial hit in sales, so it could be argued it wouldn’t even cost him anything.
He could even justify it to the fans as a collab with a well-known author, who would do the bulk of writing with Martin as a supervisor/big picture guy. Like if Jordan had spoken with Sanderson to finish WoT before he died.
the Game of Thrones show’s last 2 seasons (the ones not based on any published books) was so bad, it make people retroactively hate the entire series and the entire intellectual property lol
Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt
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 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.
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.
Haven’t read the comics, but everyone says that The Boys tv show is way better
I should watch it then. I think the comics are brilliant.
Seasons 1 and 2, I’d agree. Season 3 was just bad.
That’s a bit harsh. The first ¾ of season 3 are really good, even if they did drop the ball at the end.
The Bourne Identity movie > book
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.
Blade runner. Much better than “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” but it is only loosely based off it.
PS: when reading a book after watching a film, it usually feels like the book is much better, fills in details, separates scenes which a film had mixed together or altogether done away with. E.g. The Shining, LotR, Dune…but for Androids I just felt “what, that’s it?”
I dunno if you can still find it, but I remember there being a Blade runner TTRPG in the FASA catalog in the '90s
A solid chunk of Philip K Dick’s output worked better as movies/TV than as books.
There’s definitely something there, but the books feel somewhat unfinished/unpolished. Which makes sense, his books weren’t popular in English until after the release of Blade Runner, which coincided with his death. Maybe the popularity of the movie would’ve given him more time and resources to revise future works.
A Scanner Darkly is the only one where both the book and the movie felt about the same quality.
Stalker. The movie, not necessarily the games.
Roadside picnic is a fantastic book that feels thrilling for a scifi story. There’s everything you could hope for, from deep philosophical questions to fictional technology that’s described in a way that fascinates but doesn’t attempt to over-explain; there’s political implications to the geopolitics of the time that the authors consider. And at the center, an anti-hero who just wants to get his wish fulfilled and get out of this place, who’s willing to make a deal with the devil for it.
To take all that and reimagine it as a long trialogue in an eerily deserted nature reserve/post-apocalyptic wasteland that touches upon all sorts of deep philosophy—from the divine to whether we can truly know ourselves; the struggle between logic and creativity; the vast ineffability of the natural world, not so much as Man vs. Nature conflict but as a reminder of how large and apathetic the natural world is to humanity—while maintaining a strained atmosphere of invisible threats that we never see. I could draw parallels to Dante’s Inferno and Sartre’s No Exit.
Stalker ending spoiler
Then for the protagonists to leave empty-handed after it all, too afraid to find out who they truly are deep down.
chef’s kiss
It is one of the most aesthetically beautiful films I’ve ever seen, and does something I wish more filmmakers would do: focus on atmosphere rather than plot and action. It sounds boring, but it was a transformative work of art.
It’s dark, it’s broody, it’s strangely serene. I love it so much.
Arcane, the animated Netflix show that was based on League of Legends.
