The Book Is Better

I am a Nora Roberts fan. I adore her heroes and her heroines and her plot lines and her bad guys and most of all her wording. Somehow, her dialogue just leaps out at me.

So, I saw that Lifetime had made four of her books into movies. I viewed that with mixed emotions. How would it translate to the little screen.

“Angel Falls” was on this week. I’ve never read it, so I don’t know how the story was adapted. There were scraps of dialogue that seemed Nora-ish, but were delivered in such a flat manner that I wanted to gag. The lead female was played by Heather Locklear who didn’t, to me, really fit the part. And the background soundtrack? Don’t get me started.

A friend of mine is a real movie production buff. She can see something good in just about any movie. If the dialogue is bad, she’ll look to the acting, the costumes, the soundtrack. Through her, I’ve learned to view a film with a multi-dimensional eye. Unlike her, it makes the experience harder to enjoy when something is really off.

So, although I enjoyed this piece of fluff, which got my mind off the fact that I had a big confrontation coming up the next day, I want to repeat the age-old (or, at least, tech-age-old) truism: the book is almost always better.

Can anyone think of an example where that is not the cases? (For me, The Princess Bride was better as a movie than a book. The book was too snarly and sarcastic; the movie had gentle humor instead. And Mandy Patinkin. I love Mandy Patinkin.)

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