Everyone knows I want to shove hot irons into the eyes of
people who always like to say, “The book is better than the movie.” Most people
read the book long before it’s a movie, or before the movie comes out. Why they
feel the two are comparable mediums, I’ll never know. A book is not a movie and
since the portrait the words paint in your mind are going to be completely
different than what you will see on screen, you should really be saying, “I
didn’t imagine any of the movie when I read the book.” That gave me a headache
just thinking about it, but the same can be said for tie-in novels. They’re
usually fleshed out by someone who is more or less a formula writer and is
getting paid a quick ten grand to crank out a novel in less than a month,
solely to cash in on a movies success, only now you’re using a source that
everyone has seen and has had visualized for them, and the book is almost
always worse than the movie.
No one is impressed that you read a book and it makes you
seem ignorant of storytelling in film when you ramble on about how much
material was cut from the book to make a film that will probably take less than
a few hours to watch. Let’s say you can read 250 words a minute. The average
brain can only comprehend about 400, so anyone who thinks they’re speed reading
is probably not comprehending shit. Back to the 250, if you read a 50,000 word
novel it would take you about 200 minutes, which is longer than most films. The
hunger games has twice as many words, yet the film was only 142 minutes. That’s
a major differences between the two and they both serve different purposes. If
you like the book better than the movie, you probably like reading better than
watching movies, or you just think that reading adds a new level to how
intelligent people think you are.
My real gripe is against the all-consuming. I’m talking
about people who go on about every form of entertainment, books, movies, music,
plays, sports, etc., acting like they’re an expert and a critic, but when you
sit back you have to ask yourself, is it really possible that these people are
this knowledgeable about these things? Assuming people spend 8 hours working
and get 8 hours of sleep, and obviously ignoring travel time, personal hygiene,
cooking, etc. you have 8 hours of relaxation time. If they really were an
exceptional reader they could read two 50,000 word books a day, over 700 a
year, even though most novels are a bit wordier. If we’re talking movies,
assuming the average length is 90-120 minutes, you could easily watch 4 a day,
so twice as many as the book readers.
I know people who make it a point to be avid in these
fields, and even they do not come up with these numbers. I guess what I am saying
is it’s okay to not be full of shit and have an opinion on everything,
especially things you’ve never seen or heard of. In fact, your opinion means
little to most on the internet, unless you have a blog with readers in 75
countries and territories, like myself.
A typical night for some people.