Which is better, the book or the movie? I usually stay out of these arguments. Books and movies are different mediums and things that work brilliantly in the book need to be removed from the movie because of either time (the movie has significantly less leeway on details when compared with the book) or because the way it happens in the book just wouldn't work in a movie. The 'Harry Potter' movies are an extreme example--there is so much going on in the later books that the context has been removed form the movie, and by the fifth one, if you hadn't read the book, you would have no way of following the story line at all. And sometimes the book is so luminous that no matter how strictly the movie adheres to it, the viewer is disappointed ('A River Runs Through It' is a great example of a good movie made from a spectacular book--no way to win with that).
I am going to make an exception and lodge a complaint. The movie should not totally and completely ignore the book's take home message. I read 'Something Borrowed' by Emily Griffin and then recently saw the movie. No comparison. The characters are the same, and many of the events co-occur in both book and movie, but the transformation of one character that made the book so appealing was removed from the movie. How annoying. Call it something else if you have to make the movie so dramatically different. Do not make those of us who know one story have to suffer through watching it ruined in another medium. The movie might have been just fine in and of itself, but I couldn't really concentrate on that because of the distraction that it missed the point of the book.
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