Everytime, I read books that often become movies, and i'm super excitted to see how its done, and am let down every time.The only movie that was better than the book, was home alone 2 lost in new york, but you could have guessed that!

I do. The books are almost always better--I can not think of a movie I have liked more than a book in this situation. Then if I read the book AFTER I see the movie I realize how much the movie really sucked compared.

I know what you mean, I found that everybody who watched the Lord Of The Rings who had read the books came out of the cinema talking about how they thought X should have been focussed on more, how Y was over-exaggerated and how Z had been left out completely and they would have left it in. I had never read the books so just watched the films as they were with no pre-conceptions or expectations and enjoyed them a lot more than I felt others were. So although I loved The Da Vinci Code I never bothered to see the film version, I would have just grumbled about how it wasn't what I had expected...

That is the wonderful thing about books - it lets us create our own concepts,ideas and images. I guess that is why films are often disappointing as we arepresented with the images as the directors 'see' it. How many times have we said .. I wouldn't have cast x in that part?

I'm always disappointed because I expect the book to come alive on the screen and it never does. Most of the time it's nothing like the book.

No, not at all. The Trilogy of The Ring series is an example. J.R.R. Tolkein devoted years of his life to this monumental work, and few would dare tackle it in times past. But all three movies pulled it off, and largely because of the continuity of director and actors involved. It was made as a continuous trilogy with the idea of three individual movies. While naysayers will always find fault with this or that, the rational and sane among us recognize that it impossible to include EVERYTHING of each and every book. 'Gone With the Wind' was actually BETTER than Margaret Mitchell's sometimes plodding tome, as was the 'Wizard of Oz' versus the 14 books by L. Frank Baum that the movie was drawn from (an interesting note: he coined 'OZ' from glancing at his file cabinet when asked by one of the children he was reading to 'What the name of the place was?', i.e., O-Z). Recently, C.S. Lewis's works on Narnia were made into a movie as well. It was absolutely delightful to see figures so well known from childhood spring to life on screen. And that is one of the joys of movie-going. To see accomplished and experienced artists come together to create in a brief moment in time an experience that inspires, uplifts, and instills within us all that is good from a writer's prose is a JOY. Sure, I would have liked to have seen the enigmatic Tom Bombadill portrayed in some way or fashion in the 'Lord of the Rings', but I recognize this would have been an excursion into a flight of fancy, just as it obviously was for the author when he penned it originally. The joy of reading books is the imagination we bring to bear on the wordplay of the author. We do not get hung up on color or style or even specifics, but go willingly with the wordsmith as we are lead along into the tale. It is similar for movies, only all the more, for finally we behold in living color what heretofore we only dimly imagined. Well, almost living color....'To Kill a Mockingbird', starring Gregory Peck, was at least as good as Nellie Harper Lee's book, even filmed in black and white. In short, enjoy the movie for what it is; an experience that compliments what the author fashioned when first taking up paper however long ago.