It's a common experience to read a book slated for a film adaptation and then approach the movie, if at all, with a trepidation bordering on fear. As an optimist who doesn't get too offended when his favorite stories get changed for a different medium, I generally try to minimize that reaction. Yet that is exactly how I feel about Stephen Daldry's imminent adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader. A large part of me is convinced that Schlink's lovely, challenging little novel – almost more of an essay than a novel, really – can't possibly survive Daldry's questionable prestige picture instincts. The book demands a small film, melancholy, withdrawn. Can we get that from one of the year's big Oscar hopefuls?

The logline IMDb plot summary [Ed.: corrected upon being informed that this is not the official studio "logline"] is already all wrong: "Nearly a decade after his affair with an older woman came to a mysterious end, law student Michael Burk is reunited with his former lover (Winslet) as she defends herself in a war-crime trial." No. I'm loath to give too much away, but "reunited" is not the right word. In fact, the lack of a bona fide reunion between the two is part of what makes the novel so interesting, and the reason for that lack of reunion is at the heart of the moral questions it grapples with.

I'm still reeling from Body of Lies' remarkable box office flameout. The $70-million, Ridley Scott-directed, heavily-advertised spy thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe opened three weekends ago to third place and 12.8 million dollars, and will struggle to get to $35 million domestic by the end of its theatrical run. What the hell happened? A B-grade Jack Ryan movie with Ben Affleck can make almost four times that, and a film with this sort of pedigree winds up dead on arrival?

The answer, of course, is that The Sum of All Fears isn't the proper point of comparison. Because it turns out that Body of Lies isn't much of a "spy thriller" after all. Writing Part One of this column back in the summer, I mused that Scott and screenwriter William Monahan were going to have a tough time making author David Ignatius's ultra-realistic depiction of CIA grunt work into compelling pop cinema. I was probably right, because they didn't really bother. They responded to the problem by making the film less crackerjack and more political; less exciting, perhaps, but smarter, sadder. In doing so, they threw their lot in with the sorry batch of Iraq War films rather than Jack Ryan. It was a bold choice that resulted in one of the best movies of the year – and a resounding commercial failure.

Politically, Ignatius' novel more or less kept its head down. There was certainly a sense that Roger Ferris, the protagonist played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film, was frustrated with constant, counterproductive interference by his US-stationed superior Ed Hoffman (Crowe), but the subtext of this, if any, was soft: the problem wasn't any systemic defect but rather just that Hoffman was an insufferable micromanager. The book mostly concentrated on the fascinating (albeit not terribly cinematic) nitty-gritty of CIA field work in the Middle East.

This is a follow-up of sorts to my piece on Mikael Hafstrøm's adaptation of Stephen King's 1408. If you're interested, you should check that out. There, I half-marveled at and half-lamented the fact that the film managed to transform 1408 from a spectacularly scary, quasi-Lovecraftian horror tale into a personal, abstract meditation on grief and loss. In effect, the movie transplanted the story from the conceptual, hard-horror half of King's ouvre (think Cell and From a Buick 8) to the character-driven half (Lisey's Story, Bag of Bones). It was still a good film, but it needed someone who understood the existential terror that King is so good at evoking: a glimpse of something so alien, so divorced from the world we know, that it is simply beyond our comprehension. That's scary. Give me a movie like that.

At the time I wrote that post, such a film already existed. I suspected that this was the case, but I hadn't read the source material, and so couldn't validly make the comparison. Now I can: Frank Darabont's The Mist understands the sort of paralyzing, staring-into-the-abyss horror that King does so well. Even more impressive: not only does it brilliantly translate that aspect of the novella to the screen, it – like 1408 – fleshes out dimensions that the author barely implied. I knew I loved the film when I saw it, but only now do I understand how accomplished it really is.

The cover for the spiffy new movie edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button reads: "the inspiration for the upcoming major motion picture." Anyone who reads the famous 1922 short story, about a man who is mysteriously born a septuagenarian and begins to age backwards, will immediately realize that it can't be any more than that. My copy is about fifty small, large-print pages, and it takes no more than twenty minutes to read. There are only about four characters of any note, and each of their relationships is bitter and hollow; the whole thing is a quick, moody burst of melancholy, a high concept on which Fitzgerald had no interest in lingering.

The anxiously awaited movie is directed by David Fincher – his follow-up to Zodiac -- and written by Eric Roth (the IMDb doesn't list a credit for Fitzgerald), whose resume includes Forrest Gump, The Insider, and Munich. Compared to the source material, the film has virtually a cast of thousands. Benjamin's love interest is renamed Daisy – the story's "Hildegarde" just doesn't have the same ring to it – and is played by Cate Blanchett. "Daisy age 6" is played by Elle Fanning (a.k.a. Little Dakota), though it's hard to imagine what use the film will have for a Daisy age 6: do she and Benjamin now meet while the latter is an "old man" and she a toddler? President Theodore Roosevelt shows up, for some reason. And, at least according to this Ain't It Cool test screening review, the current incarnation of the movie clocks in at three hours.

Warning: Some spoilers ahead. Though if you've either read the book or seen the movie, you're cool.

Order matters. It's not true what they say: that as between a book and a movie, you inevitably prefer whichever one you read or watch first. But the order you take them in nonetheless profoundly affects the experience. You can try to be objective – claim that each work has to stand or fall on its own merits, other incarnations be damned – but it won't work. You've been tainted.

I liked The Ruins – the movie. It was tight, brutal, ruthlessly effective; along with The Strangers, one of the year's few R-rated breaths of fresh air. Though it hewed pretty closely to genre conventions, it also recombined them to come up with its own interesting take on survival horror. I appreciated the movie's simplicity (the vines are a pure, almost elemental villain); its gruesomeness that never turned into sadism or needless cruelty; its grim, harsh relentlessness. It was a gripping roller coaster of a movie; a fun ride I enjoyed, praised, and pretty much put out of my mind.

Now that I've read the book, I ask myself: Would I still have liked the movie had I gone to the book first? The answer, I think, is no. It's not that I now think I was wrong about the film; to the contrary. But Scott Smith's novel is so extraordinary a genre achievement that the movie – adapted by Smith himself – can, in retrospect, feel only like a hapless abridgement, a wispy simulacrum of the novel's all-encompassing sense of doom and spiraling psychological terror. Taking the two in reverse order would have made the film feel cheap, impotent, lame; The Ruins for Dummies.

Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf took a lot of hits for its perceived silliness, a verdict I could never quite sign on to. First of all, silly compared to what? Have these people seen the 1999 space opera Beowulf starring Christopher Lambert? Compared to that, Zemeckis's Beowulf is a sober meditation on the human condition. Have they seen the Gerard Butler clunker Beowulf and Grendel? Come on, guys: considering what the movies have done to this story in the past, last year's high-tech effort seems like serious business to me.

What about the source material – the ancient Old English epic poem upon which these movies purport to be based? If you've ever read it (or tried to read it), the perversions of the adaptations shouldn't surprise you. It's both begging for action movie treatment and impossible to faithfully adapt into anything resembling a compelling action movie. The story is credited with generating many of the archetypes we see in our fiction, and indeed, it's so archetypical that by modern standards, it's a skeleton; there's nothing there.

Seriously – you know how people complain about movies whose plots can be fully described in one sentence? A faithful Beowulf would take this phenomenon to new heights. A synopsis would read something like this: Beowulf beats up Grendel, Grendel's mom, and a dragon, and dies. The end. Some complained that the Zemeckis version distorted Beowulf, but I'd have liked to see their reaction to an undistorted adaptation. Trust me, it wouldn't work. There's a reason that all these screenwriters have scrambled to add elements to the story.

I think that everyone who loves Michael Cera's comedy – and that should be practically everyone – is a little worried about Michael Cera. Because even as Arrested Development becomes legend, Superbad wins over every twentysomething in sight, and Juno charms the pants off the entire nation, the hushed, often unspoken question is: how long can he milk this? Cera's shtick is killer, but it's also ultra-specific – he's the shy, unprepossessing, painfully awkward adolescent, a nice guy who's self-aware enough to get embarrassed but not confident enough to avoid it.

Cera is so good at playing this part in a way that's both touching and hysterical that it's propelled him to stardom. For me to say that I haven't enjoyed any of the incarnations of George Michael Bluth that he's given us over the past couple years would be a bald-faced lie. Indeed, I think the character he's crafted is one of the most impressive comic achievements of my adult lifetime. But even as I relish it, I start to fidget, because I can sense exasperation and annoyance threatening from just around the bend. Oh, maybe not mine – I could watch Cera do this forever, I tell myself – but certainly other people will soon lose patience and turn on the guy. One-trick pony, they'll yell. Do something else.

Fantasy may have the most rabid and obsessive fans, but it also has the staunchest detractors of any mainstream genre. We all know people who simply refuse to watch fantasy films or read fantasy books of their own volition. They may have sat through The Fellowship of the Ring grudgingly, but didn't bother with the rest of the series. They probably associate the genre with asocial nerds, fan conventions, and Dungeons & Dragons. They can only shrug at the exuberance of the devotees. Fantasy is "not their thing."

Why are fantasy movies (and the genre in general) so polarizing? I've long thought it has something to do with viewers' relative affinity for cinematic worlds. Some people go to the movies to see something that directly relates to their own lives, something that takes place in the universe they live in and know. Others – myself among them, if you haven't figured it out – flip for new, self-contained worlds that could exist independently of the movie; wonderful and strange places we feel like it's possible to actually inhabit. This might explain why those who like good fantasy also tend to enjoy good science-fiction.

Have you read Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates? Huh? You have? Then why the hell haven't you told me about it? What's your problem, anyway? And where has this book been all my life?

There's a movie version of Revolutionary Road on the way, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and directed by Sam Mendes. It's set to be released at Christmastime, and is widely expected to be a major player in the Oscar race. But here I have to betray this column's reason for being. F*** the movie. Read the book.

Published in 1961, Yates's first novel was more acclaimed than popular. It is a merciless, intense and pitch-black social satire – funny only in the most uncomfortable way, like being cleverly mocked by someone who sees clean through to your soul. The jacket pitches it as being about "the opulent desolation of the American suburbs," but Revolutionary Road is not another of those books that merely mocks the empty lives of well-to-do suburbanites. It's about our attitudes toward life and love and each other. Almost a half-century after it was published, it contains as much devastating insight into human nature as just about anything else I've ever read.

The conventional wisdom regarding Sean Penn's justly acclaimed rendering of Into the Wild is that the film is "faithful" to the Jon Krakauer book. This is utterly cracked, and the misconception is illustrative of my staunch "books are not movies" philosophy. Not only is Into the Wild not "faithful" to the book, but it couldn't possibly have been faithful and remain a narrative film. Sure, it dutifully replicates what Krakauer was able to discover about Chris McCandless' adventure – most of the supporting characters, destinations and events are here, and some lines of dialogue are lifted from Krakauer's account. If that's all it takes for a movie to be "faithful," then I guess it's faithful. But that ignores the fact that the book and the film were trying to accomplish fundamentally different things, and went about it in fundamentally different ways.

Krakauer's book – which, by the way, is a national treasure – is first journalistic, and then philosophical. The author did painstaking research to piece together the details of McCandless' journey and death from interviews, personal observations, and Chris's own writings. What emerged probably wasn't what Krakauer, who obviously sympathizes and identifies with his hero, would have preferred: the picture of McCandless his sources paint is that of a young man who is bright and curious, but also inconsiderate, arrogant, and often downright unpleasant. (The letter he wrote to "Ron Franz," Hal Holbrook's character in the film, haranguing the octogenarian to sell his possessions and go on the road, is painful to read.)