This weekend I sat down and watched the movie On the Road by Jack Kerouac. The movie came out in 2013.

The novel, if you have read it, is a story about travel, friendship, and personal growth, all the things the title suggest. The movie, on the other hand, is overtly about sex, devoid of any semblance of the story itself, and has several scenes that I do not recall being in the book.

This brings up a point. If you cannot reproduce it in film, do not try. Some things should simply be left alone. Now an entire generation of readers, not familiar with Kerouac's “Original Scroll” will examine this film and conclude the book is primarily about sex.

If there is any humor at all to be derived from this cinematic blunder, it will be the look on the high school teacher's face after reading a student's report on the novel so lazily gleaned from the watching the movie.

Some books I have read after watching the movie, and I found to enjoy the book immensely compared to the cinema. Though most of the monster movies are classics, like Dracula and Frankenstein, I found that their original book tales would have made much better movies.

A while back I did find a movie called Bram Stoker's Dracula. Sadly, much like the movie you experienced, it was overly sexed and they deviated from the plot to throw in a needless love story between Dracula and one of his victims.

I only know of one movie that I enjoyed more than the book. That was "A River Runs Through It" by Norman Maclean (University of Chicago Press, 1972). In 1992 it was made into a movie, directed by Robert Redford and starring Craig Scheffer, Brad Pitt and Tom Skerritt . Why did I enjoy the movie more? Not because Brad Pitt was in it, or because it was directed by Redford, though his direction no doubt had a hand in my enjoyment. The story centered around two brothers growing up in Montana, and inheriting a love of fly fishing from their father. What made the movie great (to me) was its visual appeal. It was filmed in and around Bozeman, Montana, and on the Madison River. A word description of one of the brothers wading in the river and making his casts just could not compare to its visual counterpart. The entire movie was a visual treat, though of course it would never have been made if not for Macleans book.