Books and their movies

This week I watched the movies of three books I read this last year:  The Help, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Water for Elephants.  Here are my reviews without any spoilers.

The Help was a fabulous book.  In fact, I stayed up until 2:30 in the morning on a school night when I finished it.  I just couldn't put it down!  The movie was also great, but the motivation behind many things wasn't entirely explained in the movie.  I recommend the book first, then the movie.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a really hard book to get into because the story is so complex and there are just so many characters.  I got through 2.5 of the 3 books before giving up on them.  It seemed like a lot of back story for a few insanely huge action points in the plot.  I watched the Swedish movies and they weren't bad.  Now we have the American version of the first book in theaters now.  My cousin and I read the books together and we thought it would be fun to catch this movie in the theater last week.  The movie was really great with one huge problem:  I'm not sure I'd understand the movie without having read the book, in fact one of the main conclusions in the movie was completely anti-climactic and we had no idea what had happened.  There is one other warning on this book/movie, the whole thing is about rape.  Keep this in consideration before choosing your movie-going partner!

Water for Elephants was a really short book.  I read the whole thing in a week on my brand new Kindle Touch.  The book was great!  The movie was similar to The Help in that the motivation for things was not explained in the movie.  I'm not sure seeing the movie without having read the book would be that great of an experience.  I think this movie gets the lowest ratings of the three from me.

On an unrelated note, I also watched Remember Me and Friends with Benefits, both of which were worth seeing.

What do you think?   Any book/movie combos that you particularly liked?