Neither. I keep an open mind and try to be lineant, knowing how hard it can be to turn someone’s limitless imagination into a tangible and also financially viable product. I do have some standards though.
- the characters never look like what I envisioned; true, and it’s what I often regret about movies. Though some come pretty close (eg in Harry Potter, the house elf is nothing like what I imagined, but Harry himself is pretty close – in LotR, Gandalf is great, but Legolas is far from what I thought and the dwarves are all much bigger than I expected).
– the movie can’t possibly be as deep as the book; not always true, depends on the book. And I’m not sure I always want it to be deep. Some books are meant to be deep, but others (thinking of LotR again) are just descriptive, so showing the story rather than telling it can work fine.
– they omit parts of the book; true, but they can add others. And hopefully they’ll keep the overall feel in balance. Besides, you can always read the book after the movie and discover all the omitted details for yourself. Which is twice as much fun :)
– they have a field day with the original timeline of the book… do you mean flashbacks and so on? Can be, but since a movie only takes about 2 hours to watch (and a book anywhere from 2 days to 2 months), that is not really a problem. It’s actually a great thing that the narrative experience is squeezed into 2 hours, so that you can hear the whole story in one go and follow the central idea through without getting stuck on details.
Overall, I know it seems I’m just defending movies, but that’s not it at all. I’m just not anti-movie. If done well, a movie can often add to the book, or in extreme cases even replace it. It depends on the original story as much as the quality of the movie. But in many cases films are just not good enough, and all they provide is at best a distorted version of the book, and at worse a rushed and badly made summary. But I still keep an open mind.