Two things, both unrelated to this movie (which I would not have seen even without your screed): 1. I walked out of The Drama shortly after the reveal, despite the fine acting. I thought to myself, "There is no way they handle this in a way that doesn't eat at me for the whole runtime" and as I was walking out I heard the photographer saying "And then we'll shoot your family" and I knew I had made the right choice for me. 2. Wrt the implied hierarchy of media. I think if one expands out "the book was better to the movie" to "I had a better experience with the book than I did with the movie," it's not really an empty statement but a statement more about the person making the statement. I think that's normally what we mean when we say something like that. And I don't think it's surprising that people who stick with it to spend many hours with a book compared with perhaps two hours with the movie adaptation will tend to prefer the book -- it engaged them enough over that longer time. Since Super Mario Galaxy is the one Mario game I've gotten all the stars in, I think I can definitively say I'd prefer the game over the movie. (I'll skip the movie, it's clearly not for me.)