Books into Films
For some strange reason since 2011 began I have been reading my ass off. We are barely a month into the year and I have read something like four books, one a week. This is previously unheard of for me and is a sign that perhaps I’m getting better at concentrating now I have cut out all the noise that drinking and drugs bring or maybe I’ve just been really bored. Either way my reading habits usually lead me to seek out books that I know will shortly become feature films and this month I have sought out three such titles and will now offer my thoughts on who and what is involved.
The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins has a quote by billionaire spinster Stephanie Meyer on the cover (on my edition at least) but don't let that put you off, The Hunger Games is a ‘young adult’ novel that manages to be brutal and bleaker than many adult novels. The premise is simple, in the future the USA no longer exists, it has been divided up into districts and is ruled over by the Capital, a brutal totalitarian regime. People live in near poverty and once a year the Capital holds a fight to the death where they take two kids from each district, one boy one girl and plop them into the wilderness so they can fight to the death. This is then televised for the populace so they can see just how much power the Capital has over them. The ultimate winner will be set for life with food and money. Told from the perspective of Katniss Everdean, a fifteen year old female contestant, The book is the very definition of a page turner, its 400 or so pages just flew by. Its shocking and lots of kids die, lots in a horrible manner….in a country which still has no distributor for the film Battle Royale because of the potential fallout from another Columbine massacre, they want to turn THIS into a film. Imagine my shock and total lack of surprise then to learn that a director has been attached to The Hunger Games (first in a trilogy of course) and that man is none other than Mr. Gary Ross. Who he? you might say, Gary Ross who directed Seabiscuit and Pleasantville and wrote Big and erm the Lassie remake from 1994, in other words completely wrong for the material but probably a safe non edgy bet for a studio looking to make a buck. If they at least get the casting right (please not Kirsten Stewart) then my interest might be back but at this point I don’t have much hope for the film. To do this right you really need someone with a bit of an edge with a bit of a vision, I’m thinking Alfonso Cuaron could make it work as the later novels are compared to Children of Men by some of my pals who have read them. Anyway, thats rant number one out of the way and now….
John Dies At The End
This book was recommended to me by my fellow CHUD forum dwellers and it took me a while to find it as there does not seem to be many copies in existence, and thats probably for the best as John Dies At The End by David Wong, is completely and utterly insane. Imagine if you will the now defunct TV series Reaper crossed with Invasion of the Body Snatchers with the violence of Braindead and the drug fuelled paranoia of Phillip K Dick and that comes somewhere close to the tone of this thing and yet I still haven’t told you about the author actually being the main character and the constant referencing to famous people when describing the secondary characters. The basic plot concerns two slacker friends who at a party are exposed to ‘Soy Sauce’ a drug that opens up perception, kills people and also allows demons to access this plain of existence. David and his best pal John must stop the demon invasion before it brings about the end of the world, still with me? good. I know I’m going to have to read this book again, its incredibly dense and also laugh out loud funny and at 500 or so pages its easy to become complacent and miss stuff. Then I made the mistake of looking up what was going on with the film adaptation. Now my first thought about this book is that its why they coined the phrase ‘unfilmable’ but thats not stopping Don Coscarelli. Coscarelli directed one of the best cult films of the last ten with Bubba Ho Tep as well as Phantasm and there is nothing wrong with that choice of director at all, its just that Coscarelli is the kind of director who works almost entirely with a low budget. At least the first 200 pages or so of the book would need a good ten million or so to be done right and whilst they have not released details of the budget, when your biggest names in the cast are Paul Giamatti and Clancy Brown, its a safe bet that you are not commanding an extravagant effects budget. I’m still intrigued to see how it turns out I am just worried that they may end up excising a lot of the good stuff instead making another straight to DVD zombie film. At the end of the day Coscarelli is still one of the better directors working in low budget cinema today and I will literally travel across the Atlantic to see Bubba Nosferatu when it comes out.
As She Climbed Across The Table
I first read Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn about ten or so years ago, it was entertaining and funny with a genius central idea. Recently I have sought out Lethem’s back catalogue: Gun, with occasional music (once going to be a film with Alan Parker directing no less) and Amnesia Moon are both mind bogglingly brilliant and brief pieces of sci-fi fantasy and then I picked up As She Climbed Across The Table. This is the tale of a professor whose girlfriend, a brilliant physics student opens up a void in reality in the science lab which is referred to as ‘Lack’ and proceeds to fall in love with it. Lack becomes a sensation on the university campus and begins making things disappear. The story is told from the perspective of someone who is definitely losing the love of his life and is funny as well as sad. Its a story that is all too familiar for anyone who has been dumped in favor of a good looking person seemingly devoid of all personality. I think the big problem in filming this would be how to present the concept of nothing on the screen, because lets face it; nothing or a void isn't that visually exciting. They probably have something up their sleeves but the story is more about loss of love and how we deal with it, do you accept it with grace? or do you rage against losing something so precious? . Which is why David Cronenberg is the wrong person to bring this to the screen. Now don’t get me wrong I love Cronenberg, I think The Fly and Videodrome are classics and some of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises really works despite feeling a bit slight. The problem is Cronenberg isn't known for emotional out pouring and his previous work is (for want of a better term) cold and clinical. As She Climbed Across the table is like a warm blanket or a hot mug of cocoa for dumped nerds everywhere, its full of truth and emotion and really needs someone with a good grasp of how to do this on screen. Whilst reading it I kept thinking of films like High Fidelity, (500) Days of Summer and Say Anything, not exactly films loaded with bizarre surgery and body horror. I think that the concept of ‘nothing’ being portrayed on screen, is too much of a hurdle to get over and I’ll be surprised if this ever happens.
The Joe Pitt Case Books
This series has recently been finished and consists of five books: Already Dead, No Dominion, Half The Blood Of Brooklyn, Every Last Drop and My Dead Body. Written by Charlie Huston, these books follow the trials and tribulations of a Vampire named Joe Pitt, kind of a freelancer living in New York who does odd jobs for the various Vampire clans that dominate Manhattan, usually involving violence and keeping the Vamps existence a secret. The stories are classic noir with cracking dialogue and bone crunching violence. Written without chapters, they are each barely 200 pages long and once you pick one up, its easy to read the whole thing in one sitting. As far as I know nobody has optioned the movie rights to these books but they bloody well should do. The descriptions of the clans of Vampires and the take on the myth is crying out to be filmed. Huston treats Vampirism as a virus and it is known as ‘The Vyrus’ to the infected and everyone has an opinion on how those infected should live. Some choose to behave like the mafia and some choose to accept it as a disease and live inside wasting away hoping to ascend to some higher plain. Joe Pitt doesn't ally himself with any particular group and is a tough as nails loner, it would be an awesome role for someone like John Cusack or Jeffery Dean Morgan to really get into and make iconic. For everyone who bitches and moans that the Vampire has nothing new to offer would be well advised to start reading this series. If not a film, it would make a cracking HBO or AMC series on television with a strong director like David Fincher behind it.
by Chris Holt
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