It has just come to my attention that they are going to make Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell into a movie.
Without spoiling any aspects of the book, (which I loved), I don’t see how in the hell they’re going to film that. Not even with the greatest F/X imaginable can I figure out how they would show certain things. Not just due to complexity of certain images, of which there would be a tremendous amount, but due to certain people and places overlapping with one another at the same time, but invisible to the other. Two places unknowingly sharing the same space, if that makes sense.
What are some other books you’ve read and thought “No way can that be a movie” for one reason or another?
I’d have to go with Dune and its sequels. I’ve seen both film adaptions, and they both have their good and bad points (although I feel that Lynch’s innate weirdness resulted in a film that came closer to the actual feel), but they both missed the mark by miles. The book is just too weird. Too cerebral. Too much of the story takes place in the minds of the protagonists in a way that simply cannot be translated into a visual medium. I remember watching Scifi’s Children of Dune miniseries, and while they got Dune Messiah more or less correct, they essentially made up an entirely new story for the last episode.
Ditto for Solaris. Tartovsky’s version was OK, but it still played fast and loose with Lem’s material, and the ending pretty much negated the entire point of the book. I feel the same way with the version starring George Clooney, although I did enjoy watching it.
There is no possible way that anyone could ever do justice to the brilliance of Toole’s writing, which is key to the genius of the novel. The vocabulary makes the story; the story on it’s own, without Toole’s expertly crafted wording, would not be nearly as effective…
Clive Barker’s Weaveworld. There was some talk a while back about making it into a mini-series, but apparently it fell through. I could see them doing some neat special effect things with Shadwell’s jacket or that building with all those strange rooms. But how would you depict the Scourge? A being made of wheels, eyes, and fire, that is constantly changing? What about the Firmament, and the Gyre? Unfilmable, I say.
One of my favorite books of all time, but I’m glad it never became a movie. Some things are better left to the mind’s eye.
My choice for unfilmable is Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. There is a movie of that title, but rather than an adaptation of the book it is a story about filming an adaptation of the book.
I could picture a decent Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell movie, granted they’d have to cut out a lot, but that’s sort of the art of making a decent film version of any book. Some of the worst (umm…there must be a word, movie made from a book, what’s the opposite of “novelization”?) have been the ones where the director just decided to use the book as a script and left everything in.
I was surprised to see Sophie’s World listed recently in a list of best-selling books, and started thinking about what a movie version would be like. I’d say pretty damn boring or it would have to jettison basically the main point of the book. So I’ll nominate that one.
Also a Sandman movie gets floated every once and a while. While I guess it might be filmable, the comic is basically a collection of stories in which the main character is only tangentially involved, I doubt it would hold together well. Would make a bitchin’ TV series, but since every couple of episodes would require a new bunch of sets, I doubt anyone could afford to make it.
The long running joke about A Brief History of Time was that people who didn’t want to try to slog through the book would say “I’ll wait for the movie”. Then Errol Morris went and made it.