Cryptonomicon
House of Leaves
I’m thinking bigger: The Temple in Jerusalem, in its heyday under Solomon – set up the cameras to run nonstop for the entire High Holiday period (from Yom haZikaron through Shmini Atzeret), and edit down the 510+ hours of footage per camera later in the comfort of the modern studio.
A drama/suspense set in a non-humanoid alien culture. Without subtitles/dubbing. The culture set up is completely unlike anything on earth and we’re left to our own devices to interpret what we see and the motivations for each character. The story is logically consistent with the invented culture, lifecycle and behavioural characteristics of the aliens but is unexplained.
•Perfectly honestly? There are probably a few works of fanfiction that I could stand to see onscreen. Either because they’re stories that stand well on their own…or that they’re ones filled with so much unabashed wish-fulfillment and completely over the top spectacle that I couldn’t resist watching it onscreen. (Look, I can’t be the only guy who’s gone to the theater on a hot summer day to get some overpriced snacks and watch monsters beat each other to death for two hours, then gone home completely satisfied for the experience.)
•Along said lines…Hitler vs. Stalin. :eek:
The Infinity Gauntlet. It would be a huge epic, broken up into a few parts, covering everything from Thanos’ early life, to his quest for the Infinity Gems, to the huge space battle itself.
The Big Bang, the formation of the moon, time-lapse photography of the creation and evaporation of inland sea in the middle of North America over eons, dinosaurs hunting, and the volcanic winter of 535 AD.
Thinking of literature, I’d like to see films made of Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Perilous Gard and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.
For much the same reason, something with giant stompy robots and/or big bloody tanks. Something set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe comes to mind.
Atlas Shrugged
Think bigger Johnny Q: a 12 hour Baroque Cycle movie!
The Illuminatus Trilogy
The real actual every day portrayed life of Jesus H. Christ. From conception to death (or resurrection, depending on what really happened).
The Lensman series.
More good romantic comedies with lesbians like D. E. B. S.
A Kung Fu wuxia ensemble movie like Bloodsport, with the following cast in cloned/resurrected in their prime. Think Dirty Dozen meets Crouching Tiger…
Jackie Chan
Jet Li
Bruce Lee
Gordon Liu
Michelle Yeoh
Donnie Yen
Chuck Norris
…and extra tough-guy cameos by Lee Van Cleef and Charles Bronson.
A biography of Canute the Great, I’ve been fascinated by Vikings lately.
Any adaption of a Bernard Cornwall book that’s as good as or better than the Sharpe series.
Here are my impossible wishes:
I’d like to see (buy as novelisation, Betamax, VHS, DVD or any kind of available format, and faithfully rewatch until I could quote it from memory) the biopic on Christopher Marlowe’s life and times that wasn’t made in the late eighties. Starring Gary Oldman somewhere in between Sid & Nancy and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. Forget rom-coms about Shakespeare, Marlowe’s where the drama is.
Too bad that producers don’t like their heroes getting knifed through the eye in shady riverside taverns.
And the faithful adaptations of The Dark Is Rising (that’d be my ultimate Christmas fantasy flick) and His Dark Materials. But those wells seem to be well and truly poisoned now.
A pitch-perfect version of Snow Crash.
A Hammer’s Slammers adaptation of some sort, preferably based on Rolling Hot.
I don’t know that they’re impossible, but:
A decent adaptation of Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Non-abridged versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey. C’mon – if they could do an 11 hour version of War and Peace they could do those.
This one IS impossible – I’d like to see Jeremy Brett do the rest of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels (they can do a Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear, and I won’t complain if they leave out the non-Holmes half of each book). And redo the ones that didn’t turn out so well (There’s no need to turn The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire into a snoozer.) . Then he can go on and do some of the copies and pastiches.
I wanna see more Jules Verne novels turned into movies. Without gratuitous female characters, or camp humor. Gimme a decent From the Earth to the Moon, already!
More decent science fiction! I want The Stars my Destination! And Fredric Brown’s Arena, and Henry Kuttner’s Robots Have No Tails, and Robert Sheckley’s Immortality, Inc./Immortality Delivered without Mick Jagger and Anthony Hopkins but WITH Sheckley’s plot. I want The Puppet Masters done right (I don’t think it’s been hopelessly suillied by two bad adaptations)
Give Mike Jittlov some money and let him make The Wizard of Speed and Time the way he wanted to, not as it turned out. Or let him make anything.
Make more Frederick Forsythe movies! Do The Devil’s Alternative and more of his short stories. Just don’t do The Phantom in Manhattan.
Do Lovecraft straight. “The Call of Cthulhu” was a good start, but give us The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which would be a good movie, done properly. Redo The Shadow Over Innsmouth without the blood – “Dagon” went overboard.
Redo Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld, and Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. We really need to get on the SciFi Channel’s case – those “adaptations” were awful.
I would love to see a brand new version of Forever Amber, life of a loose woman in the royal court, London, 1600’s. (Though it would probably make a better mini-series, then people would think it was Moll Flanders! Again!) I’d like to see the old version, made in the '40s, but it seems to be one of those films that has just disappeared.
I’d like to see something of Ruth Rendell’s (aka Barbara Vine’s) adapted to a film. Or Robert Crais - Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, played by…?..
I would love to see The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. I’d read years ago Brad Pitt was interested, but the special effects needed weren’t advanced enough. Well, they are now!
I would love to see a live action The Last Unicorn. It was on, some time ago, with Jonathan Rhys Myers and Mia Farrow, before the deal fell through.
The Peace War, Marooned in Realtime and A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge.