"Unfilmable" books and movie adaptations

theverge.com/2016/5/20/11718266/blood-meridian-cormac-mccarthy-film-adaptation-unfilmable

Apart from obvious cash-ins from big movie studios, what do you guys think about adaptations? Do they ruin the original material? Add an extra layer of meaning? Do you regard them separately? Any book you would like to see a director try translating to the big screen?

After reading your title I was going to say Blood Meridian, but nevermind.

They're their own thing, to be judged with different criteria and categories. They could be good, they could be bad - their relationship with the source material is, I feel, incidental and not that relevant to the final assessment of a film's value.

As for what I'd like to see on the big screen, my picks are:

>Neuromancer (done by a competent director, not that fucker who made Cube for fuck's sake)

>Blood Meridian (I believe it's possible, but only, maybe, as an avant-gard-ish thing)

>Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

>Cyclonopedia (just because it'd be nice to see a philosophy books on the screen after the Society of the Spectacle)

i never understood the argument that a film can ruin a book. how so? look at your bookshelf. the book's still there, mate. the only thing that can ruin a book is censorship.

i also believe any narrative can be successfully adapted to any other form or medium of storytelling.

i'm considering watching this, but it did not look that good

I never read the book but the concept seems very interesting, and Hiddleston does some nice stuff aside his big movies (absolutely loved him in Only Lovers Left Alive).

>Neuromancer
Chris Cunningham once started working on it in the mid 00s, but it's either in development hell or he gave up during that slump he had between working with RDJ and Sheena Is A Parasite's music video.

I think Alejandro González Iñárritu would be able to pull off a pretty good Blood Meridian, then again a project like that would probably be too similar to The Revenant, so I doubt he'd be up for it.

>that 30 minute "test footage" Franco shot

I'm not kidding, that shit is on the same level of quality of a high school comm tech project. Does he know fucking nothing about how to handle a camera?

I can only imagine how badly he butchered pic related.

I was really hoping that Revenant would be able to satisfy my longings for a brutal and bloody western in the style of Blood Meridian
people thought I was weird when I told them I didn't think it was violent enough

I think a project of the scale of BM would be disqualified from having the level of violence that the novel describes. It would obviously require a lot of location shooting, extras, constructed village sets, the budget would be very high, and nobody is going to fund a movie that's going to get slapped with an NC-17. We'd at the very least be looking at a butchered theatrical cut with a possibly good director's cut on blu-ray.

On the other hand, it could be an HBO mini series, which I think is along the lines of what Michael Haneke proposed.

I wonder what stopped Haneke in his tracks on doing his version, he's the director of fucking Funny Games, Benny's Video and The Seventh Continent for God's sake. People expect his movies to be gruesomely bleak.

High-Rise isn't remotely unfilmable though. The whole time I was reading it I was thinking 'this would make a fun movie'.

Also I like how this poster almost gets around the 'you must include photos of the stars' limitation of film poster art.

The Catch-22 movie is surprisingly good considering what a challenge the source material must present. Includes quite a lot of the plot and manages to get something of the right feel.

I don't get why it looked so bad, was it the lighting?
Why is there such a big difference?

And that's what's stopping it.
But with deadpool being such a success, who knows?

Lighting, color grading (or lack thereof), ridiculous shakiness, lack of focus, overuse of fucking weird angles and close-ups, even the audio sounds like nobody gave a single shit about it. Everything about the footage is amateur, but at the same time I've seen really amateur shit that was much better put together than that. I honestly have no idea what Franco was thinking when he made that, let alone when he put it out for everyone to see. Judging from the reception that his feature length projects have received, I'm guessing it's just that he's fucking stupid.

donno if I'd really call Cyclonopedia a philosophy book

Is studio trickery really that big of a deal when using natural lighting? That is really dissapointing.
Also, do you know of any films that don't use focus at all? I've been interested in it.

No, he'd turn it into some contrived piece about the resiliency of the human spirit like all of his other wankfests. Lubezki would be a good choice for cinematography though

one hundred years of solitude would be pretty impossible to film


i think 'the waves' by virginia woolf would be an incredibly easy film to adapt if im thinking in the reverse.

They've yet to do The Hobbit justice.

I think Lubezki is the only choice, aside from maybe Roger Deakins on a good day. I really can't see any others getting the right look.

Siddhartha is unfilmable. I feel like anyone who tried would just end up with a bunch of shitty DUDE ACID LMAO kaleidoscopes of the final scene.
Demian, on the other hand, might make an interesting Hesse film adaptation. That being said, I know very little about movies or directors or any of this.