Books I Would Love To See As Movies

I would like to first start off by saying that I am not a book-to-movie purist.  That means that I have never been one to say "well, the book was better", like a hipster.  No.  A book cannot be turned into a film at 100% accuracy, so I don't expect it.  As long as the general feeling is there and the same story comes across.  I really hate it when people get so caught up in inconsequential little things like, "her hair is not the right color in the movie because it was supposed to be blonde in the book".  Come on.  Get over yourself.  Congratulations.  We all now know you read the book.  Good for you.

With that said, I actually really love to see books turned into movies.  Books are a great source of story material (duh) and for that group of tremendously sad people who don't read (I'm looking at some of my brothers!), this is a way to expose them to some excellent stories.  I was so excited to see that The Maze Runner was going to film, and I have to say that I was very happy with it and I'm hoping to be able to see The Scorch Trials as well.  One book I have loved so much was Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz.  Fortunately this was made into a pretty good film.  Unfortunately, it was so muddled by legal woes that it never got wide release and the finished film floundered.  Lucky for you, Odd Thomas is available on Netflix and I would strongly recommend it.  So I wanted to compile of list books that I would love to see made into films if only to expose more people to some of these great works.  Here you go, in no specific order:

1:  A Spell for Chameleon:  This is a fantasy book by Piers Anthony, written in the 70's, but is one of my favorite fantasy series ever.  This was one of the first books I remember finishing as a kid and loving the story, which is still a great tale even by today's standards. It won the Best Novel of the Year Award back in 1977.  It's a tale about a land called Xanth where everyone is born with a magical talent, whether it is killing your enemy with a death curse or being able to turn a white rose into a red one.  Every once in a while someone is born without a talent and that person is then exiled when he/she comes of age.  Bink is such a person, who seems to have no identifiable talent and is on the verge of exile when a magician tells him that he has a wizard-caliber talent, something so powerful that he could use it to defeat an evil magician that held the land in fear, but if he can't find out what it is, then would soon be banished.  Chameleon is a great fantasy story unlike anything that you might have read and it spawned a large series of sequels to follow that are equally fun.  If I had to cast it, I would love to see Anton Yelchin as Bink.  He's got the youth and humor that would really bring out the eventual hero of the story.

2:  A Discovery of Witches:  A novel by Deborah Harkness, Discovery is a wonderful fantasy of a woman who happens to be a modern witch, raised with simple spells, who now studies old literature at the university.  In her attempt to uncover an ancient text to research for her studies, she inadvertently triggers a series of events that put her in danger.  She learns that the book had been bound by a spell to stay secret from other witches that want to learn its dangerous spells.  Discovery is a great and engrossing read.  The story is fun and there are two other books as part of the All Souls Trilogy.  This would be a fun adventure on film, and I would put Rachel McAdams or Scarlett Johanssen as the lead.

3:  Ready Player One:  Alright.  Anybody who loves this book knows that Steven Spielberg heard our pleas and is actually going to helm this project.  With that said, THANK HEAVENS.  Spielberg would be the perfect dude to head up this story.  For all of you who haven't enjoyed this book yet, I can try to give you a little taste.  In a dystopian future, a teen boy Wade Watts gets away from the daily problems in his horrible life by logging into a world-wide computer game named "The Oasis", which is like a virtual reality world that allows its players to be anyone and to travel endless worlds.  When the gazillionaire creator of the game world dies, his will offers his entire fortune up as a prize to anybody who can complete a complex treasure hunt within the game.  The hunt has been going on for years now and as Wade gets closer to understanding the difficult clues, he finds himself up against corporations who would do anything, in the game or in the real world, to make sure he doesn't win.  This is such a fun book, filled with lots of video game references from our atari and nintendo faves of the 80's.  If/when I see this in the theater, I would really love it if the video game world was not animated, but more of a TRON-esque landscape of characters and places.  But like I said, I am very happy that Spielberg is a part of this and I trust his excellent judgement.  After all, he has created some of my favorite films.

4:  The Farm:  The book by Emily McKay has spawned sequels as well.  It's a tale set in yet another dystopian future, where the world has been over run by blood sucking mutant humans called Ticks.  The survivors have built barricaded shelters around the globe where the youth of the world are rounded up and quarantined.  These shelters, termed Farms by the kids that live there, use the kids to produce blood to keep the Ticks at bay.  Lily and her autistic sister Mel live in such a Farm and the conditions there are becoming too dangerous.  Mel has uncanny abilities that help her see things that others can't see, like a portion of the electric fence that gets turned off every night.  Lily devises a plan to escape with Mel, which becomes more complicated when a new guy shows up at the Farm, a kid that Lily once knew before everything went to Hell.  He learns of their plan, but Lily must decide if he is trustworthy enough to help them on the outside if they can ever leave the Farm.  Dark and compelling, I really have loved reading these books.  The world is dark and very apocalyptic (Walking Dead-esque), which I totally enjoy.  This is like a vampire story, if the vampires were also like zombies.  This would be such an exciting story for film, and I would cast Brit Robertson as Lily and maybe Alex Pettyfer as Carter, the guy that shows up at the Farm.

5:  Storm Front:  Okay.  I know that The Dresden Files (TV show that ran for a short while on SciFi) already gave this a go, but it kind of failed miserably, and I think that that was because it wasn't true enough to the source material.  So I would like to see it again, maybe silver screen this time.  The first book in the Dresden series by Jim Butcher tells the story of Harry Dresden, a wizard that lives in modern day Chicago, who occasionally consults with the Chicago PD on any of those cases that don't quite make logical sense.  In Storm Front, he is asked to consult on a grisly double murder that seems to have black magical tracings.  The stories of Harry Dresden are both fantasy and mystery with a modern noir twist.  Dresden is quirky, and the many characters that surround him are equally as fun.  Like Bob, for example.  This is where the TV show really got it wrong.  Bob is an ancient spirit trapped in a skull who gives Harry advice when needed.  That sounds scary, until you realize that Bob is quiet obnoxious and the best payment for his advice is to provide him with steamy romance novels.  He really likes that.  In the TV show, Bob was just some boring dude that helped Harry every once in a while.  If done right, these stories would make for really fun films.  I don't know why, but I often think of Harry portrayed as James Roday, probably because of his comedic wise-crack timing but also a little ruggedly handsome.

There's a brief list of some of my favorites.  But this is not all inclusive, by no means.  If you have any others I would love to hear about them.  Maybe someone out there will heed our desires (I'm looking at you, Joss Whedon or Guillermo Del Toro)!!!

Until next time,
The pen is mightier than the sword.