Five Good Books That Should Be Great Movies

Great novels that are due and overdue for a leap to the big screen.

Ignatius Reilly, the poster child for Development Hell

Books, as we’ve said before, are like movies that play in your head. Good books are movies you don’t mind watching over and over again on the screen in your mind. The film industry has appropriated all kinds of books virtually since its inception, taking material from the best fiction and nonfiction as well as from the lowest genre potboilers. There’s just no way of predicting how a book will translate: Hollywood has made masterpieces out of humble paperbacks but also made garbage of bona fide classics. Films and movies aren’t exactly alike, but they’re close enough in structure and pacing that it’s sometimes hard to believe filmmakers could screw up excellent source material. But they manage.

We were excited by recent news announcing that Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars novels are headed for filming soon, at last bringing two classics of science fiction into cinema. The following is five additional examples of worthy books we’d like to see on the screen, if only so that cinema’s much wider audience can take notice of their superb stories. Just for the sake of variety, we’ve tried to include samples of literature of many different styles and periods.

Life During Wartime, by Lucius Shepard (1987) Shepard’s Cold War thriller is part horror tale, part allegory and part military war epic, forming a mosaic of genres typical of his strange genius. Set amid a U.S.-led guerrilla war in Central America, the story follows infantryman David Mingolla as he joins an elite cadre of psychic tacticians but finds his fledgling abilities much much vaster than he realized, allowing him to bend reality to his will and challenge the other psychics manipulating world events. Suggested cast: We imagine Jeremy Renner (The Unusuals) playing Mingolla, with Vinessa Shaw (Two Lovers) as his adversary and kindred spirit Deborah. Imagine the film as: A cross between Scanners, Apocalypse Now, and The Matrix. Ideal director: David Cronenberg.

The Big Nowhere, by James Ellroy (1988) A homophobic sheriff’s deputy, a mafia thug and an anguished investigator desperately pursue a brutal serial killer through McCarthy-era Los Angeles while communists, gangsters and politicians jockey for power. The second and arguably the darkest of Ellroy’s “L.A. Quartet” cycle of novels, it’s similar in tone and structure to L.A. Confidential but even bleaker and more cynical. And its ending, for better or worse, is anything but “Hollywood.” Suggested cast: Ryan Gosling (Fracture) stars as the self-loathing Deputy Danny Upshaw, alongside Michael Hogan (Battlestar Galactica) as repentant enforcer Buzz Meeks and Dean Winters (Oz) as weary crusader Mal Considine. No one on Earth should be allowed to play the monumentally evil Dudley Smith except James Cromwell, who nailed the same role in L.A. Confidential. Imagine the film as: Chinatown, Body Double and Manhunter combined. Ideal director: James Gray.

Five Skies, by Ron Carlson (2007) Three men – a petty criminal, a recent widower, and a Hollywood construction foreman – work at building a stunt ramp beside a gorge in the Idaho wilderness, all so that a female stunt driver (think Danica Patrick) can jump the ravine on Pay Per View. The three men confront their past as the ramp slowly takes shape and form. Suggested cast: Damian Lewis (Life) stars as the guilt-ridden foreman Arthur Key, alongside Chris Pine (Star Trek) as thief Ronnie Panelli and Sam Elliott as the heartbroken Darwin Gallegos. Imagine the film as: The Wages of Fear and Tender Mercies merged with Days of Heaven. Ideal director: Terrence Malick.

The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford  (1927) Easy to visualize as a costume drama with an edgy anger to it - an antidote to the huffing and puffing Oscarbait of recent years – Ford’s Victorian Era novel swirls around two married couples spending weeks together over twenty years at a German spa. The titular good soldier, Edward Ashburnham, is a perfect English gentleman except for his almost compulsive need to seduce women – including his friend’s wife. Long praised as an influential work both for its structure and style, the book was previously a 1981 telepic, so its time has easily come round again. Suggested cast: Liev Shreiber (Defiance) and Cate Blanchett (Bandits) play Ashburnham and his lover Florence Dowell; Robert Downey, Jr. costars as the cuckolded John Dowell alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight) as Leonora Ashurnham. Imagine the film as: A mix of Last Year At Marienbad, The Ice Storm, and The English Patient. Ideal director: Michael Winterbottom.

Night Train, by Martin Amis (1997) Amis’ critically-lauded 1997 fling with the hardboiled detective genre features an alcoholic, emotionally crippled police detective trying to solve the apparent suicide of a beautiful scientist with every reason to live. The investigation takes a turn for the darkly existential, and Amis twists conventions further by making the troubled detective a woman, too. The novel’s abrupt ending is like two fingers joliting out of the page, poking you in the eyes. Suggested cast: Laura Linney (Breach) plays the self-destructive Detective Mike Hoolihan, Amy Adams (Enchanted) plays the deceased Jennifer Rockwell, and Paul Schneider (Away We Go) co-stars as Rockwell’s lover and suspected killer Trader Faulkner. Imagine the film as: The Pledge, Prime Suspect and Laura compressed into a brainy whodunnit. Ideal director: John Dahl.

- Michael Kabel
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Seven Lesser Known Comic Book Adaptations

Not every comic-to-screen leap was a blockbuster success. 

Following the colossal successes of The Dark Knight Returns and Iron Man this past summer, there’s a bit of a gold rush to get comic book adaptations finished and into theatres. This week a lot of the buzz was about casting: Don Cheadle will replace Terrence Howard in the Iron Man sequel, while rumors circulated that Warner Brothers wants Ryan Gosling (Lars and The Real Girl) to lead the upcoming Green Lantern movie and Brandon Routh to play Superman again when and if that film takes flight. Beyond casting announcements, the venerable Internet Movie Database shows film adaptations of Thor, The Flash, The Metal Men, Captain America and others in various stages of development. The Hugh Jackman-led X-Men Origins: Wolverine opens next May, and the Punisher: War Zone sequel arrives this December.

This image has nothing to do with the article. Its just too strange not to share.

Yet, for every attempt that hit its box office or audience reception target, there are probably three adaptations that tanked, fell victim to small budgets, or just couldn’t garner public interest. The following list is only a sampling of the projects that took their place in the “also ran” category. We’re sure a few are sentimental favorites to forigiving fans of their respective inspirations. (We like The Flash TV series.) Some aren’t bad, considering their limited resources, and some had unrealized potential. And one or two are terrible. But they’re all from comic books, for better or worse.

Sable (TV series) Premiered November 1987; lasted seven episodes. Based on the First Comics series by longtime Green Arrow writer-artist Mike Grell, Sable followed the exploits of freelance mercenary Jon Sable (Lewis Van Bergen) who worked days as an author of children’s books. Rene Russo, very early in her career, played his girlfriend Eden Kendall. The clip below shows its noirish promise, even if the show’s “alpha dog adventurer helps client of the week” conceit seems kinda passe now.

Steel (Movie) Released August 15, 1997; total U.S. box office: $1.7 million. In his own DC Comics series and in the Justice League comics and cartoon, Steel is a brilliant engineer and inventor who dedicates himself to defending good after Superman saves his life. So what better “actor” to convey such intellectual and moral strength than human marketing technique Shaquille O’Neal? Judd Nelson played the bad guy, while Richard Roundtree (Shaft) appeared as Uncle Joe. Though admittedly the film carried a modest $16 million budget, “Shaq Steel” still looks as if he swallowed an electromagnet and walked through a junkyard.

Dr. Strange (TV movie) Premiered September 6, 1978. Clad in a snaredrum-tight Disco perm and piles of gold jewelry, New York psychiatrist Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten) trains to be Earth’s new “Sorcerer Supreme” and rescue a young woman from the evil sorceress Morgan LeFay (Arrested Development’s Jessica Walter). Intended as the pilot to a television series that never happened, it featured Marvel Comics’ honcho Stan Lee as a consultant.

Supergirl (Movie) Released November 21, 1984; total U.S. Box Office: $15 million. For years the poster child for misbegotten comic adaptations, Supergirl was rushed into production after the success of the first two Superman films but struggled for distribution after Superman III flopped. Nevertheless, expanded versions released on DVD have clarified its choppily-edited story and somewhat repaired its reputation. Peter O’Toole, Mia Farrow, and Faye Dunaway overweigh the supporting cast, while underused 80s actress Helen Slater (Ruthless People) makes her debut as super-cousin Kara Zor-El.

Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV Movie) Premiered May 26, 1998. A decade before Samuel L. Jackson’s cameo in Iron Man, David Hasellhoff starred in this low budget TV movie about Marvel Comics’ Man from U.N.C.L.E. riff Nick Fury. The superspy and his former love Valentine Fontaine (Lisa Rinna) take on rival organization HYDRA for possession of a deadly virus. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight scribe David Goyer wrote the scrpt. The Hoff plays the hyper-macho Fury as… The Hoff with an eyepatch. Watch how S.H.I.E.L.D.’s flying headquarters looks like a basement steam room somewhere. (actual video begins about 23 seconds into clip.)

The Flash (TV Series) Premiered September 20, 1990; lasted 21 episodes. CBS brought the Scarlet Speedster to the small screen apparently motivated by the runaway success of Batman the year before. A TV movie pilot got the family-friendly series off and running, but constant schedule shifts and pre-emptions for Gulf War news coverage kept it from building an audience. Still, The Flash’s (John Wesley Shipp) costume has aged well, as have the special effects. The script quality suffered as the season wore on, however, though fan favorite guests stars like Mark Hamill, Tim Thomerson and Jeffrey Combs frequently livened things up. The series is even collected in a no-frills DVD package.

Captain America (TV movie) Premiered January 19, 1979. An attempt to update the character for the Evil Kenievel/motorcycle years of the 70s, this adaptation featured the original Captain America’s son trying to stop terrorists from detonating a hydrogen bomb on Phoenix, Arizona. There’s almost nothing about the clip below that doesn’t feel dated, especially the ersatz Cap’s costume and the long, loving takes of motorcycle stunts. A sequel TV movie, released just eleven months later, offered a comparatively more comics-accurate uniform and included Christopher Lee as its villain.

Monday we’ll have our review of Oliver Stone’s W. Have a super weekend.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD: Lars And The Real Girl

Lazy Direction Deflates Character Study Into Fluffy Hipster Romcom

Director Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl is a study of the toll that mental illness can exact upon a person, a subject usually neglected in contemporary cinema. Though anxious to foster sympathy, the film ends up trivializing its dark subject matter by veering into the realm of cute, oversimplified fantasy.

The film’s titular Lars (Ryan Gosling) suffers from intense shyness: uncomfortable around other people and terrified of physical contact. To stifle his loneliness, he purchases a “real doll,” an incredibly lifelike, anatomically correct mannequin (read: sex toy) that he names Bianca. His relationship with the doll is completely innocent and nonsexual, but he nevertheless invents a personal history for it and routinely speaks to it as if it were an actual person. So when his family doctor (Patricia Clarkson) abandons conventional psychology and instructs Lars’ friends and family to indulge him in his delusions, they accept the doll as one of the gang. But as he becomes increasingly unable to monopolize Bianca’s use, Lars grows ever more possessive and resentful of the “life” that it has without him. Of course he eventually gets better, and cue the crowd-pleasing happy ending.

The premise certainly carries the potential for relevance, with its contrast of a seductively impossible ideal versus confronting riskier chances for genuine happiness. Martin Scorsese brilliantly examined a similar conceit in his dark masterpiece The King of Comedy. But dark waters scare the kids, and Gillespie chickens out with trendier fare. The angst is sugar-coated in twee for its audience: fuzzy vintage sweaters, whimsically rugged faces and quaint Rockwellian settings abound. Sure, the intentionally cute and precious trappings make the potentially unsettling subject matter more palatable, but they also distract from Lars’ pain – the heart of the matter. So to remind the viewer of the hero’s distress, Gillespie employs clumsily facile camerawork: shaky, handheld cameras are used when Lars is onscreen, but stationary cameras capture the action when he isn’t. Lars is unstable everyone! Because the camera says so! Do you get it? Do you?

Nancy Oliver’s script provides amateurishly little insight into the cause of Lars’ delusions, doling out occasional crumbs about his mother’s untimely death during childbirth and his anxiety about his sister-in-law’s pregnancy. Millions of unfortunate people grow up without a mother, but there’s no explanation for the extraordinary degree of Lars’s trauma or the outlandish results it compels. Once Bianca arrives, suspension of disbelief goes out the window – nobody makes fun of him for walking around town with a sex toy? The local minister allows it into his church service? And what healthcare provider in the world would admit a sex doll into an emergency room? 

Even worse, the dialogue smacks of boilerplate made-for-Lifetime drivel, hitting its nadir when Lars’s sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer) explains the town’s collective decision to serve as an enabler: “All these people love you! We do it for you!”

Despite the glaring scriptural shortcomings, the film could still be salvaged if Gillepsie made the audience care about Lars as a character. Regrettably, Gosling’s synthetic performance consists of a string of overly-rehearsed tics and tells incapable of eliciting anything beyond an occasional bemused grin. It’s a plastic performance for a plastic film. On the bright side Clarkson, quite possibly the most underrated actress around right now, brings much needed gravitas, while Mortimer exudes frustrated compassion as Lars’s pregnant sister-in-law. Kelli Garner is adorable as a goofball co-worker inexplicably smitten with Lars.  Oddly the most compelling and genuine scenes occur between Lars and his guilt-stricken older brother Gus (Paul Schneider, in a radical departure from his creepy turn in The Assassination of Jesse James).

By no means the first film to focus on an unsound protagonist, Lars and the Real Girl lacks the palpable tension and desperation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s similar Punch Drunk Love, and doesn’t remotely approach the hopeless anguish of Scorsese’s The Aviator.  Admittedly, mental illness is a tough sell, but to cloak such an uncomfortable subject with illusions of universal warmth and acceptance is baldly irresponsible. Rather than take the opportunity to seriously and sensitively foster dialogue, Gillespie exploits a condition by creating a feel-good romcom for the Sundance set.

- Steve Kabel