Posting that Megan Fox near-nudey pic was the best move I ever made for this site. For a while there, we were averaging over 1,000 hits a day. Easily. Clearing 2k sometimes. Of course, they were all baited in by my literacy genius.
Or just the Megan Fox pic.
It’s kind of sad, really. 2,000 people used this site as jack-off material. Marc started this site, so while I can’t speak to the actual mission statement, I’m finding it hard to believe that the purpose was ultimately to become a masturbatory vacation spot.
At least some of them clicked over to other posts, though. And proceeded to beat off to the shirtless picture of Marc, then. Shady ass internet!
Anyway, with Where The Wild Thing s Are coming out soon (and hipsters everywhere downloading the Arcade Fire anthology so that they can claim to have been friends since the band’s inception, even though Arcade Fire was kinda stale even by the time I graduated high school), there’s been a lot of discussion as to how Spike Jonze has managed to adapt one of the most popular childrens books of all time.
(The New York Times also did a tremendous write-up on Jonze’s career leading him to this movie. It’s a fantastic read, even if you’re not a Jonze fan – and how could you not be? – I suggest you read it, if nothing else to appreciate the different-for-everyone process that is becoming an acclaimed filmmaker.)
I have no doubt that Jonze did well with his adaptation and will be stoked to see it. I’m wondering, though, what other books from my childhood I’d like to see transition to the silver screen. There’s a certain timeless sense about titles like WTWTA, a book that’s been read to children for nearly 50 years. I remember it as a focal point of third grade, actually. “We” did a “project” (= our parents made a poster) on it and everything. It’s almost as if there’s a transcendent characteristic of books you grew up with. You’ll forgive them literary flaws or the process of character development in lieu of remembering how they made you felt at that point in your life, how they either opened you up to the creative world or inspired you or just made you feel secure when you fell asleep at night.
After the jump, I’ll list out a couple books from my childhood that I would love to see make it to theaters someday:
1. Redwall
I’d love to see Walden Media option Brian Jacques’ Redwall series and make it into a series of movies. Why Walden Media? Because they adapted Narnia and Terabithia really well, and I think they could do the same with the Redwall series. I doubt it would succumb to too much CGI cheesiness. Redwall, if you never read any of the books as a kid, is a series about a castle named Redwall in the middle of Mossflower woods and just chronicles a junkload of historical developments – usually epic battles featuring a litany of heroic figures – throughout the history of Redwall. It’s incredibly immersive and detailed, definitely on the high end of descriptive children’s literature. Probably one of the first books to really make me appreciate the ability of literature to transcend to-the-point statements and really paint a detailed world that more often than not left me craving scones, though I had/have no idea what a scone is. The only problem with adapting this series is where to start. Redwall would be an obvious starting point, but Martin the Warrior and Mossflower precede it chronologically and are fairly instrumental in setting up the story.
2. The Eyes of the Dragon
Few people know that Stephen King wrote a…well, I wouldn’t call it a children’s book per se, but it’s definitely aimed at the 10-and-up demographic. It’s also, though minimally, a Dark Tower tie-in, and chronicles (am I using that word enough?) the Flagg character at one point in his historical development. It’s a simple, well-told story that won’t escape the plot processing capacity of most kids, and for a King book at least, it’s not overly violent or morbid. It follows two brothers, both the progeny of a King, named Peter and Thomas. Peter is the gallant, pure, talented one of the two, surely destined to succeed his father. Thomas is awkward, not nearly as pure and not overly talented at anything but archery. As the King ages, his closest adviser – a magician named Flagg – sees that he has the opportunity to make a power play to gain control of the kingdom of Delain, and that he can do so by positioning the morally-ambiguous Thomas to succeed the King, as he rightfully surmises that Peter would dismiss his services and advice. So Flagg assasinates the King and frames Peter for the murder, leaving Thomas to take the crown. The rest of the book mainly details how an overwhelmed Thomas allows the evil Flagg to completely manipulate him and how Peter plots an escape from his imprisonment atop a gigantic tower and rise back to his rightful place on the throne. This was all practically made to be a movie, so I don’t know why it isn’t already.
3. A Wrinkle in Time
I would mostly like to see this adapted to the big screen because I’d love to see an eccentric director like Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam or hell even Alfonso Cuaron or Michel Gondry run with it. The book was trippy as hell, especially reading it in sixth grade. I would want the movie to be just as trippy, if not more so. Tesseracts, Mrs. Whatsit, five-year-old super geniuses and a planet controlled by a disembodied human brain. So much potential for trippiness there. I had no idea what the hell the book was about. Still don’t. Probably need to re-read it now that I am no longer twelve years old, though.
4. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales
Again, I primarily just want to see a director drop a ton of acid and then shoot this film. It’s actually a genius book in that’s a parody of banal fairy tales and the storytelling process itself. I say with all sincerity that this is an incredibly intelligent book, and you’d never know it until you were grown up and reading it to your own kids and thinking about how it plays with conventions. For instance, in the story Little Red Running Shorts, Jack (from Jack & the Beanstalk) accidentally enters Red’s story and tells the reader the entire story from beginning to end. Then Red doesn’t want to continue living out the story because she knows the ending is not good for her. My favorite in retrospect is The Really Ugly Duckling because it’s such a 90’s pessimistic, “whatever” take on the world…the joke being that the really ugly duckling grows up to be the really ugly duck. Tremendously anticlimactic, no? Anyway, someone like Terry Gilliam could do a lot of damage with these stories. Though it may not be aimed directly at kids because it’s more a joke of storytelling itself, I’d still love to see it.
5. Running Out of Time
Oh wait, M. Night Shymalan totally already stole this story and made it into a movie. He called it The Village. Except there were no monsters. Seriously, this was a crazy good book and author Margaret Peterson Haddix was pissed at Shymalan for stealing her already-published idea. So it’s only fair that her story gets a shot at becoming a film too, right? We all know one thing: it couldn’t possibly be any worse than Shymalan’s film.
