What stories do you wish someone would adapt as a movie?
When I say 'stories,' I mean any kind--fictional, or historical.
I've been wishing for years now that somebody would film a faithful adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's great detective novel Red Harvest.
Hammett's book has been ripped off--er, re-imagined three times: as a samurai movie (Yojimbo), as a spaghetti western (A Fistful of Dollars) and as a gangster film (Last Man Standing). And the Coen brothers have used elements of Red Harvest in films like Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing. But nobody has ever filmed Hammett's actual novel. And that's a crying shame.
I've also thought that, if handled with the necessary sensitivity and intelligence, historian Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland could be a riveting historical drama.
All previous Holocaust films--Schindler's List, The Pianist, etc.--have focused on the experience of the victims, and told the story from their perspective. And it is altogether fitting and proper that they have done so.
What Browning did, by contrast, was focus on the perpetrators, and try to understand why they acted the way they did. In particular, he tried to determine how and why a unit of draftee policemen took part in the genocide of Poland's Jews, both directly (by committing massacres) and indirectly (by rounding up Jews and sending them to the death camps).
His work was based on interviews that were conducted when this unit's crimes were investigated by the West German government in the 1960s.
Perhaps I've seen too many episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, but it seems to me that the easiest and best way to adapt Browning's work for the screen would be to set it in the 1960s, and make the main characters the investigators who interviewed the killers. The crimes in which the unit took part could then be shown in flashback.
Spike Lee's upcoming film Miracle at St. Anna seems to be taking a somewhat similar approach, in dramatizing both the experiences of African-American soldiers in the Italian Campaign, and the events of the Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre in August 1944.
If handled properly, like I said, a film based on Browning's Ordinary Men would have the potential to say something really new and important about this topic, while addressing the changes in German society and culture since the Second World War, and wider themes about the roots of violence.
When I say 'stories,' I mean any kind--fictional, or historical.
I've been wishing for years now that somebody would film a faithful adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's great detective novel Red Harvest.
Hammett's book has been ripped off--er, re-imagined three times: as a samurai movie (Yojimbo), as a spaghetti western (A Fistful of Dollars) and as a gangster film (Last Man Standing). And the Coen brothers have used elements of Red Harvest in films like Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing. But nobody has ever filmed Hammett's actual novel. And that's a crying shame.
I've also thought that, if handled with the necessary sensitivity and intelligence, historian Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland could be a riveting historical drama.
All previous Holocaust films--Schindler's List, The Pianist, etc.--have focused on the experience of the victims, and told the story from their perspective. And it is altogether fitting and proper that they have done so.
What Browning did, by contrast, was focus on the perpetrators, and try to understand why they acted the way they did. In particular, he tried to determine how and why a unit of draftee policemen took part in the genocide of Poland's Jews, both directly (by committing massacres) and indirectly (by rounding up Jews and sending them to the death camps).
His work was based on interviews that were conducted when this unit's crimes were investigated by the West German government in the 1960s.
Perhaps I've seen too many episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, but it seems to me that the easiest and best way to adapt Browning's work for the screen would be to set it in the 1960s, and make the main characters the investigators who interviewed the killers. The crimes in which the unit took part could then be shown in flashback.
Spike Lee's upcoming film Miracle at St. Anna seems to be taking a somewhat similar approach, in dramatizing both the experiences of African-American soldiers in the Italian Campaign, and the events of the Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre in August 1944.
If handled properly, like I said, a film based on Browning's Ordinary Men would have the potential to say something really new and important about this topic, while addressing the changes in German society and culture since the Second World War, and wider themes about the roots of violence.
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. However, I think 3001 would make for an interesting, at the very least visually appealing movie. However, whereas I'd like them to be more faithful to 2010, I'd prefer if they took quite a few liberties with 3001 since some parts are great but others are just pretty weak IMHO (the ending, for example).
