WatchmenComicMovie.com Forum

So Watchmen long regarded as the unfilmable Graphic Novel has been filmed. What other works are unfilmable? (Graphic Novel or otherwise). I'll start the ball rolling:

Cerebus - let's see someone film that puppy. (or should that be aardvark )

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Someone must have been telling lies about Walter K.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: There can never be a live action remake to the original anime TV series. It was distinctly made with Hideaki Anno's vision, style, and his psychological problems. The only person who could remake it is Anno himself, and I doubt he'll turn it into a live action feature film. Besides, he's already working on movie "retellings" of Evangelion.

Honorable mention: The Catcher in the Rye. A lot of people say the novel is unfilmable and there have been attempts to turn it into a movie. However, I have to disagree. I can see it as a movie, but it can only work if its true to the novel. Hell, it could even be an "art house" movie with experimental sequences.

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Non-GN example: The Silmarillion

I talked about this in a 'works you'd like to see adapted' thread. It makes me sad. Silmarillion = LOTR x 10 + lots of people dying. But with the time frame and the number of characters...yeah. I have no idea how you could do it.

Very sad.

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- James Joyce's Ulysses (for obvious reasons)
- Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (can't believe Hollywood is trying to make it)
- William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (Cronenberg's film was good, but it wasn't Naked Lunch)
- Blaise Cendrars' Moravagine (even more impenetrable than Naked Lunch)
- Anything by Mario De Sa-Carneiro (the author was legitimately insane)
- Anything by Antonin Artaud (again, completely out of his mind)

There really aren't any graphic novels that couldn't be filmed if the right people were behind the project. Despite what Alan Moore believes, Watchmen could be remade, in its entirety, as a miniseries.

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"I didn't know what his racket was. I start hitting him and I think 'Jeez! He's breathing funny! Does he have asthma?'"

A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Maybe as a long running TV show or even as a miniseries, but really, you could make a two hour movie out of each page, but not the whole thing.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
There is already the Michael Winterbottom movie, which follows the film in metaphysical spirt but is more about trying to make a Tristram Shandy movie rather than an adaptation of the novel.

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My unofficial and offical work-> http://www.youtube.com/movieboyandco

I remember reading this in AP Lang. One of the best mindfucks I've ever had.

I suppose I should contribute a work...how about Neil Gaiman's Sandman? It's possible to make it into a TV series/movie...I just don't ever want it to be.

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"My greatest fear in life is not knowing where Bjork is at any given moment." --Me

Yeah, it wouldn't be the same.

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I disagree. If Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is filmable, Naked Lunch has got to be.

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Say, Doc, did I ever tell you I'm the only metal that's liquid at room temperature?

As weird (and great) as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is, it's a lot more straightforward than Naked Lunch. The latter is all over the place.

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"I didn't know what his racket was. I start hitting him and I think 'Jeez! He's breathing funny! Does he have asthma?'"

It could work as a mini-series maybe.

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Say, Doc, did I ever tell you I'm the only metal that's liquid at room temperature?

Frankly, this quote sums up how I feel about this thread topic:

"If it can be thought, felt or imagined, it can be filmed" - Stanley Kubrick

This will ring especially true if Watchmen becomes a true success.

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"When someone asks if you're a god, you say YES!"

The trouble with 'Naked Lunch' is it is largely narrative-free. Or rather, is evidence of the birth-pangs of a new kind of narrative. Burroughs honed his techniques over the decades, and I think his later western 'The Place Of Dead Roads' would make a fantastic movie. You'd still have to invent a new kind of movie-language to nail it, but it could be done. In that sense 'Naked Lunch' also would work on the same terms, but you'd have to seriously adapt the hell out of it, and probably lose all that precious anarchic WTF along with it.

Burrough's would be one of the first to go to 'the Real Rorschach's death-camps.

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...evidently chicken-town.

Yes, it can be filmed. But can it make a compelling and coherent narrative?

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This is truly a madhouse. And I'm the lunatic running it. I've spent three years wondering if I should be proud or ashamed.

And will anyone watch it and understand it besides the fans of the original work?

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anything by the author Peter F Hamilton, particulalry his Night's Dawn Trilogy. unless you want a 12 hour anime epic.... unlikely since he's british.

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We're all actors, Laurie. I'm just an actor who read the script.

"The Children of Hurin" is possible. Maybe.
It would be lovely to see Beren and Luthien onscreen, too.
Those are the only two stories that come to mind as potentially working as stand-alone films. Perhaps Morgoth's fall and the corruption of Sauron, but as you said we'd be getting into pretty heavy character stuff. You would need one film by itself to explain the Maiar.
Maybe as a monstrously long mini-series?

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"Ah, walking into a field of flowers. Nothing says 'I'm going to rip your f*cking head off' like walking into a field of flowers!"--MadWorld

Well I mentioned one when I started the thread ("Cerebus"), but there are plenty of others. How about a "Smax" movie or better still a "Promethea" one.

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Someone must have been telling lies about Walter K.

Catcher in the Rye would be interesting, but I don't think it should be made into a film either.

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Anything and everything the Marquis de Sade had ever written. Whilst it CAN be filmed, it SHOULDN'T.

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