Tuesday, May 18, 2010

The Soto List: Books-To-Movie Edition


I use to read all the fucking time when I was a young lad. Now I'm all about movies so I don't read as much. But the books I have read in my lifetime, I was reading them and thinking "This would make a kickass movie!" So I figured it's time to unveil:
Top 6 Books I'd Like To See Made Into Movies

6. "Haunted" Written by Chuck Palahniuk-Palahniuk, who wrote the novels of "Fight Club" and "Choke" wrote this in 2005. My thinking was he wrote a novel that couldn't turned into a movie easily. But if this was turned into a movie, holy fucking shit it'd be a fucked up movie. The novel is pretty much 23 short stories about the characters in the novel. Every story is just one fucked up story after another. But the MAIN fucked up story is titled "Guts". If you haven't read it, I won't spoil it but I'll just say it deals with masturbation, a pool, and those sucktion ports in swimming pools. Enough said.
(Oddly enough, while doing research on this, I found this so maybe it will be a movie. But I wouldn't hold my breath.)

5. "The Wayside School Stories" Written by Louis Sachar-I read this series when I was a kid and thinking about them and reading the Wikipedia entry on it made me giddy. The stories focuses on a school called Wayside and the school is 30 stories tall with one class on each story. The book tells 30 stories about each kid on the 30th story and it's just weird. Also while reading the wikipedia, it mentions there's a TV show and maybe a movie in the works. I should reword this list but screw that noise.

4. "My Teacher..." series Written by Bruce Coville-Another series I read when I was a kid. The first book "My Teach is an Alien" tells the story of a substitute teacher who turns out to be an alien, sent to Earth to scout out for a reason. When the alien left, taking the nerd Peter, we go into the into the second book "My Teacher Fried My Brain", about another teacher who uses some sort of hair dryer and a kid's brain to contact the runaway alien to get back home. The third series "My Teacher Glows In The Dark" tells the story of what happened to the nerd Peter when he ran away with the alien. The fourth book "My Teacher Flunked The Planet" tells us what the story was about: the aliens hate Earth because of how we act to each other and scared they'll invent space travel and bring their awfulness to other planets, want to destroy it. So it's up to these three kids to save the planet. Honestly, these could be a good series of movies if done right. They're funny, insightful, and the story about how we act on this planet still rings true to this day.

3. Mike Nelson's "Death Rat" Written by Michael J. Nelson-When I heard Mystery Science Theater 3000 head writer and star Mike Nelson was writing a novel, I was estactic. When the book hit the stores, I scooped it up and read it in one day and it's a glorious wonderful book. The story focuses on Ponty, a failed writer who mainly writes boring history books. One day he gets the idea to write a fictional action book called "Death Rat" about a giant rat that attacked a town in the 1900's. But the publisher doesn't think Ponty looks like the type to write a historic action book, so he hires an actor named Jack to play the writer but Jack, not knowing any better, said the book is based on a true story. This gets around and soon hilarity ensues, with Jack and Ponty heading to the actual town and setting up a cover up by making it seem like the Death Rat thing actually happened. This would be an awesome fucking movie. If there was a movie I would attempt to write, it would be this one.

2. "The Face" Written by Dean Koontz-This one, as I was reading it, I was picturing the movie in the head as it played out. The "Face" in the movie is a high profile actor who's in tons of movies and as a result, he leaves his son home alone a lot. I picture "The Face" being played by Ben Affleck for some reason. Anyway, this book is kinda hard to talk about but it'd make an awesome movie. There's angels, time travel, a weird creepy dude, everything. If you haven't read it, read it, and let's hope a movie version isn't too far off.

1. "The Talisman" Written by Stephen King and Peter Straub-I FUCKIN' love this book. You don't even know. The story is super complicated. The easiest way to describe it would be it's about a kid on a cross country adventure looking for a way to save his dying mom. He has some liquid that can transport him to an alternate version of America and he has a companion that's a giant wolf guy who turns human when they come to the real world. There's way more to it than that. This would have to be a mini-series or sequels or something cause it's a long story and nothing-NOTHING-should be taken out.

Well there ya go. I'm sure there's other novels I'd like to see turned into movies but these were the first six I thought of. Feel free to sound off in the comments. Until next week...
-Jason

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