The Great Gatsby is about to get the celluloid treatment again. And while we can only hope that Baz Luhrmann does it justice, a great book does not automatically equal a great film. (The Scarlett Letter much?) The Huffington Post lists 15 novels that it considers "unfilmable":
- Pale Fire, by Vladamir Nabokov: Truly a riddle, this footnote-ridden book revolves around a 999-line poem.
- The Waves, by Virginia Woolf: It's basically six monologues, making the book one big monologue.
- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: It's not the book, so much as the author, that's the issue here. A famously private recluse, HuffPo can't imagine him giving anyone the movie rights.
- Maus by Art Spiegelman: This Holocaust-era biography/graphic novel about Spiegelman's father depicts the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats ... just too serious for a cartoon. Notes HuffPo, it's tough when your pitch is: "Think Schindler's List, but with dogs and reindeer."
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here for the complete list, which, of course, includes a book by James Joyce.
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