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Books I’d Like to See Made Into Movies (Top Ten Tuesday)

By Brookelorren on May 14, 2019May 13, 201938 Comments

Hello again! It’s Tuesday again, so you know what that means. Time for another edition of Top Ten Tuesday! Each week, it’s hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! Today is a “Page to Screen Freebie”. I’ve decided to do one on “Books I’d Like to See Made Into Movies”. I’ve done one other Top Ten Tuesday on movies, so if you’re interested, you can also see “Books Made Into Movies: Which Was Better?” Let’s get started!

Legend – Marie Lu

Of course I have to put my favorite book up on this list. I don’t watch a lot of movies, but I would definitely go to see this one. And you’d probably get sick of hearing me talk about this on my blog in the months leading up to its release. It’s been optioned for a movie, but that still means there’s fifty bajillion steps between that and an actual movie coming out, and at any one point, the movie could fall through.

An Ember in the Ashes – Sabaa Tahir

An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir would make an amazing movie, if it was done right. You’d have to get the kind of director that could do Lord of the Rings style epic movies. The final book in this series isn’t quite done yet, and it’s supposed to release in 2020, so maybe wait to start doing this for a bit? But I’d love to see this as a movie… someday.

Carve the Mark – Veronica Roth

Carve the Mark would make a great movie, if it was done right. I loved this duology and I keep wanting to give it a reread at some point. This might actually be easier to do as a movie than Divergent, but you’d want to get someone to direct it that’s good at making space movies.

Strange the Dreamer – Laini Taylor

Laini Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer would make a good movie. Ten or twenty years ago, the moths might have been difficult to render on a movie screen, but you could completely do it with CGI now.

When Dimple Met Rishi – Sandhya Menon

Although I haven’t seen To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (like I said, I don’t watch many movies), it was really popular, at least among book lovers. When Dimple Met Rishi would be the cutest movie. Unlike all of the fantasy books listed above, this one wouldn’t need a ton of CGI or epic sets either. That’s one of the most difficult things about bringing fantasy and/or dystopian books to life… they don’t always translate well to movies.

Flame in the Mist – Renée Ahdieh

Flame in the Mist would make a great movie. The casting directors would have to make sure that they got the right actress to play Mariko, but if they did, this movie could have a lot of potential. The medieval Japanese-like setting could be gorgeous to see upon a large screen.

Enchantée – Gita Trelease

I’d love to see Enchantée as a movie. The contrast between the poor beggars on the street and the nobility lounging about in the palace would be interesting to see. Although there have been movies done that take place in revolutionary France, as far as I know, a lot of them don’t have magic to them.

The Last Year of the War – Susan Meissner

If The Last Year of the War were made into a movie, you’d definitely have to get out the tissues. A girl of German descent befriending a girl of Japanese descent in the US internment camps, losing each other, and then meeting again right before Alzheimer’s and cancer threaten to take them? Yes please!

Sky Without Stars – Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell

I’d love to see this dystopian movie set in a French-like society on another planet turned into a movie. However, movie makers might want to hold off a bit, since the book series isn’t done yet. I’d love to see it as a movie when the books are finished though!

Spectacle – Jodie Lynn Zdrock

People love a good crime thriller. Spectacle, if done as a movie, would have visits to an old-timey morgue, visions, killings, a murder mystery, and a thrilling chase through catacombs. I could definitely see there being a market for a movie like this.

Bonus – Dragonlance!

We were on our way to go see Detective Pikachu on Sunday and my husband mentioned that they were thinking of making another Dragonlance movie? The first time they attempted to make a Dragonlance movie, it was terrible. My kids were named after Dragonlance characters and they deserve better than that. I really hope that this movie turns out well.

There’s my ten for the week, plus a bonus! What did you all come up with? I’m looking forward to seeing your ideas. Next week, we’re going to talk about books I refuse to let anyone touch. See you then!

Gosnell was Better Than Expected

By Brookelorren on October 22, 2018Leave a Comment

My husband and I just got back from seeing the Gosnell movie. It was better than I expected it to be. We had the theater all to ourselves, which (although bad for movie sales) was kind of nice because we didn’t have to worry about talking when we had a comment to make.

In the interest of full disclosure, I made a contribution to Indigogo in May 2014 to help fund this movie, in exchange for a DVD.

For people who don’t know, Kermit Gosnell ran an abortion clinic in Philadelphia for decades. He went to trial in 2013 after a raid on his facility, which was meant to find drug trafficking (writing scripts for things like Oxycontin and percocet), discovered a dirty, dangerous facility with the bodies of dead fetuses lying in refrigerators and on the floor.

What I found most interesting about this movie was that it wasn’t necessarily a pro-life or pro-choice movie. It stuck to the facts of the case and didn’t seem to make a judgement either way. I would like to think that very few people would be on Mr. Gosnell’s side. If you’re pro-life, then you wouldn’t really want him practicing, but if you’re pro-choice, then do you really want women going to an unsafe facility which spread STDs and killed at least one patient?

I really liked how they showed the condition of the facility. This is the first part where I was really glad that my husband and I were the only people in the theater. There were cats roaming the facility (one agent serving the warrant stepped on cat feces). Trash was all over the place. When they opened the fridge, there were biohazard bags in there along with milk cartons. This movie is not for the squeamish.

Later, the police serve a warrant in Gosnell’s house. His personal home was really bad as well (minus the cat feces and blood). When investigators went into his basement, there was a dead cat on the floor covered with bugs. They had to run out of the place. This part was like watching a horror movie (perfect for October viewing). Gosnell isn’t a horror movie, and there is a lot of courtroom stuff that goes on later in the movie, but this part did feel like one.

After watching this movie, I feel a little sorry for the guy, even though he did some evil things. I think he’s slightly insane. There were many times when he’d admit to something without realizing the wrongness of it. One example: he mentioned that the cats in his facility got over 100 dead mice for him. He expressed concern for his turtles, which he admitted (in court) were endangered species. As they raided his home, he played the piano like nothing was going on. He thought he was doing the women in his community a favor because he would take on riskier abortion procedures (even though they were illegal).

I thought Gosnell was well-done and I’m glad I went to go see it. I think they tried to make the story as true-to-life as possible. During the credits, they showed actual footage of the filthy clinic, Gosnell playing piano while his home was being raided, the refrigerator, the jars of baby feet that were kept in a cupboard and other actual pictures from the case. It’s too bad that more people aren’t seeing the movie, and might see it as controversial. There shouldn’t be anything controversial about wanting people to have access to safe, clean medical facilities.

Books Made into Movies: Which Was Better? (Top Ten Tuesday)

By Brookelorren on September 4, 2018September 3, 201850 Comments

It’s Tuesday again, and you know what that means… another Top Ten Tuesday post. Today’s Topic is supposed to be “Bingeworthy TV Shows/Movies”, but I’ll be doing a post on “Books That Were Made into Movies: Which Was Better?” Because I’m sure that you’re not interested in this:

Or this:

And since I usually only watch TV shows during my Russian meetup group, I think I’ll stick to books (the last one, Red Queen, has nothing to do with the Aveyard books). These are in no particular order.

How could I write a Top Ten Tuesday post about movies without including Divergent? Divergent was the movie that got me into reading YA. I actually saw the movie trailer before I read the book, and I read the book before I saw the movie. Despite the fact that I own all the movies in this series and have seen them several times (mostly in Spanish to practice my language skills), I actually don’t think the movie was all that great. I don’t think Shailene Woodley did an outstanding acting job here, and although Theo James is kinda hot, his acting was just okay as well. Plus, they get the stupidest details wrong in these movies (eye color, tattoos, location of the safe house in book 1…). I understand that they changed some of the details for artistic license, but these movies could have been a lot more faithful to the books. Maybe I’m bothered by it because of the hours and hours and hours of Divergent trivia that I’ve played on QuizUp.

Verdict: Books were better.

The Hunger Games is another book series that I loved that was made into movies. I think I watched the first movie before I read the books, but I read the rest of the books before I saw the movies. This was a series that I read in both English and in Spanish.

I think that they did a great job on the movies here. They seemed to stay fairly faithful to the books, and the acting was decent as well. I would have liked the movies even if I hadn’t read the books.

Verdict: Both the books and movies were good.

The Little House on the Prairie books are classic books. I don’t know how many times I read the set when I was a kid. The television show that ran in the 1980s was fairly popular as well. When my kids were younger, we’d watch the TV show with them, and it’s still pretty good.

However, even though the television show was pretty good, I still think that the books were better. The TV series had a feel-good message and moral lessons, but it wasn’t enough to beat the books.

Verdict: Books were better.

Anne of Green Gables is another series that I’ve read that they made into movies. I haven’t watched the Netflix series based on this show, but I did see some movies that they did of this show years ago. I wasn’t really that impressed (I think that I’ve seen two different versions of this book to screen adaptation). Even if the movies had been good, they didn’t cover the entire series, and Rilla of Ingleside is actually my favorite book of the entire series, I think.

Verdict: Books were better.

Forrest Gump is one of my all-time favorite movies. I just love the story, and the music is wonderful as well. I’ve seen this movie quite a few times.

The book, on the other hand (pictured here), is not quite as good. I don’t remember it all that well, but I do remember that it was just okay. I think I found it on sale, along with its sequel, Gump & Co. Forrest is not the same guy in the book as he is in the movie, and he’s not as likeable. Not by a long shot.

Verdict: Movie was better.

Like Divergent, I had never heard of The 5th Wave until I had seen the movie trailer. I went ahead and read the book before I saw the movie though. I thought the book was fantastic, and I flew right through it. This book made my top ten list of favorite books for the year that I read it in (the other books in the trilogy were not as good and didn’t make my favorite books list, however).

I thought the movie was pretty good, however, it really paled in comparison to the book.

Verdict: Book was better.

I was so excited when I heard that they were going to make Dragons of Autumn Twilight into a movie. After all, I named my kids after characters in these books! Alas, instead of making a really cool live-action film like The Lord of the Rings, they ended up making a really terrible cartoon instead. We were really disappointed.

I’m sure that you’ve heard to never judge a book by its movie, and that is doubly true for this book. The book series is fantastic! Unfortunately, I think that the movie that goes along with this book is the worst on the list.

Verdict: Book was WAY better.

The Lord of the Rings is a classic book series. I read it a long time ago, and I don’t remember much about it because I had aspartame poisoning at the time (it really killed my memory), but I remember liking the books.

Of course, I’ve seen all of the movies as well, and they were also great. They did a wonderful job making these movies, and I wish that they had done such an amazing job on Dragons of Autumn Twilight as they did on these movies. Before these movies came out, I was never really impressed by fantasy books that had been turned into movies. But these showed me that they could be done well.

Verdict: Both the books and movies were good.

Ender’s Game is another book that I was really excited to see turned into a movie. I read three of the books in this series in high school and I thought that they were really good, so I had to go see the movie when it came out.

While I thought the movie was good, I thought that there was a lot that was in the book that they ended up having to leave out for the movie. I know that they have to edit movies for time and all, but I think that all that ended up getting cut out made the movie inferior to the book.

Verdict: Book was better.

Unbroken was a great movie. It had a wonderful message, and it left me crying at the end. I think I saw the movie on Christmas day, and my dh gave me a copy of the book as a present on the same day, so I saw the movie first.

Even though I thought the movie was really good, there is only so much you can put in a movie. The guy spent a long time on a life raft, and then he went to a prisoner of war camp. Then when he went home he had to recover. It’s difficult to pack into a short movie

Verdict: Book was better.

So that was this week’s Top Ten Tuesday Topic. Come back next week where I talk about Hidden Gems: books that were really great, but not everybody knows about yet.

Wonderful Legend News!

By Brookelorren on July 27, 2018July 27, 20182 Comments

If you read this book for nearly any length of time at all, then you’ll discover that I love Legend, and Marie Lu’s books in general. I’ve probably mentioned at least one of her books every week that I’ve been active on this blog. Well, today I heard some WONDERFUL Legend news while I was on my break at work. There is still a chance that there will be a Legend movie!

I’m certainly not an expert on how all this works, but from what I understand, a movie studio initially buys the rights to a movie for a certain period of time. At that point, they can either make the movie… or not. CBS Films originally bought the rights to the Legend movie, but nothing ever came from it. BCDF Pictures now has the rights to the movie. So evidently, there is still enough interest for this to potentially happen.

I so hope this happens. This is a wonderful book and a movie would allow more people to hear about it. I had never heard of Divergent until I saw the movie trailer… and the book is so much better than the movie. The Legend fanfiction category over at AO3 is getting a little lonely.

That leads me to the other Legendy part of my day. It really was a great day for me. I participated in Camp NaNoWriMo this year, with a goal of 20,000 words. I also decided to do a fun little (okay, little is a little bit of a misnomer) challenge over at the Archive of Our Own Writers Group over on Facebook. They had a little game called “fandom roulette” where they would roll a specific type of story for me to write. I was challenged to write a gen fusion fic in my current fandom.

Gen fics are those that don’t have a love relationship, fusion fics are those where characters are written into another fandom as if they’ve always been there. So for my challenge (and Camp NaNoWriMo) I wrote a story where Day and June are born in the Divergent world and they both end up joining Dauntless. On Tuesday night, I won Camp NaNoWriMo with this story, My New Best Friend.

I published chapter 1 on Wednesday morning. Within 24 hours, I had 50 hits. I have absolutely no idea where all those hits came from. As a comparison, my most successful Legend fanfic, Like Normal People, only has gotten 757 hits in 2 1/2 years. The story with my most hits ever is Selfless, which is in the Divergent fandom, and it has a grand total of 2357 hits, but that story is almost 3 1/2 years old.

So today was a wonderful day, with both the movie news and my fanfic doing so well. It made my day at work seem to fly by, I was so happy. Hopefully, if you like Legend as well, the exciting movie news will actually result in some sort of movie!

The Fool: Ray Comfort’s Inspiring Documentary

By Brookelorren on May 27, 2018Leave a Comment

I had the opportunity to watch Ray Comfort’s new upcoming YouTube documentary The Fool this evening. I found it to be very interesting and inspiring.

If you’re unfamiliar with who Ray Comfort is, he’s an evangelist who was originally born in New Zealand, but has been working out of Southern California (primarily Huntington Beach) for the last decade or so. He has partnered with the former atheist child actor turned Christian, Kirk Cameron, for many years. He’s the guy in charge of Living Waters.com as well as The Way of the Master.

The Fool speaks about how a little comedy bit that Comfort had been using for years was ridiculed incessantly — but was eventually used mightily by God. He had a comedy bit where he spoke about how a Coke can looked like it had a designer, and then compared it to a banana. Eventually, the atheist community picked up on it, and started calling him a buffoon and an idiot, and gave him the moniker “Bananaman”. While they were relentlessly mocking him, however, the gospel was getting out — to millions of people.

Being “Bananaman” opened the door for Ray Comfort to speak to many atheists and people who opposed his work, but most of the people were cordial with him. His ability to reach all of these people would not have been possible if people hadn’t been mocking him for all of these years.

For a movie, The Fool is fairly short — it’s a little over an hour. It kept my interest the entire time. I cried a little towards the end. When he goes to Huntington Beach, comfort often talks to people, and some people come to see him quite often. The Fool cuts to scenes where he talks to one of these regulars; I’m not going to spoil what happens, but it did leave me in tears.

When it is released (sorry, I don’t know the date) it will be released for free on YouTube. I will definitely be sharing it with my friends, because I found it to be inspirational and convicting.