Part 3 of a 5 parts series

While some of the most engrossing films are based on original scripts, there are some equally awesome movies which are based on adaptations of some of today's best-selling novels and non-fiction books. In this feature, we listed 50 of the most anticipated book to movie adaptations for 2008 and beyond.

The list is quite diverse- thrillers and horror, coming-of-age, fantasy and adventure, classics, romantic novels, crime and drama. Some of them are currently 'works in progress' and soon to be released, while some are still at the stage of being optioned by various extremely excited filmmakers and producers.

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"Gilbert grafts the structure of romantic fiction upon the inquiries of reporting in this sprawling yet methodical travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery. Plagued with despair after a nasty divorce, the author, in her early 30s, divides a year equally among three dissimilar countries, exploring her competing urges for earthly delights and divine transcendence. First, pleasure: savoring Italy's buffet of delights — the world's best pizza, free-flowing wine and dashing conversation partners — Gilbert consumes la dolce vita as spiritual succor. 'I came to Italy pinched and thin,' she writes, but soon fills out in waist and soul. Then, prayer and ascetic rigor: seeking communion with the divine at a sacred ashram in India, Gilbert emulates the ways of yogis in grueling hours of meditation, struggling to still her churning mind. Finally, a balancing act in Bali, where Gilbert tries for equipoise 'betwixt and between' realms, studies with a merry medicine man and plunges into a charged love affair. Sustaining a chatty, conspiratorial tone, Gilbert fully engages readers in the year's cultural and emotional tapestry — conveying rapture with infectious brio, recalling anguish with touching candor — as she details her exotic tableau with history, anecdote and impression."

Film Version: As reported by Cinematical: "Paramount Pictures recently picked up the rights to Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir Eat, Pray, Love for Pretty Woman Julia Roberts to star. I know Pretty Woman was a long time ago but it meant a lot to me, ok? Besides, who doesn't love a "hooker with a heart of gold" story? I know I do. And remember that scene when Richard Gere showed her the box with the necklace in it and then closed the lid on her hand so she jumped and then they both laughed? Priceless. " [ read more ]

[ IMDb movie details ] [ Author's official website ]

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22. Dirt Music: One of tMF'S most popular film focus article is Dirt Music. Nancy Pearl, librarian, best-selling author and book reviewer has this to say about Tim Winton’s Dirt Music:

"Tim Winton is one of those writers whose books just keep getting better and better. Two of the Australian novelist's best books are Cloudstreet and The Riders. (The latter is a wonderfully infuriating choice for book clubs.) And his newest novel, Dirt Music, just might be his best book yet, in which the two main characters are haunted by their pasts.

Fleeing her family and her job as a nurse, Georgie Jutland moves in with wealthy widower Jim Buckridge in his home on White Point, on the coast of Western Australia, recognizing the emptiness in her life but unable to rouse herself enough to do anything to change it. Then by chance (but somehow in Winton's novels you get the feeling that it's fate) she meets musician Luther Fox, whose lost his love of music when his family was killed, and who now ekes out a living as a poacher, threatened and despised by the townspeople.

The feelings that spring up between Georgie and Lu are visceral, passionate, and ultimately dangerous, and their affair only comes to an end after an act of terrible violence. Luther disappears, and Georgie tries to track him down, following him along the coast and into the desert of Western and Northern Australia. This is one of those novels that will thrill readers looking for good writing, living, breathing, complicated characters, and a palpable sense of place, not to mention an engrossing story of loss and the possibility of forgiveness (for oneself and others) and grace. "

Film Version: Dirt Music is now one of Hanway films upcoming movies. It was supposed to be one of the late Heath Ledger's upcoming project, but due to his hectic schedule, the role went to Colin Farrel. Rachel Weisz plays one of the lead roles, Georgie.

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23. Dream Boy: Based on the novel by Jim Grimsley, "Dream Boy" chronicles the relationship between two gay teenagers in the rural south in the late 70's. More from Publishers Weekly:

"With this heartbreaking story of first love, Grimsley, recipient of the 1995 Sue Kaufman Prize for his first novel, Winter Birds, has crafted another potential award winner. Here he works that novel's theme: a father's abuse of his son into his sensitive depiction of a love affair between two high-school boys in the rural South. Nathan, a sophomore and the only child of an abusive, scripture-quoting, booze-guzzling father and a nearly invisible mother, becomes smitten with Roy, a senior who lives next door. Almost without realizing it (and with some reluctance on both sides), they begin an achingly tender romance. Ultimately, peer pressure leads to tragedy, and to a sort of metaphysical denouement that may strike some readers as over-the-top. But by that time, Grimsley's scenario has become so poignant and credible that the ending seems almost inevitable. He clearly understands the pain and confusion of budding love, and his present-tense narrative adds urgency and a touching immediacy to his tale. Without ever succumbing to cliche, Grimsley cuts with surgical precision to the heart of these characters' inchoate longings and barely repressed fears. Deceptively simple descriptive passages are hauntingly elegiac, and things left unsaid become as important as words expressed: these players' silences speak volumes. Romantic passion, violence and ultimate liberation coalesce in this singular display of literary craftsmanship.

Film Version: Four young actors to play the lead roles are Stephan Bender ( Nathan ), Maximillian Roeg ( Roy ), Randy Wayne ( Burke ) and Owen Beckman (Randy). Stephan Bender played the younger version of Clark Kent in Superman Returns. From Bender's website: "Dream Boy" has been invited to have its world premiere at one of the largest film festivals in the world, the 58th Annual Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale). The festival begins February 7th and also features the world premiere of a Marin Scorsese documentary. "Dream Boy" is one of three American films to be invited to the Panorama, the most prestigious portion of the festival and the opening of the event.

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24. The Food of Love by Anthony Capella. - Camilla Chaper reviews:

"In Rome, American college student Laura Patterson is fed up of slimy men and decides that she would much rather go out with a chef. Overhearing this is Tommaso, a charismatic waiter without a culinary bone in his body. He doesn't let that stop him though. In his pursuit of Laura he tells her that he is a fantastic chef and thus begins a comedy of masked identities.

As Laura falls in love with Tommaso's amazing food, we are introduced to Bruno, the less good-looking, less talented-with-women friend of Tommaso who has a unique ability… he's a great chef and is the one really making the food that Laura adores. However, Bruno too is falling in love with her, with a slight problem… she doesn't know he even exists in Tommaso's shadow. [ read more ]

Film Version: IMDb reported that the film will be directed by Peter Chelsom, who did Shall We Dance (Gere, Jennifer Lopez) and Serendipity.

[ IMDb movie details ] [ Author's official website ]

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25. The Restraint of Beasts- by Magnus Mills. Says amazon:

"Good fences may make good neighbors, but in Magnus Mills's first novel, bad fences make for high tension indeed. An eerie noir fable told in a grim, deadpan voice, The Restraint of Beasts begins as an unnamed English fence builder finds himself promoted to foreman over Tam and Richie, two undermotivated Scots laborers. They've just been sent out to fix a high-tension fence when events go horribly awry--and that's just the beginning. For the rest of the novel, as his charges drink, smoke, loaf, and pound the occasional post, things go wrong over and over again. In a sense, that's all you can truly rely on in Mills's fictional world. It is not giving away too much to say that with these particular fencers on the job, you'd best watch your back. And your front, for that matter. And maybe keep a firm eye on the skies, just in case.

The team travels south to England, where they live out of a damp, cold caravan in the town of Upper Bowland. They're soon at loggerheads with the sinister Hall brothers, whose business enterprises seem to combine fencing, butchering, sausage-making, and a fierce attachment to school meals. "We committed no end of good deeds!" cries John Hall. "Yet still we lost the school dinners! Always the authorities laying down some new requirement, one thing after another! This time is seems we must provide more living space. Very well! If that's the way they want it, we'll go on building fences for ever if necessary! We'll build pens and compounds and enclosures! And we'll make sure we never lose them again!"

In between placing Kafkaesque obstacles in his narrator's path, Mills seeds his debut with small, darkly comic touches: Tam's father, whom we last see erecting a stockade round his house "to stop you from coming home any more"; the sound of Richie's Black Sabbath tapes "slowly being stretched in an under-powered cassette player"; the caravan's encroaching squalor; An Early Bath for Thompson, the book that Richie tries without success to read. No doubt about it, The Restraint of Beasts is a strange novel that only grows stranger as it progresses; with luck, it augurs more brilliant, odd work from Mills.

Film Version: Ben Whishaw, Rhys Ifans and Eddie Marsan play three of the leading roles. Directed by Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski.

[ IMDb movie details ] [ NY Times Book review ]

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"On a whim, Young decided it might be interesting to visit notorious San Pedro Prison in La Paz, Bolivia, so he signed up for an illegal tour. The tour guide was Thomas McFadden, an inmate who had been imprisoned for drug smuggling. They struck up a friendship, and Young bribed the guards to let him stay "inside" for three months, where he recorded the particulars of life in one of the world's most peculiar prisons. San Pedro is like a city: inmates must "buy" their cells from real estate agents, drug lords live in the high style to which they are accustomed, and the destitute, as always, live a hand-to-mouth existence. Like most cities, San Pedro is a lively if decidedly cutthroat place, and Young, who teaches English in Colombia, writes about it as if he were Joseph Mitchell prowling Greenwich Village. The book is filled with characters ranging from outrageous to inspiring, and Young layers on the texture--sights, sounds, smells--until we feel as though we have visited the place. "

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27. The Sparrow : Reports totalfilm: "Warner Bros has just announced that they will be teaming up with Pitt the producer on The Sparrow, a tale adapted from Mary Doria Russell’s debut novel by North Country scribe Michael Seitzman. The story centres on a Jesuit priest who tags along with a gang of astronauts to a planet far, far away after earth receives its first contact with an alien race. The man of the cloth and the crew create outrage on the planet after befriending one of the planet’s two races. A terrible war breaks out and the priest suffers a crisis of faith. "

What It's about: In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet which will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question the meaning of being "human." When the lone survivor of the expedition, Emilio Sandoz, returns to Earth in 2059, he will try to explain what went wrong... Words like "provocative" and "compelling" will come to mind as you read this shocking novel about first contact with a race that creates music akin to both poetry and prayer.

Film Version: Might star Brad Pitt.

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Film Version: Matthew Goode (Match Point) and Ben Whishaw (Perfume - The Story of a Murderer) have been cast in the two key roles for the big-screen adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel Brideshead Revisited, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Goode will play Charles Ryder, the character made famous in the U.K. by Jeremy Irons in a previous television adaptation, while Whishaw is cast as the flamboyant aesthete Sebastian Flyte, previously played by Anthony Andrews.

[ IMDb movie details ] [ Hanway Films ]

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"The crowning achievement of one of Israel's literary masters, Adam Resurrected remains one of the most powerful works of Holocaust fiction ever written. A former circus clown who was spared the gas chamber so that he might entertain thousands of other Jews as they marched to their deaths, Adam Stein is now the ringleader at an asylum in the Negev desert populated solely by Holocaust survivors. Alternately more brilliant than the doctors and more insane than any of the patients, Adam struggles wildly to make sense of a world in which the line between sanity and madness has been irreversibly blurred. With the biting irony of Catch-22, the intellectual vigor of Saul Bellow, and the pathos and humanity that are Kaniuk's hallmarks, Adam Resurrected offers a vision of a modern hell that devastates even as it inches toward redemption.

Film Version: Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe will play lead roles, also in the cast are Moritz Bleibtreu, Derek Jacobi and Ayelet Zurer.

[ IMDb movie details ] [ Casting news from cinematical ]

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"Seldom do we find a historical novel written with both so much scholarship and passion. Marguerite Yourcenar not only incarnates the soul and spirit of Emperor Hadrian but of his time as well (second century A.D.). Narrated in the first person, it is the written meditations of a sick man who holds audience with his memories. Suffering from gout, knowing that his remaining days are few, Hadrian leaves a testimony of his life, his accomplishments, his philosophical outlook on life, and some pieces of good advise for his successor Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian was an architect of peace as well as buildings, he felt responsible for sustaining and increasing the beauty of his world, and his duties forced him "to serve as the incarnation of Providence," to the point that he felt he was indeed divine. A lover of the arts, of Greek culture, of the occult, he was above all a pragmatic man whose motto was "Strength, Justice and the Muses." For him life was "like a horse to whose motions one yields, but only after having trained the animal to the utmost." His positive attitude in every life experience allows him to look back as a man fully satisfied... except in matters of love! His passion and tragic death of young Antinous reminds him that "love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul."

Film Version: There were talks that Charlie Hunnam will play one of the leads, Antinous. However, it was recently denied by Mr. Hunnam's management. Antonio Banderas was also reported to be 'attached' to this movie, but the report remains unconfirmed.

[ IMDb movie details ] [ Updates from comingsoon.net ]

[ Read more: Part 4 ]

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