Rumors of Pratchett Film

kongjie writes "The BBC reports on the rumored possibility of Terry Pratchett's novel Wee Free Men being made into a Hollywood film, with Raimi attached to it. This would be the first, although in the past his stuff has made the television screen."

Comments

Re:I'll...

[jwilloug]

Intended audience, I'm sure. Wee Free Men is written for kids, it's not really supposed to stand against the "real" Discworld books. Presumably the movie is going after the Harry Potter crowd.

And you didn't like the rats book? The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents actually won the Carnegie Medal for best children's book of 2001. I'm surprised it wasn't the one chosen for the movie (rats not photogenic enough?).

Converging lines

[svunt]

Well, as Pratchett's Discworld series has been getting more predictable, less thought-provoking and generally less entertaining for several years, it's no surprise that the film industry has decided that his time has come. Finally, he's nailed the mediocrity demanded by cinema, bravo Mr P!

Re:Converging lines

[NoMaster]

I'd agree with you, in general - it seems like, for a while at least, he listened too much to the sad inbred clique of a.f.p. and wrote books that tried to fit everybody's favourite characters and bits in. After the first one of those, they became formulaic - every book had to have the Watch, A-M, the Wizards, at least a passing nod to the witches, etc.

But it seems in the last couple of years he's woken up. "Going Postal" is a brilliant piece of work, capturing a clash between the public servant culture, modern business "ethics", and the engineer / hacker ethos. "Thief of Time" runs a close second to this - the description of the spinners going wild is the stuff power plant engineers nightmares are made of, while the whole thing is a nice piss-take / homage to a thousand martial arts movies (Rule One - heh! ;-).

But still, the best stand-alone books would be "Pyramids" or "Small Gods". The latter, however, is probably too deep - it was my least favourite to start with but, having read it maybe a dozen times, each time I find some new deep cutting insight into organised religion, and enjoy it more and more...

(It has to also be said that, for a long time there, the man couldn't write a decent ending to save his life. The later books, however, are much much better in this regard.)