One of my concerns when I started doing this column was that each forthcoming adaptation I covered would equate to a new movie losing the ability to surprise me. What more effective way to strip oneself of the thrill of cinematic discovery, I thought, than to pore over the source material before watching? Ultimately I decided that the prospect of literary discovery along with the chance to write the column more than compensated for that risk, but here's some evidence that maybe I shouldn't have worried at all: having read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I'm more excited to see John Hillcoat's adaptation – coming this November -- than I ever would have been otherwise.

Just when it was looking like No Country for Old Men had a monopoly on successful interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's drearily minimalistic prose, production on an adaptation of The Road suggests the possibility of healthy competition. The movie, which recently finished shooting in Pennsylvania and hits theaters in November, remains a wild card until post-production wraps. Nevertheless, if this colorful report from the set in The New York Times offers any indication, The Road appears poised to capture McCarthy's original gloomy lyricism. Reporter Charles McGrath points out the difficulties the filmmakers endured when the weather got too nice and the grass looked too green. In other words, they're working really hard to keep things bleak. The story, about a father and son wandering through desolate landscapes after a cataclysmic event destroys civilization, demands that the dark aura remain intact. However, it wouldn't work without two strong leads, and McGrath implies that with Viggo Mortensen and eleven-year-old Kodi Smit-Mcphee (the next Haley Joel Osment?), that need has been fulfilled.

The best match for The Road, however, is its director, John Hillcoat, whose work on The Proposition proves he's the man for the job. That woefully undervalued western had the intensity of a Sam Peckinpah movie in overdrive, and The Road screams for the same raw, stripped-down approach. It's nice to hear that Hillcoat sees the movie as an antithesis to Mad Max, meaning he wants to eschew cartoony violence in order to create a scarily realistic depiction of post-apocalyptic duress. Bring it on.

[Photo above: Kodi Smit-Mcphee on the set of The Road, courtesy of the New York Times]

I'm about 50 pages away from finishing The Road, and all I think about when I'm reading it (apart from praying the two stumble across another can of peaches -- just one more can of peaches, please!) is what director John Hillcoat is going to do with this sucker. It has the potential to be absolutely amazing, from a visual standpoint, and should make for an interesting comparison to Hillcoat's last film, The Proposition -- which, like The Road, was full of empty land and empty people. Needless to say, I cannot friggin' wait for this film to arrive in the fall.

Which brings us to this first image from The Road, courtesy of Row Three. The photo shows Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the father and son who attempt to head south across a post-apocalyptic United States, toward the coast. Along the way, they'll hide from cannibals, search for more food, clothing -- anything to keep them alive, really. The film, which is due out November 26, is based on the book by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men) and also stars Guy Pearce and Charlize Theron.

[via JoBlo]

Everyone and their (his?) mother loves The Proposition, the Nick Cave-penned Australian western starring Danny Huston as a villain who could give Chigurh a run for his money in sheer badassery. It's hard to blame them, since movies that gritty and tough don't come along very often. (As modern westerns go, I think 3:10 to Yuma is better, but it certainly isn't as awesomely brutal.) Two years after that film became a critical darling and a sleeper hit of sorts, director John Hillcoat -- who is currently in production on Cormac McCarthy's The Road -- has signed with Columbia to direct an adaptation of a not-yet-released novel by Matt Bondurant called The Wettest Country in the World. The book is about a trio of gangsters -- the author's grandfather and grand-uncles -- who ran the moonshine trade at the peak of the Prohibition Era, and the writer who tracked them in search of a scoop.

I have a problem. As a moviegoer, I'm always attracted to charisma over deed. More times than I can count, I find myself rooting for the bad guy and hoping that they bring the bland hero down. Of course, sometimes it's a fight between hero and villain for who has the most charisma, and sometimes the film wants us to love the villain, but whatever the case, the thorn is usually a lot more fun than the hero he's stuck onto. And this means that I'm often disappointed at the end, because the bad guy almost always dies.

Still, this is what's so great about film -- you can love the baddies without the real-world consequences. We've all heard about bad-guy lust, but this way, the baddie can do his bad thing for us to enjoy, without us getting all of the negative repercussions. We get the wild eye without the body count, the ripped muscles without the steroid set-up, and the twisted humor without the reality.

However, seeing that bad guys are my kryptonite, it's hard to pick just seven. While the following is, by no means, all-encompassing, it's a list of some of my favorite baddies. Some we're told to love, and others, well, they just steal the show.

Jason Dean -- Heathers

This is probably what started it all. When my friends and I gathered around the television to watch Christian Slater's new movie, we were immediately smitten. We didn't care that J.D. had a thing for doling out his own deadly justice. By the time he said: "Alright, so maybe I am killing everyone in the school... because nobody loves me!" We were exclaiming: "We love you!" J.D. had the drawling, Jack Nicholson voice, the sexy trench, and the need to row out to the middle of a lake somewhere with a bottle of tequila, his sax, and some Bach. He was very. Very very.

What a difference a month can make. Back in September, Viggo Mortensen seemed pretty confident when he told MTV Movies Blog that he was in talks to star in a big-screen version of Cormac McCarthy's, The Road. Now, Shock Till You Drop is reporting that Guy Pearce could be replacing Mortensen in the film. Mortensen was never officially confirmed, so Pearce as a replacement would seem to be the most likely scenario -- especially since the story isn't exactly teeming with characters. The novel focuses on a father and son who are survivors of an apocalyptic event and are trying to make it to 'the coast' while surrounded by fellow survivors who have reverted to cannibalism. If you haven't read the book, I really recommend picking it up, although be warned: don't let that Oprah Book Club selection sticker lull you into thinking this is a feel-good story. Nothing could be further from the truth.

John Hillcoat is already set to direct the Joe Penhall adaptation and since Hillcoat worked with Pearce on the revisionist western, The Proposition, back in 2006, that could tip the scales in Pearce's favor. The film could be a bit of a hard-sell with audiences to begin with. There is some truly disturbing stuff going on in the story, and for those of you who have read the book, you probably know what I mean. Luckily, no matter which actor they go with, I think either would be more than capable of handling the role, don't you? The Road is tentatively scheduled for release in 2009.

Over the past century, the Western ranged from being by far the most popular genre to almost dying out completely. But as often as it has been pronounced dead, it has been resurrected. One of the genre's key resurrections was Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), which emerged almost instantly as a masterpiece and a landmark film, but, despite that, actually went on to win four Oscars. After Unforgiven (and a previous Oscar-winner, Dances With Wolves), the Western had a minor resurgence; by one count, there were more Westerns produced in the 1990s than in the 1970s and 1980s combined. This year three excellent Westerns have been released, prompting many writers to use phrases like "the best Western since..." or, more specifically, to measure the landmarks. Here, to put the record straight, are the seven best Westerns sine Unforgiven.

1. Dead Man (1996, Jim Jarmusch)

Jim Jarmusch's brutal, black-and-white poem of a movie was, like Unforgiven, as well as Ride the High Country and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a Western death-rattle, but it was something entirely unique as well, like a dream or a primal odyssey. Johnny Depp stars as William Blake, not the poet, who comes to the town of Machine for a job but winds up shot and dying in the woods, aided by an American Indian called Nobody (Gary Farmer). The great Robert Mitchum co-stars -- in one of his final roles -- as a monstrous town boss who sends out a band of killers after Blake.

Once a year or so for the past several years, usually around awards season, somebody somewhere writes a story about how TV has gotten so much better than the movies. This year's article on the state of TV versus the movies is over at Newsweek, and there's a lively debate going on over at Hollywood Elsewhere on the topic, with people trumpeting their favorite TV shows (The Wire, Lost, 24, Heroes, even, god help us, American Idol) over the offerings at the multiplex.

Now, I can see the value of a well-made television program. I've been addicted to Jack Bauer and 24 since episode one of season one, and I'm not even sure how I feel about seeing 24 up on the big screen. There's something about the intimacy of curling up on the couch each week with Jack, Chloe and the gang that would be lost in translation to the silver screen. And I know lots of folks, some of them living in my very own house, who can't make it through a week without checking in with Heroes or Grey's Anatomy, but that doesn't mean that those shows are better than the films I can see at one of the arthouse cinemas in town (although I might buy the argument that they're better than what's showing down the road at the multiplex).

When I look at my own top ten films for 2006, I see films like Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, Liittle Children and The Proposition, films which cry out for a big screen in a dark theater. Even The Lives of Others (which would have had a spot on my list if I'd seen it in time) uses the big screen to make you feel the weight of the Stasi oppression through its gloomy cinematography. TV storytelling may have gotten better over the past decade or so, with more focus on compelling stories, but I'm not sure you can even objectively compare the two media -- even the Newsweek article says, it's like "comparing apples to tubas" -- but then author Devin Gordon goes on to do just that, asserting that television is "running circles" around the movies.

So what do you think? Are your fave TV shows better than the movies Hollywood studios are churning out?

[ via Hollywood Elsewhere ]

It ought to be relatively easy to narrow down a list of films I've seen and liked in 2006 into a cogent top ten -- and to be fair, I whittled it down to the top 20 pretty easily -- but figuring out in just what order to rank my final ten was incredibly frustrating. How to rank a list of films, so different from each other, into a semi-ordered list that would be less than random? Equally frustrating was realizing that, in spite of the number of films I did see in 2006, there were still some great films that I missed catching, some of which might have made it onto my list had I seen them. Nonetheless, I can only rank from amongst those films I did see; here then, are my top ten films of the year.

I have a lot of admiration for screenwriters. They are the unsung heroes of the film business; without their stories, no film would ever be made. Being a writer is hard, anxious and often lonely work. You stare at the blank screen. It waits to be filled, it must be filled, and so you start to write, praying that the end result is worth the effort you give to it. I've started and not finished countless screenplays whose stories just wouldn't go anywhere, written and completed eight full drafts of an absolutely dreadful romantic comedy and, through various writing groups I've belonged to over the years, read a lot of developing screenplays that will, thankfully, never see the light of day. I'm such a geek, in fact, that I often read the scripts for films I love, over and over again, just to feel rhythm of the words on the page, and to get a sense for how those words translated into the finished film on the screen.

As so often happens, Anne Thompson at The Hollywood Reporter has written an astute piece on screenwriting that is so obvious it seems it should be carved into granite above the entrance to every studio in Hollywood: Great writing makes for great movies. The film with which Thompson explores this hypothesis is Stranger Than Fiction, which debuted at Toronto (sadly, I missed it there), and she makes her point about great writing by enumerating how many big stars wanted to be in the film based on the script alone. Some truly great films have come out of a script that speaks its truth to actors so purely and loudly that they simply must see the film get made. They'll work for scale, drop other projects, shuffle their schedules around, all for the sake of that golden opportunity to be in a film so good that it demands to be made, whatever the sacrifice. When critics and cinephiles bemoan the dismal quality of so many films sludging their way out of Hollywood, very often what we are really bemoaning is the lack of originality in storytelling, the lack of passion in penning that story, and mostly, the lack of truth that seems to permeate so many films.