Not a whole lot going on in the way of movie news today (well, aside from that little New Line announcement ...), so I thought I'd write about books instead. I just finished reading Magnus Mills's The Restraint of Beasts, which supposedly has already been filmed by Pawel Pawlikowski but is apparently stuck in some kind of post-production limbo. The book is weirdly hilarious, enough so that I now want to read more by Mills.

I'm now reading Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, which is hard to imagine as a movie, but I suppose it could be done if it was by the right director. Peter Jackson's upcoming adaptation of The Lovely Bones still looks promising, perhaps even more so now that Saiorse Ronan, who he wisely cast as Susie Salmon, is now an Oscar-nominated actress for her performance in Atonement, but we're going to have to wait until 2009 to see that one.

What books have you read of late that you think would make great films? Who would you want to see direct the adaptations and star in the main roles? Discuss away ...

I loved Tom Tykwer's Perfurme: The Story of a Murderer, starring Ben Whishaw as a sociopathic serial killer. Whishaw's performance in that film -- in which he had very little dialog and had to convey almost everything through facial expression and body language -- was just outstanding. In poking around IMDb a bit while writing some Sundance reviews, I found out that Whishaw (most recently seen in Todd Hayne's I'm Not There) has three new projects lined up, and I'm excited about all of them.

First up is The Restraint of Beasts (currently in post-prod), an adaptation of Magnus Mills's first novel. The film is being directed by Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, whose film My Summer of Love back in 2004 first brought Emily Blunt to notice.The darkly comedic story is about an unnamed supervisor (presumably Whishaw) working with two Scottish high-tensile fence builders in the countryside and "accidentally" killing people along the way by day and hitting the local pub at night. I have the book on reserve to read before the film comes out -- I like Mills's work but I've not read this one yet. If this film does well, perhaps it will be the beginning of a series of adaptations of Mills's books.