Shucks, you go away for a couple of days to come back to find that they’re making your all-time favourite book into a movie. Now, if there’s anyone I might think about sort of maybe trusting into making a movie of Kerouac’s On the Road it would be Francis Ford Coppola. And that he’s teamed up with Walter Salles, who made the amazingly wonderful The Motorcycle Diaries, I feel a bit better about it, but dream teams have gone wrong before. Cough. Anyone remember the absolutely terrible A.I.?
Annnywaay. It’s hard to make road movies at the best of times, Easy Rider being the obvious exception. And as of 2001, when the project was first tossed about, Brad Pitt was attached to star. Um, he’s the hottest fellow in the world, which means he’s too hot to play Dean Moriarty, and I have a hard time thinking he could pull it off—not to downplay his talent at all, but you know what I mean, he’s too pretty. And how would the hip-jazz loving language of Kerouac’s book translate to the cynical age we live in now? The idea of the beat generation, with their constant craving for that sweet spot that’s almost impossible to define, being captured on the big screen seems almost the opposite of what should happen.
Who knows. Maybe it won’t suck. And maybe I’ll lose 20 pounds by tomorrow.