Movie Matchmaker: Alfonso Cuaron's Odd Thomas
by Brian Talerico

THE MATCH

Our match for Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas is a man who has excelled at combining fantasy with reality and who's clearly not afraid to tap emotional beats in genre films - Alfonso Cuaron. The man who made A Little Princess, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Children of Men is, quite simply, one of the best directors alive. He has no problems working from other people's source material (he did a version of Great Expectations too) and most of his films have a balance of character and otherworldly events. The Bodachs have something in common with the Dementors used so brilliantly in Azkaban and the urgency of the final act could be all the more riveting if Children of Men lenser Emmanuel Lubeszki did half the job that he did with that masterpiece of cinematography.

And Cuaron has always had an amazing sense of place in his movies. He uses nature and the world around his characters extremely effectively, and the setting of Odd Thomas, the small town life of Pico Mundo, is as important as any character in the film. Cuaron would definitely get that right. He's one of the few directors working today (his buddy Guillermo Del Toro is another) who doesn't skew the balance between the fantasy and the reality, realizing that both are just as important to creating a successful film. He pulled the Harry Potter franchise from the deadly clutches of Chris Columbus and made it about Harry, Ron, and Hermione as much as the special effects that surrounded them, and Odd Thomas needs to be, more than anything, a love story between a short-order cook and his soul mate. There are thousands of directors who could get the supernatural action and even more who could make a sappy love story, but very few who could balance both like Alfonso Cuaron.

According to Wikipedia, Alfonso Cuaron is currently working on an adaptation of James Patterson's Maximum Ride. Patterson (Women's Murder Club, Kiss the Girls) is another author more often found in an airport gift store than a book club but with legions of fans, and Maximum Ride is one of Patterson’s science fiction novels. The point is that Cuaron isn't afraid of tackling source material not as well-respected as it should be by the "intellectual" community. There's simply no better fit to turn the corner of the movie world for Dean Koontz.

CONCLUSION

No offense to the men and women who have toiled to bring previous Dean Koontz books to the big and small screen, but Odd Thomas needs to be treated more, for lack of a better word, seriously. The source material is good enough that it could easily make for a ratings-grabbing TV movie even in the hands of a hack director, but it has the potential for so much more in the hands of Alfonso Cuaron.

In Future Editions of Movie Matchmaker: Samaritan by Richard Price, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, The Terror by Dan Simmons, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, The Dark Tower by Stephen King, and many more.