Some books become excellent films. Take Jaws or The Godfather, for instance. Best-selling novels, both, turned into blockbusters. Some books spawn lousy film versions. Among the entries in this large category are: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the 2001 Planet of the Apes remake, Roberto Benigni's version of Pinocchio, and Myra Breckenridge (you could probably also include Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers and The Amorous Adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza). Then there are those films that take such an uninhibited leap away from their source material that you never see them coming. It's this latter category which film critic Robert Horton will discuss at Movie Mashup: Wild Literary Adaptations on Film Saturday afternoon at the Tumwater Timberland Library. Horton says that these kinds of adaptations - The Tempest transformed into Forbidden Planet; Homer's Odyssey reimagined by the Coen Brothers as O Brother Where Art Thou - can show us something new, illuminating the original, even when we don't recognize it, and teaching us about being open to the unexpected. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for some brave director to take on Irene Iddesleigh, an 1897 self-published novel by Amanda McKittrick Ros, known as the worst writer in the world.

MOVIE MASHUP: WILD LITERARY ADAPTATIONS ON FILM WITH ROBERT HORTON, 2-3 p.m., Tumwater Timberland Library, 7023 New Market St. SW, Tumwater, no cover, 360.943.7790