10 Unfilmable Properties That Should've Stayed That Way

6. Bloom

Few filmmakers have been brave - or rather, foolish - enough to attempt to bring James Joyce's sprawling, intricate stream of consciousness masterpiece Ulysses to the big screen. Few other books come quite so close as to truly warrant the label "unfilmable". Yet a few have tried, and predictably none have really succeeded. A recent example is the 2003 movie Bloom written and directed by Sean Walsh and starring Stephen Rea as Leopold Bloom. Despite an admirable effort to reproduce the exhausting (in its book form) soliloquy from the end of the book (a sequence which Joyce wrote as one long continual uninterrupted, unpunctuated sentence which runs for approximately 50 pages), Bloom fails to scratch the surface of the novel's many rich and fascinating complexities. It's unlikely that this is the fault of Walsh, who appears to have opted for delivering a pleasantly shot, accessible abridgement of the novel. But with a book so wildly different from anything remotely "cinematic", firmly rooted in the literary realm, it all seems like a pointless endeavour in the first place.