But the female lead has to show an actual interest in them while everyone goes "that guy's a [redacted]".
Chandra don't have that.

For some reason, this discussion now has me imaging the Magic movie as Shakespeare, and trying to decide which of the comedies would be the funniest if you cast the planeswalkers in the various parts. The mental image of Jace, Liliana, Ajani, et. al. doing Shakespeare just tickles my funny bone.

Love's Labor's Lost jumped first into mind for reasons I can't put my finger on, but I'm pretty sure that's not the right choice.

(Someone who really wanted to force Jace x Chandra could try to run with Taming Of The Shrew, but imagining that just kind of hurts my head.)

I think the best way to handle mind reading would be to do it like BBC's Sherlock handles his deductions. Look at a person, and have relevant words pop up around them.

Different lighting when Jace is mindreading someone (like how the matrix was green), different audio mixing like a lot of reverb or the like.
There's lots of ways to go about it.

Yes there are. But most of them look lame and unimpressive.

Do a csi when mindreading. Lots of trippy rock or techno music, zooming into things that don't matter so much and lots of cgi.

I think the key to doing good mind-reading visuals is presenting all the information visually. Like in Pacific Rim, all the drifting scenes can pretty well be watched silently and you'd still know exactly what was being presented (I actually plan on watching a number of movies quietly/silently to see how well they convey their information visually).

Also, I think the problem is less that mind-reading in movies is usually lame and more that the same ways of doing it are always chosen instead of trying to do something unique.

Re: Portraying Mind Reading. I suggest small faeries rapping musical numbers to explain. Like. . .

*Jace Peers into Sarkhan's Thoughts*

Faerie One: N to the I to the C to the O to the L. That's that dragon from the maw of hell.
Faerie Two: B to the O to the L-A-S apostrophe S. This ninja's mind is a great big mess.
Faerie Thee: *Low Voice* Dick.
Jace: *Sigh*

I don't know how to write things.

Fox may not even be interested in the strengths of the MTG property. I mean, studios make films about Battleship and Rock 'em Sock'em Robots for god's sake. They are planning a Candyland film. Candyland. They may just want a name to attach to their film because that's Hollywood MO at the moment.
@Pablo: Evidently not.
@Mindreading visuals: I thought the Sherlock style words popping up thing was cool, but it would be a lot of effort to adapt to foreign languages.

Luna: have you read keeper's article on Pacific Rim?
Pablo: I've always preferred faerie punk rock to faerie rap.
TPmanW: that's what I've been trying to say for the last few pages.

Single-handedly convinced me that it was worth more than the cool alien designs. Also made me buy my first retail DVD in years.

IIRC, whatever article I read talked about them wanting to develop a series, not just a single movie.