Lusting after the latest news on literary adaptations? Get satisfied this weekend on Romancing the Tome where Amy covers the hard news on funding for Masterpiece Theatre while I report on Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, a hot faun who fences, and the new Shakespeare adaptations from the BBC.
This week, Amy and I tackle the really important questions like:
Who's hotter, Brits or Yanks?
Why is Ioan Gruffudd frowning?
What's the latest scoop on the Kavalier and Clay adaptation?
and more--so do check it out!
My earlier post about Evelyn Waugh reminded me of perhaps our most controversial topic ever over at Romancing the Tome. Way back in November of 2004, Amy and I had watched the 1981 British miniseries Brideshead Revisited, based on Waugh's novel, which starred Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. Her short but unintentionally offensive post stirred up a small tempest in a teapot and garnered a whopping seven comments (although to be fair almost half of them were from the two of us).
After a Bordeaux tasting at The Hidden Vine last night I went home and became truly intoxicated by Richard Yates' novel about 1950's suburban malaise, Revolutionary Road (#8), finishing it this morning on the Bart ride to the airport. It's a remarkable novel and one that I'll be thinking about for quite some time. It's hard to envision how it will be adapted into a film, but if the result is even half as good as the source, I imagine it will be fantastic.
In honor of Charles Dickens' birthday, here is the first paragraph of Bleak House, the adaptation of which we've been raving about for the last three weeks over at Romancing the Tome.
Chapter 1 — In Chancery
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and
the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November
weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly
retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to
meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an
elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from
chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as
big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine,
for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses,
scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers,
jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper,
and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands
of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day
broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon
crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and
accumulating at compound interest. Continue reading here.
Otherwise engaged in equally adventurous champagne-sipping festivities (aka Nicki's birthday) at the bewitching bar inside Hotel Rex, I couldn't make it to Saturday night's favorite excuse to don a corset in public, the Edwardian Ball. However I did manage to get my Goth on this weekend, albeit virtually, with Part 1 of BBC's sublimely gloomy Bleak House adaptation. (You can read my short yet effusive review at Romancing the Tome.) I also began reading Branwell, Douglas A. Martin's dark and dreamy novel about Charlotte and Emily Bronte's brother and finally made it to fairly new SF restaurant Lime, only to find that it's really a lemon... and unfortunately not the kind with which you suddenly and strangely find yourself madly--and maddeningly--in love.
Image: Corset c.1875, Leicestershire Museum
Amy and I contributed an essay on literary adaptations to the January issue of VoidMagazine.com. The theme this month is book-to-film, which of course is one of our many obsessions (tea and chocolate are just a few more--that we're willing to share, anyway). Be sure to check out our essay, "Dusting off the Classics," but don't miss the other great reads in this issue, including the fun fictional adaptations the Void crew came up with ("Dream Team Scenes: TAKE ONE"), four new fiction pieces, an interview with the screenwriter of North Country, and book and film reviews (including one on the Macbeth remake, Scotland, P.A.) and lit picks. Enjoy!
