The Places You Will Go

Just Read It

The Star never reviewed any of the books in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy so it decided to correct this oversight by running a review of Northern Lights to coincide with the 6th December release of the  New Line Cinema film based on the book (renamed in the States as The Golden Compass to avoid confusing it with Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light, this is also the name of the movie).

The reviewer, who loves the books, was not impressed with the film, saying, amongst other things, "they turned it into a cliched good-vs-evil thing, which is NOT what the story is about, and eliminated Pullman's technique of slowly giving out answers - instead they spent pretty much every moment explaining things!!! [It was] so dull and the dialogue was so cliched and completely missed out the variety of voices Pullman has."

I have yet to watch The Golden Compass and I think that even if I decide to, I can wait til it's released on DVD.

Philip Pullman told Roger Sutton, in a Horn Book podcast that, "To be truly happy with [a film adaption of a book] you have to be the director as well as the scriptwriter and the star and the composer and the producer and everything else because the whole nature of the film obviously is collaborative. It’s the work of many, many people and the writer, even of the script, is not at the centre of it. The director is at the centre of it, and the writer of the original book on which the film is based is a long way away from the centre of the action. So inevitably there are things that, as writers, we always think we’d have done that  differently, or “I wouldn’t have put the camera here, I’d have put it there."

You can read the entire transcript of the interview here and listen to it here.

Looking for a Change?

The Seeker, which is the title of the film version of The Dark is Rising, opens today in cinemas worldwide (yes, including Malaysia).

The story has been changed a great deal so that I am certain that none of my favourite bits in the book have made it to the big screen.

Says author Susan Cooper in an article on the National Public Radio website, "You do have to do violence to a book to make it into a screenplay — the two mediums are so different. But the alteration is so enormous in this case. It is just different."

Here's an early review in the The Sydney Morning Herald. I'm annoyed that, so far, critics are saying that the story is nothing new after Harry Potter and the books that came after it ("franchise wannabes" says ign.com). The Dark is Rising was published in 1973.

Five Get Together Again

Julian, Dick and Anne, George and a descendant of Timmy the Dog are all set to reunite in a new telly series about the Famous Five, set several decades after the original stories.

Read the report in The Times.

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Hollywood has fallen in love with children’s books. Those who already love these books are not quite sure if they love Hollywood back.

Dare I Watch?

Andrew Davies will write the screenplay for Middlemarch (by George Eliot, left). The film will be directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty).

Davies was responsible for the 1995 screen adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth.

As Kate Winslet is married to Mendes, I hope she gets a part in it. She's too old to play either Dorothea Brooke or Rosamond Vichy but who knows .... Afterall, Emma Thompson played Elinor is Sense and Sensibility!

Facing Your Daemons

Speaking of film adaptations of favourite books, The Golden Compass (based on Philip Pullman's Northern Lights) will be released, in early December this year (around the same time as Prince Caspian).

I have reservations about Nicole Kidman playing Mrs Coulter. She looks like a 1940s movie star in the stills! But I like the look of Eva Green as Serafina Pekkala, the witch.The website is interesting. The Meet Your Daemon section will delight anyone who's used Hobbit-name generators and the like!

The Dark is Rising ...

I suppose it was only a matter of time before they messed up another good book ...

When Harry Potter became a hit and the movies came out, I wondered why no one was raving about Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper, or wanted to make any of their books into movies.

Since then Hayao Miyazaki has turned DWJ's Howl's Moving Castle into an anime, and I've just found out that Walden Pictures has bought the movie rights for Cooper's The Dark is Rising Sequence. A film based on the second book (The Dark is Rising) is due out later this year.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!

"You bewitch me body and soul," says Mr Darcy, chest heaving.

That was the final straw.

No, I did not like the 2005 film adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley.

The Bennetts are portrayed as a working class family. In fact, they are landed gentry, "poor" only in relation to the Bingleys and the Darcys. Mrs Bennett's anxiety over her daughter's future is to do with the fact that their father's property must be inherited by a male relative. It's a common problem of the time. Otherwise, the family lives comfortably and hold a respected position in society.

A Tale of Wu

I spent most of the weekend reading Pearl S. Buck's Pavilion of Women. In fact I found it difficult to stop reading and was really sorry when I got to the last page.

However, I don't think I will read anymore Buck. I had a look at the other books I've "inherited" from a colleague (whose father was a big fan of the author: she's given me his entire collection and there must be more than 25 books in the bag) and they all look really depressing, which, I find, books about and set in China tend to be.

A Sendak Feast

I've been gorging on Maurice Sendak ... never a bad thing.

Got an audiobook of a collection of his stories read by Tammy Grimes, an American stage actress and have been listening to it (repeatedly) in the car. I love the way Grimes reads the stories - she's made Sendak even better and he was already the best!

And then my friend, Hsian, bought me a collection of animated film adaptations of Sendak's books and it's on right now as I type this.