Sherlock

When Sherlock first aired on the BBC last August, there was a lot of talk about it. I started the first episode, and didn't even get as far as meeting Sherlock before I decided I wasn't in the mood. I definitely stopped too soon. The show is created and written by Steven Moffat, the writer of Doctor Who, and Mark Gatiss, who also sometimes writes (and acts) for Doctor Who.

Sherlock is a modernized Sherlock Holmes. I've never read Sherlock Holmes, so I can't judge how it relates to the canon, but on it's own merit it's a fabulous show. There were only three 90-minute episodes, three more to come next fall. I'm super impatient.

The acting is lovely. Sherlock is mesmerizing. With the exceptions of the unfortunate Asian stereotyping in the second episode, the stories are great.

Some shows are sort of... impregnable. You can't take them and play with them, because they don't leave room for that. Sherlock, on the other hand, almost seems like it's written with fans in mind. Everyone takes a show or a book and contemplates how it might have gone differently, or what might have happened in between scenes. Sherlock both leaves this open and makes suggestions. For example, people assume Sherlock and Watson (we call him John, here) are gay hilariously often. The two have a great dynamic, whether or not you want to form theories about them.

So that's my latest television obsession.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding?

I keep hearing rumours that they're  making a movie of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding. People keep finding their way here looking for confirmation of the rumours, because I read the book last July. Sorry everyone, I don't know any more about it than you do! I've heard Sinead Cusack is in it, I've heard Emily Blunt is in it, and I've heard (yay!) that David Tennant is in it, but IMDB doesn't seem to know anything about it.

Does anyone have any more information? I think it would make a very interesting movie.

A Room with a View out of my television

After reading A Room with a View I watched both the 1985 film and the 2007 tv adaptation. Neither was perfect.

The 2007 version was pretty good right up until the end when you realize that they changed the ending. Not only did they change it, they made it sad. The book was written in 1908, well before World War I, but for some utterly bizarre reason they decided to set the movie in 1912 and then kill off Lucy's husband in the war. The book ends happily! They go back to Italy and are happy! But no, they decided that they were going to let Lucy have a little bit of happiness and then take it away! Can you tell I was horrified? This is the version I saw some of ages ago. I probably absorbed the idea that it ended sadly and that was why I didn't want to read it. Why on earth would they want to ruin a lovely happy ending, and turn people off the book? Apart from that, I thought the casting was very good. I like Elaine Cassidy as Lucy better than I like Helena Bonham Carter.

Mind, I did like Helena Bonham Carter in the 1985 version. I'd never seen her in anything from when she was so young, and she did naiveté well. But she wasn't quite... magical enough, I guess. There was something missing. Maggie Smith as Charlotte Bartlett also didn't quite strike me as right. Maggie Smith doesn't really do fluttery, and I always saw Charlotte as fluttery. Sophie Thompson nailed that as Charlotte in 2007--she played Ms. Bates to Gwyneth Paltrow's Emma, we know she can do fluttery. All the other casting was great, however. I particularly liked Daniel Day Lewis as Cecil Vyse, and a very young Rupert Graves as Freddy Honeychurch.

Both of these were fairly good adaptations (apart from 2007's ridiculousness with the ending), but somehow neither of them fit my image of the book. There's a certain lightness about the book. In my head it was always the very bright sunlight filtered through leaves--very green and cool, but bright. Not a heavy lightness. Both the movies went for heavier, gold tones, which to be honest is probably what Italy in the summer looks like, but which still felt wrong. Visually it might have been logical, but I felt it didn't reflect the tone of the book.

Oh, the perils of film adaptation.

Emma, film adaptations, and mental images

So I'm here to talk about Jane Austen again. Sort of, anyway. I rewatched the latest Emma adaptation over the last several nights, because my mother wanted to see it, and by the end I was a bit obsessed and went back and watched the entire four hours in one sitting. And then I started rereading the book. Despite the three other books I am already reading.

People often talk about film adaptations ruining books for them. There's no questioning the fact that sometimes films have a very large effect on how we read and visualize a book, and especially how we see characters. But it's not often that the film was good enough that this is a good thing. I love Romola Garai's Emma. I think it was extraordinarily well-cast. I wrote about it briefly when I first saw it, but I think I like it even better on subsequent viewings. Now, on rereading the book, it occurs to me that Jane Austen is the sort of writer where a very good film can have a very helpful effect on the reading. Jane Austen doesn't spend a lot of time on description. Dialogue is her strong point, which lends well to films and lets the designers have a lot of free rein over how things look. Of course, this generally means there's more chance of them getting it wrong in somebody's view. Sometimes, though, they get it right. And having a film where nearly every character and setting agrees with my mental picture, I can use this visual to help me read the book.

Most of the time, I don't have a continuous mental image of what I'm reading--except, oddly, with directions. I usually know where I think things are on relative to each other, on which side of the street someone is walking, and so on. I've no idea why this is, and it always throws me off when the text contradicts my image. Apart from this, I don't visualize settings or characters in any great detail, especially not if the book doesn't offer much description. When I see film adaptations, I know what looks wrong, but when something looks right it's not generally because it agrees with an image I already have. Once I have seen an image of the scene, however, be it an illustration or a movie, I always have that in the background while reading. I think having an image adds something to the experience. So a film as good as this Emma is a great thing, not only in and of itself, but for the book.

Does anyone else have similar experiences with visualizing books or with the interaction between book and film? I'm curious--I feel like I usually hear people say they do visualize books, but I don't, so I wonder if I'm alone in this.

Beginning the saga

Years ago I first saw the most recent miniseries adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, and years ago I bought the first book of the saga, The Man of Property, by John Galsworthy. I read a couple of chapters and got distracted. Finally, I've gotten back to it. Some combination of a post over at A Work in Progress and some photos at How to be a Retronaut brought it to mind and made reading it seem suddenly necessary.

This is an odd, interesting, satisfying book. It isn't about the grand passions of life, but the lesser, no less driving, emotions--pride, simple pleasure, satisfaction, possession. Mostly possession. The title of the book is constantly relevant, and property takes all forms--things, land, houses, people. Galsworthy's style is unusual and captivating. I hesitate to say this, but he's almost the more masculine form of Virginia Woolf, writing about more material subjects. The style reminds me of Virginia Woolf because the book so often pauses to take a look at things like the sunlight, passing strangers in the street, a background character doing something not very relevant halfway across the city, someone's idle thought even he doesn't acknowledge. This book is a slice of Forsyte life--both the Forsyte family and the generic, upper-middle class Victorian Forsyte.

"A Forsyte," replied young Jolyon, "is not an uncommon animal. There are hundreds among the members of this Club. Hundreds out there in the streets; you meet them wherever you go!"
"And how do you tell them, may I ask?" said Bosinney.
"By their sense of property. A Forsyte takes a practical--one might say a common-sense--view of things, and a practical view of things is based fundamentally on a sense of property. A Forsyte, you will notice, never gives himself away."
... "Ah!" murmured Bosinney. "You should patent the word."
"I should like," said young Jolyon, "to lecture on it: 'Properties and qualties of a Forsyte.'"

But while this book is a slice of life, it also has a powerful plot, which is constantly in the background, sometimes in the foreground, but always barrelling onwards. A Man of Property is in this sense the best of both worlds--little, passingly beautiful moments, and a thoroughly engaging plot. It's a book that doesn't have a remotely happy ending, but leaves you feeling that something has triumphed anyway. Though possibly you just don't care if there's a happy ending now because you know there are lots more book in the saga to read. And I definitely plan to read them soon.

ShakespeaRe-told

Had an unexpected day of Shakespeare yesterday. I had a DVD of the BBC miniseries Shakespeare Retold floating around, so over lunch I figured I'd sit down and watch it. There are four stories on two discs--Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Predictably, they all have hordes of very recognizable, very good British actors in them. I watched Much Ado About Nothing, because it was the only one of the four I'd never read or seen.

These really are adaptations--they use the story, not the language. Much Ado is set in a fictional local television studio. Beatrice and Benedick are rival news broadcasters. Sarah Parish and Damian Lewis play the pair. I found Sarah Parish extremely familiar, and I know what movies I've seen that she was in, but I don't actually remember her in those movies with any clarity at all, so I don't know why she's so familiar. Damian Lewis, of course, memorable as Soames in The Forsyte Saga. Billie Piper, of Dr Who fame, plays Hero, and everybody else is familiar as well. This was a lovely, lovely adaptation. I couldn't believe I'd never encountered Much Ado before, as it's completely my kind of romantic comedy. And all the actors were perfect in their roles. The tv studio setting worked very well to bring the cast together believably, and it was perfect for people overhearing each other, which is crucial to the story, as microphones and headsets could be left on "accidentally." Anyway, I loved the whole thing.

Later in the day I sat down and read the play. Seemed like the thing to do. It strikes me as rather a simpler story than some of the comedies (Twelfth Night springs to mind as the obvious Comedy With Issues). Much Ado is more black and white, with a clear villain and nothing left particularly unresolved at the end. I'd love to see it performed. I also noticed that Jane Austen borrowed the sentiment in Emma that "if I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more" from Claudio in Much Ado. He says, "Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much."

I watched Taming of the Shrew, too. I was less impressed with it, but then that play has some unavoidable issues anyway. It did, though, make it much more palatable to a 21st century woman than the original play is. It's not just Kate that must be tamed, it's Petruchio, too. Kate is an MP, played by Shirley Henderson (familiar from all sorts of movies and tv, though I always sort of think of her as Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter). She's completely terrifying, actually. I never thought of Kate as a shrew in quite that way. She screams at everybody, flips over a table in a restaurant, and generally goes around in a rage. Petruchio played by Rufus Sewell, which I thought was a good choice. Ultimately the whole thing was kind of ridiculous--Petruchio shows up to their wedding in heels, a skirt, and eyeliner, and Kate spends a lot of time running around in her gorgeous wedding dress, getting it really dirty. But it was fun, which I guess is sometimes just the way you have to go with Shakespeare.

Now I'll have to find time to watch the other two stories. Macbeth not my favourite, but it's got Keeley Hawes and Richard Armitage in it, so I'll watch it anyway.

Friday Ephemera #19

Did anyone ever read the children's books My Father's Dragon, Elmer and the Dragon, and The Dragons of Blueland, by Ruth Stiles Gannett? These were some of my favourite books when I was small, and I barely remember them now (must revisit) but for some reason they came to mind the other day and I looked them up on Wikipedia. This search provided the information that they made a Japanese anime out of the story. I was rather horrified at the thought, but judging by this image, it looks rather cute.

I'm turning in my term paper this morning! (Its writing explains my absence over the last week.)

Miss Woodhouse

I've finally got around to watching all of the new BBC production of Emma. I have to say I loved it. I hear some people were less than thrilled, though I don't know their reasons, but I thought it was lovely. It's the only one of the three Emma films I've seen where I liked the actors for both Emma and Mr. Knightley (I absolutely can't stand Gwyneth Paltrow for no particular reason, and the Knightley in the Kate Beckinsale version was boring). I thought they did a good job both in translating the mood of the book and in making it romantic enough to appeal to modern viewers (which of course they can't help doing, so at least they did it reasonably well).

Emma was not a book I expected to like before I started it. This, of course, was back in the day where I still thought my chances of liking a Jane Austen novel weren't assured. With that reaction, it's funny that it's become one of my favourites. I love Pride and Prejudice for being my first Jane Austen, Persuasion for the story, Mansfield Park for Fanny Price and because it was the first one where I really and truly appreciated Jane Austen's writing, and Emma because it's so very very good. I think it's possibly the most rounded out of the six novels.

Emma is also a very sentimental story for me because somehow it's become a book that is part of the definition of my relationship with my best friend. In a lot of ways we use it to help articulate what we mean in conversations, as a reference point for rather a lot of different topics (which I suppose further points out the roundedness of the book).

With all this in mind, it is absolutely lovely to finally see a film version of Emma that I really feel does it justice.