What Maggie O'Farrell so brilliantly did, not just with Agnes and Shakespeare's wife, but also with Hamnet, their son, was to bring these people ... and give them status beside this great man. ... [And] give the full landscape of what it is to be a woman.
Taken from a widely read novel by Ken Kesey, it is a prime example of how a subject which must have looked destined for the cultural ghetto of the art circuit can be hoist by its bootstraps into the commercial field and festooned with Oscar nominations. You can do this of course only by making compromises by engaging a star with redoubtable box office muscle by jollying your audience along a little before the real crunch comes.
The second film adaptation of Hiroshi Sakurazaka's 2004 eponymous novel, this new one is considerably inferior to Edge of Tomorrow from 2014, Tom Cruise's own Groundhog D1ay with mechs. It's not a question of budget or aesthetics simply a gaping hole of engaging characterisation and inner spark that makes this time loop a grinding chore, rather than a thrilling jailbreak from eternal recurrence.
Now in his 80s, Ian McKellen appears to have taken a strategically sedentary route for his appearance as Gandalf the Grey in the next year's Lord of the Rings weird-quel The Hunt for Gollum. You've probably heard about this thing: it's the new movie that's based on bits and pieces of JRR Tolkien's esteemed high-fantasy epic that were only mentioned in passing during the three original three-hour movies, and didn't get much more of a mention in the extended cuts that came out later.
The important thing about adaptations isn't what's taken out but what's put in. Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights"-or, as she'd have it, " 'Wuthering Heights,' " complete with scare quotes-is the season's second Frankenstein movie, because Fennell takes bits and pieces from Emily Brontë's novel and, adding much of her own imagining, reassembles them into a misbegotten thing that wants only to be loved. And paying audiences seem to love it, even if many critics don't.
This weekend brings the wide release of Saltburn director Emerald Fennell's adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. As is befitting Fennell's established style, the movie offers over-the-top sexual titillation (though, crucially, zero nudity) and elaborate production design. Plus, a contemporary pop soundtrack from Charli xcx. A horny film version of a 19th-century novel is as adult-skewing as it gets at the box office these days.
In Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, the moors of Yorkshire are wet with rain, fog-and symbolism. The rugged landscape separating the titular home from the neighboring estate, Thrushcross Grange, represents danger and harshness, but also a kind of wild freedom for the star-crossed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff, who explore the land together in childhood and spend their adult lives yearning for each other.
"Number one for me was not faking too much," Haley says. "Obviously you have to fake stuff and you have to pretend you're somewhere where you're not. But I wanted this film to be grounded and believable, and for it to feel like you were actually on vacation with Poppy and Alex. So it was important to me to shoot it with our boots on the ground."
"I remember things in retinal flashes," Yuknavitch explains in the book. "Without order." In another passage, she says, "All the events of my life swim in and out between each other," adding that, although her memory is nonlinear, "we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear." The liberation of time is central to modern cinema, because, once a movie is acknowledged as a work of first-person art as much as a book is, subjectivity itself becomes its overarching subject.
Out today, Woman Down centers on writer Petra Rose, an author who has writer's block and checks into a remote cabin to finish her next book. Petra, who took a hiatus after fans blamed her for a producer's decision to cut a fan-favorite character out of the film adaptation of her book A Terrible Thing, has "learned the hard way what happens when the internet turns on you," a synopsis states.
