A film adaptation I was not aware of ...
I'm fairly certain everyone who reads my very infrequently updated journal (sorry! I'll try to write more often!) is aware of the fact that I'm a voracious reader, and that I have a background in artsy university degrees that don't necessarily help in paying the bills. Okay, so the law degree should help, I admit it--but I'm more than a bit disillusioned about what I've found out about the practice of law, and as such I've been gainfully unemployed for a good long while as I take stock and decide just what kind of career I want to embark on. It may still be law; I hate being poor enough that I'll do something as I try to find my muse and get some good fiction written.
Anyhow, where was I? Oh, right. Film adaptations of books.
Well, they often just don't work. [No, really?!] But there's one coming down the Hollywood pike that I'm going to monitor very closely. You see, in my salad days (where does that odd turn of phrase come from?) when I was young, very naive, and even more shy than I am now, I happened to be studying English literature as an undergraduate student. Because I was relatively gifted (if undisciplined, a trait I haven't been able to discard) the English Department at UBC for some reason let me enroll in their Honours program, which meant that I was one of a small group of students who got to take fancy seminars and act like snobs if we felt like it towards the ordinary English majors. One of the really fun requirements of doing this course of study was the requirement of an Honours thesis (basically a mini-Masters thesis) where you chose your own topic, found a professor to supervise you, and got busy on something you found truly interesting. And then tried to cram it into a paper of 50 pages or less. Man, that was tough to do. (But I'm getting ahead of myself.)
It didn't take me long to home in on a topic where I could tackle material close to my heart, and I also managed to have my paper supervised by a brilliant young professor with whom I got along like a house afire. (What made this project such a joy was that she shared my enthusiasm for the topic and specialized in the area, too! Sometimes best-laid plans really do work!) So I considered a few authors like C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and so forth ... but settled on a trio of authors who wrote about the medieval world and just dove in. What made my research topic so ambitious was that I could easily have just written the paper on just one of them: but no, I was foolish enough to go with three. They were: W.B. Yeats, Sir Walter Scott, and Guy Gavriel Kay.
Now, the first two authors need no introduction. Yeats is an absolutely brilliant, justifiably famous poet (I regretfully had to rewrite my paper without him); Scott was the first wildly successful antiquarian medievalist who popularized historical fiction in the nineteenth century, and remains well-known even today; but Kay--who is he? you might be asking yourselves.
It just so happens that Guy Gavriel Kay was and is a comtemporary Canadian fantasist, originally from the Toronto area, with a background in Medieval Studies (as I recall he has a Medieval Studies degree from the U of T). His literary career has mostly consisted of re-imagining medieval history by taking important moments in Western European history and fictionalizing them in his own, alternate worlds, sometimes but not always dosing them with magic and/or supernatural elements. Along the way he's tackled the rise of the troubadours in southern France, the Byzantine re-conquest of Rome, the career of England's Alfred the Great ... Anyhow, with some missteps along the way, I wrote my paper, got a decent enough grade (even though we all agreed that I had bitten off a bit more than I could chew).
So what about this film adapation?
Well, as it turns out, I belatedly discovered (more than a few months since the January announcement) that one of Kay's novels has been green-lighted for pre-production aiming at a 2007 release of a film based on his book about the Spanish Reconquest: The Lions of Al-Rassan, which happens to be one of his best efforts as a novelist, and one nicely suited for a film in the same vein as The Last Samurai. Ironically enough, it has the same director attached, so at the very least we can hope for a similarly first-rate effort in cinematography.
To sum up, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this project doesn't get screwed up. It could well be a spectacular film, if they do it right.
Anyhow, where was I? Oh, right. Film adaptations of books.
Well, they often just don't work. [No, really?!] But there's one coming down the Hollywood pike that I'm going to monitor very closely. You see, in my salad days (where does that odd turn of phrase come from?) when I was young, very naive, and even more shy than I am now, I happened to be studying English literature as an undergraduate student. Because I was relatively gifted (if undisciplined, a trait I haven't been able to discard) the English Department at UBC for some reason let me enroll in their Honours program, which meant that I was one of a small group of students who got to take fancy seminars and act like snobs if we felt like it towards the ordinary English majors. One of the really fun requirements of doing this course of study was the requirement of an Honours thesis (basically a mini-Masters thesis) where you chose your own topic, found a professor to supervise you, and got busy on something you found truly interesting. And then tried to cram it into a paper of 50 pages or less. Man, that was tough to do. (But I'm getting ahead of myself.)
It didn't take me long to home in on a topic where I could tackle material close to my heart, and I also managed to have my paper supervised by a brilliant young professor with whom I got along like a house afire. (What made this project such a joy was that she shared my enthusiasm for the topic and specialized in the area, too! Sometimes best-laid plans really do work!) So I considered a few authors like C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and so forth ... but settled on a trio of authors who wrote about the medieval world and just dove in. What made my research topic so ambitious was that I could easily have just written the paper on just one of them: but no, I was foolish enough to go with three. They were: W.B. Yeats, Sir Walter Scott, and Guy Gavriel Kay.
Now, the first two authors need no introduction. Yeats is an absolutely brilliant, justifiably famous poet (I regretfully had to rewrite my paper without him); Scott was the first wildly successful antiquarian medievalist who popularized historical fiction in the nineteenth century, and remains well-known even today; but Kay--who is he? you might be asking yourselves.
It just so happens that Guy Gavriel Kay was and is a comtemporary Canadian fantasist, originally from the Toronto area, with a background in Medieval Studies (as I recall he has a Medieval Studies degree from the U of T). His literary career has mostly consisted of re-imagining medieval history by taking important moments in Western European history and fictionalizing them in his own, alternate worlds, sometimes but not always dosing them with magic and/or supernatural elements. Along the way he's tackled the rise of the troubadours in southern France, the Byzantine re-conquest of Rome, the career of England's Alfred the Great ... Anyhow, with some missteps along the way, I wrote my paper, got a decent enough grade (even though we all agreed that I had bitten off a bit more than I could chew).
So what about this film adapation?
Well, as it turns out, I belatedly discovered (more than a few months since the January announcement) that one of Kay's novels has been green-lighted for pre-production aiming at a 2007 release of a film based on his book about the Spanish Reconquest: The Lions of Al-Rassan, which happens to be one of his best efforts as a novelist, and one nicely suited for a film in the same vein as The Last Samurai. Ironically enough, it has the same director attached, so at the very least we can hope for a similarly first-rate effort in cinematography.
To sum up, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this project doesn't get screwed up. It could well be a spectacular film, if they do it right.