Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Tuesday afternoon, random notes

I'm starting to dislike Blogger's insistence on titles, but I do like the Moody Blues... and it fits. Just sitting here figuring out what to make for dinner, UPS is pulling up outside, and I'm about to start cataloging (via Librarything and Readerware) the piles of books that arrived recently. Oh, and the Donati review has been written and turned in, on the same day, even (this is not typical) - 200 words exactly, and not another review book in sight. Yet.

The burning question Entertainment Weekly has on the upcoming Sofia Coppola film Marie Antoinette is: "Will audiences buy the blend of period detail and deliberate anachronism (for example, Coppola's Marie is a sneaker-wearing punk who listens to Siouxsie and the Banshees)?" Um, what? But the Wikipedia article agrees with this raucous auditory image, so of course it must be right... I thought A Knight's Tale - which uses a similar technique - was amusingly unpredictable in a campy sort of way, but it wasn't based on a historical character. I'm not sure I'm going to like Marie Antoinette - maybe I'm too old for this "modernizing the historical character" business.

In other historical film notes, I saw Tristan and Isolde on DVD this weekend and turned it off about halfway through. Gorgeous scenery, but slow-moving, and I didn't care for Tristan much at all.

I don't often mention children's books here, but this one looks interesting (from Publishers Marketplace):

Sibert Honor author and illustrator James Rumford's BEOWULF, a retelling of the classic tale of good and evil using only Anglo-Saxon words, to Kate O'Sullivan at Houghton Mifflin Children's, in a nice deal, by Jeff Dwyer at Dwyer & O'Grady (NA).

I studied Anglo-Saxon once upon a time - took a semester-length course while I was in undergrad at Drew University, circa 1989. I wish I could remember more of it, but we did read Beowulf in the original.
Posted by at 5:06 PM

3 comments:

  1. Susan Higginbotham10:48 PM

    Don't know about the Marie Antoinette movie. Sounds as if it could be very good or simply dreadful.

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  2. Sarah Johnson6:37 PM

    I may bring a pair of earplugs - can't say I care for Siouxsie much.

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  3. Tess1:27 PM

    Yeah, I saw the trailer for M-A and am highly doubtful. Just can't buy Kirsten Dunst as M-A. Just doesn't work for me. She's just TOO young and too cutsie.

    Another movie that employed a similar technique was Plunkett and MacCleane (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134033/)
    - it was fun, and loosely based on historical people, but no-one approaching M-A.

    I might see it just for the costumes, but will likely have to wait for the DVD anyway, as we get very few movies up here.

    ReplyDelete

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