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Austenland
Feb. 13th, 2018 09:57 amWe watched Austenland! Which is candy-colored goofy fun: I enjoyed it while I was watching it, but it doesn't bear thinking about for too long after, because otherwise you start to wonder things like "but how does Austenland pay this enormous staff, I realize these are expensive vacations but STILL," and also "But maybe Jane should report Mr. Wattlesbrook for attempting to sexually assault her on general principles and not just because Mrs. Wattlesbrook is an ass who has gone out of her way to ruin Jane's vacation."
I cannot remember if that particular plotline was in the book or not. Really the movie made me want to reread the book a lot.
***
At the end of the movie we noticed that Stephanie Meyer produced the movie - yes, Twilight Stephanie Meyer - which honestly seems like the best possible way to use the money one has garnered from one's own immensely successful novel series that was adapted into films. I immediately began to contemplate which books I would fund for movie production if I suddenly came into umpteen million dollars.
Naturally I started thinking about Zilpha Keatley Snyder's books and I'm thinking maybe The Egypt Game: it strikes me as the most likely to be cinematically pleasing (although there's also something to be said in this regard for The Headless Cupid). I love The Changeling, but I think it would be hard to do as a movie, both because of the structure & because the girls are so many different ages... although maybe an animated film?
...the chances that Studio Ghibli will make The Changeling into a film are basically zero, but nonetheless that would be amazing. Can you imagine the Ghibli take on the imaginative sequences in Green Sky? Or if Ghibli did the Green Sky trilogy!
But I digress. Even my wildest dreams do not encompass coming into enough money to fund my own animation studio.
Another book that I think would make a great movie is Caroline B. Cooney's Mummy: a teenage girl steals a mummy from a museum for a senior prank, then has to protect the mummy from her fellow pranksters when they want to rip it open to find the gold wrapped in the linen. It's tense and exciting (the heist part, where Emlyn is in the museum, is delightful) and there's no romance, which honestly I think would be a nice thing in a teen movie for once.
Maybe a Sutcliff novel? I'm thinking Frontier Wolf: it takes place over a relatively short span of time, there's a clear chase sequence, and also it doesn't have one of those "rocks fall, everybody die" endings like many of Sutcliff books.
I cannot remember if that particular plotline was in the book or not. Really the movie made me want to reread the book a lot.
***
At the end of the movie we noticed that Stephanie Meyer produced the movie - yes, Twilight Stephanie Meyer - which honestly seems like the best possible way to use the money one has garnered from one's own immensely successful novel series that was adapted into films. I immediately began to contemplate which books I would fund for movie production if I suddenly came into umpteen million dollars.
Naturally I started thinking about Zilpha Keatley Snyder's books and I'm thinking maybe The Egypt Game: it strikes me as the most likely to be cinematically pleasing (although there's also something to be said in this regard for The Headless Cupid). I love The Changeling, but I think it would be hard to do as a movie, both because of the structure & because the girls are so many different ages... although maybe an animated film?
...the chances that Studio Ghibli will make The Changeling into a film are basically zero, but nonetheless that would be amazing. Can you imagine the Ghibli take on the imaginative sequences in Green Sky? Or if Ghibli did the Green Sky trilogy!
But I digress. Even my wildest dreams do not encompass coming into enough money to fund my own animation studio.
Another book that I think would make a great movie is Caroline B. Cooney's Mummy: a teenage girl steals a mummy from a museum for a senior prank, then has to protect the mummy from her fellow pranksters when they want to rip it open to find the gold wrapped in the linen. It's tense and exciting (the heist part, where Emlyn is in the museum, is delightful) and there's no romance, which honestly I think would be a nice thing in a teen movie for once.
Maybe a Sutcliff novel? I'm thinking Frontier Wolf: it takes place over a relatively short span of time, there's a clear chase sequence, and also it doesn't have one of those "rocks fall, everybody die" endings like many of Sutcliff books.
