Entertainment News

Somehow I missed that there was an "Eagle Of the Ninth" movie filming. I remember being very fond of that YA novel. I was also pleased to hear that the always-in-development Tripods trilogy has a new script.

For those of you whose taste runs more to the musical, you might be interested to hear that there's a Miss Saigon movie in development.

Also, the Swedish film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has now got a US release. The book seems enormously popular, but I haven't read it yet. Any good?

Other projects that sound interesting: Ridley Scott is apparently going to remake the "Red Riding" miniseries for US audiences.

What struck me about this story wasn't so much the oh-god-here-we-go-again spectacle of American remakes of British tv, but the fact I somehow hadn't yet heard of this series: The original [Red Riding], which was based on a four novel series by David Peace, is a study of power and police corruption framed around the investigation of the disappearance of several young girls in a case based on the real life Yorkshire Ripper killings.

In the Netflix queue it goes.

Quick reviews

Where the Wild Things Are looked beautiful. I liked the acting, the cinematography & the script. The pace seemed unnecessarily slow at times, but that may have been because I was starving and really wanted to get out of the theatre and grab some dinner.

I just finished reading In the Woods. It's a dark and unsettling book, so naturally, I really liked it.

The plot: three children vanish in Ireland in the 1980s. One is later recovered alive, clinging to a tree in the nearby woods, his shoes covered in blood. He claims to have no memory of what happened to his friends. Years later, the boy in question has grown into a troubled detective who finds himself working a child murder in the same vicinity as his own childhood trauma. Believing the two cases to be linked, the detective decides to keep his own role in the story secret from his colleagues and from the townspeople as he searches for answers.

Publisher's Weekly calls this a "psychological thriller," and I have to agree. This is really a story about how people think, about what they recognize and what they don't. It's also a good example of Todorov's Fantastic, in that there's a strong hint of the supernatural in the plot, but as it is filtered through the first-person perspective of an extremely damaged person, it's not clear whether the "truth" lies in the realms of the real or the unreal.