| Arabian Nights set for Hollywood makeover Director of the Mummy spin-off The Scorpion King signs up to give a new spin to the classic characters of One Thousand and One NightsIt introduced the world to such exotic characters as Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. Now Hollywood has set its heart on bringing Arabian Nights to the big screen, according to Variety.Chuck Russell, director of the Mummy spin-off The Scorpion King, is reportedly planning a $70m (£42m) new spin which unites Aladdin and Sinbad on a mission that you wouldn't find in the original collection of Middle Eastern tales known as One Thousand and One Nights.According to the synopsis, storyteller Scheherazade needs rescuing after being kidnapped by "dark powers" which have murdered her husband, King Shahryar. Russell has co-written the screenplay with newcomer Barry Ambrose."Through the use of a new generation of visual technologies, we will be able to quite literally take audiences around the world on a magic carpet ride," Russell said.The project is announced at a time when Hollywood appears to be showing a renewed interest in Middle Eastern fantasy. Videogame adaptation Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, from the production team behind the Pirates of the Caribbean series, is due in cinemas in May. The big-budget production stars Jake Gyllenhaal as the titular hero, alongside Gemma Arterton, Alfred Molina and Ben Kingsley.Film adaptationsBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Book roundup: Four women of considerable influence New biographies explore the lives of four very different women: Louisa May Alcott, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, Ayn Rand and Dorothea ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Paperback Mass-Market Fiction Top 5 at a Glance1. DEAR JOHN, by Nicholas Sparks2. LAVENDER MORNING, by Jude Deveraux3. THE ASSOCIATE, by John Grisham4. THE LOST, by J.D. Robb, Patricia Gaffney, Mary Blayney and Ruth Ryan Langan5. CRUEL INTENT, by J.A. Jance feeds.nytimes.com |
Guardian review book club with Peter Carey Date: Wednesday 3rd FebruaryTime: 19:00Venue: Hall OnePrice: £9.50Peter Carey will join John Mullan for a discussion of his 1988 Booker prize-winning novel, Oscar and Lucinda. On a boat bound for New South Wales in the mid-19th century, Oscar, an English clergyman, meets Lucinda, a young heiress. Both obsessive gamblers, they are drawn to each other by their affinity for risk, their loneliness and a powerful, but unexpressed, mutual attraction. In a bold and reckless act, Oscar accepts Lucinda's challenge to transport a glass church from Sydney to a remote settlement in the outback.Tickets are £9.50 online or £11.50 from the box office and can be bought direct from Kings Place:Website: kingsplace.co.ukTel: 020 7520 1490Peter Careyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Period pains: when writers can't tell the time Authorial disregard for historical mores can make reading a book set in the recent past an unsettling experienceThree books I read recently set me thinking about the period in which an author decides to set a novel: one book seemed to me to be set in the wrong time altogether; another I felt would more likely have taken place several years earlier; the last was calendar-perfect.The wrong 'un was The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. I confess to not liking the book, which reads like the result of Bernard-Henri Lévy trying to write a "woman's novel." But its philosophy-lite pretentiousness didn't irk me as much as the out-of-jointedness of the time setting. In what's more or less present-day Paris, the main character pretends to be a "typical" concierge. Why? So her tenants won't suspect she's actually an intellectual. This ruse involves a blaring television and a constant miasma of coffee and cabbage seeping from under her door while she lies low with - what else? - classical music, a good cup of tea, and gourmet cuisine. 'Allo, 'allo? What century is this? Even supposing that one were wealthy enough to find an apartment in Paris with a concierge, would one then - in this day and age - expect that concierge to be an ignorant peasant? The book would have been much more credible if set in the 1920s - and I could come up with absolutely no reason for it not having been. Madame Barbery's reasoning remains a mystery far more enigmatic than her character's deception.Before Ian McEwan fans start screaming for my head, let me say I found On Chesil Beach a brilliant and moving book. My niggling worry about the time in which it's been set may be no more than an American's ignorance of Britain. And yet … In 1962, when the action takes place, I lived in a small town in Pennsylvania. Though quite a bit younger than the book's protagonists, I, and all my friends, knew an ocean more about sex than either of them. As I read, the question wouldn't go away: were 22-year-olds in the UK really this clueless? Other references - for example, comments about music not being sexy though these were the days of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis - increased my puzzlement over why the book hadn't been set five years earlier, when the story would have seemed much more plausible. (Timewise, I found McEwan's Saturday even odder, by the way: it read as if written by someone who had only heard what contemporary London was like.)And then there's Julian Fellowes' Past Imperfect, which captures the late 1960s perfectly, even as it describes a way of life that was already on its way out. As the narrative skips back and forth between past and present, with London's debutante season as much a character as the 20-somethings at the balls, this ripping yarn deftly defines the 60s sea change in British society. Fellowes doesn't rely on time-specific events so much as a time-specific lifestyle: people lived differently in the 1960s, and anyone old enough to have experienced the decade was shaped by its clash of high and low cultures.The feeling that Fellowes had chosen the perfect year in which to place his story made me all the more aware of how unsettling I found the dating of the other two tales. I don't think any novel needs to be a reflection of its time, but it's certainly less distracting when it doesn't seem to have been delivered to the writer's imagination by time machine.FictionIan McEwanSuzanne Munshowerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |