The Squeee

Just found out there's a preview screening of Wuthering Heights '11 in Nottingham this Friday, at Broadway in town (19:30/7:30pm start, tickets are £7 + £1.50 booking fee). Not just that, it's followed by an "extended discussion", or rather, Q&A with the director Andrea Arnold afterwards. Here's the dilemma: It's a Brontë adaptation! :D See the film a week before the official premiere ftw! Be able to ask the director questions! BUT:

The first trailer for Wuthering Heights (2011) has arrived, and boy, doesn't it look dreary? It's like it's got "emo" written all over it. Suits you , sir. It's out 11 November 2011 in the UK and some time in 2012 in the US.

In the news today: The most recent adaptation of Jane Eyre was number three in the UK box office during its opening weekend. Well done! I think it was really well done considering out of the four cinemas in Nottingham (that I know of, anyway), only one is actually showing it - Showcase. Broadway will be showing it, but not until the end of the month. If that's the case here, what's it like in other parts of the country? #3 is well done! :) Keira Knightley, Jude Law and Aaron Johnson are billed to star in next year's adaptation of Anna Karenina . Haven't we known about Keira Knightley playing Anna Karenina for months now? Jude Law is to be Karenin and Johnson Vronsky. Speaking of adaptations, Joanna Trollope is apparently set to write a modern day re-make of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility . It's set to publish late 2013 and is a part of HarperFiction's attempts at giving all the Austen novels an update. I'm just slightly puzzled as to why this...

YouTube user jagfilm has uploaded a video containing four clips from the upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation, due to be released in the UK on 11 November this year. Have a look! What do you think? Does it bode well for the full feature? On a side note, Jane Eyre '11 will finally open next Friday here, yay! Some lucky winners could win tickets for a special screening this Sunday ... at Haddon Hall. Competition closed yesterday, so now it's just fingers crossed I'm one of them. ;)

This post would not have been made if it wasn't for BrontëBlog who alerted me to their existance, and hacsince1991 on YouTube for uploading them! It's SOME deleted scenes (NOT all of them!) from Jane Eyre (2011), which comes out on Region 1 DVD (North America) on 16 August. Us Brits still have to wait for the cinema release, which is one month today! The wait is almost over ...

James Howson as Heathcliff in the upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation: With thanks to @Film4 for sharing this on Twitter. :) Doesn't look too menacing here, does he?

When someone asks me, what is my favorite book, I answer “Wuthering Heights”. In one of the student organization I belong to we have had book-nights a few times. The first time I took this book with me, and someone actually asked, why this book. I just answered, that whenever I move (and as a student, I have moved a lot!), this is the book that always comes with me! My history with “Wuthering Heights” goes back into the year 2002 or 2003, when we had to read it for our English Literature course. It was out from all the libraries so I found one from the antique bookshop, which is great, because now I have my own personal copy =) Since 2004 I have read it every year at least once. Have already done it in 2011 and not long ago in June. I think I still don't know, why exactly I love this book so much! Is it the plot, the characters, the setting, the era or something else. Or perhaps all of these together. I'm not an educated literature aesthete, especially when I'm not read...

Considering it's a mere 2,5 months until the thing is set to come out (probably more like two months, as it's supposed to premiere at the Venice Film Festival, which I think is in the first half of September - don't quote me on that), I really hope there's no more changes to the casting of Wuthering Heights (2011). This doesn't look Twilighty at all, no siree ... (Source: Charleybrown at Enchanted Serenity ) According to the little information available, at least with the amount of research I'm willing to do on the subject at the moment (it's my birthday, I'm allowed) ... the cast list is surprisingly lacking. I don't mean it because I don't really recognise any of the names based on names alone - when I look up pictures in a bit, I reckon there will be a lot of "oh it's HIM/HER!" (no good with names) - but because they only list nine people. Where's Nellie? Where are everyone else? Like ... Hindley? Cathy/Edgar's ...

Wuthering Heights has been adapted for the screen many times, not even counting spin-offs like Sparkhouse or parody clips and such. Here is a chronological list according to IMDb : Wuthering Heights (1920) Wuthering Heights (1939) Wuthering Heights (1948) Wuthering Heights (1954) Wuthering Heights (1962) Wuthering Heights (1967) Wuthering Heights (1978) Wuthering Heights (1970) Hurlevent (1985) - French Arashi ga oka (1988) - Japanese Wuthering Heights (1992) Wuthering Heights (1998) Wuthering Heights (2003) Cime tempestose (2004) - Italian Wuthering Heights (2009) Wuthering Heights (2011) The last one says 2011, gasp! So ... what do we know about the latest version, number 16?

This week will be celebrating everything Wuthering Heights . Wiley windy moors? Check! Passionate love story? Check! Guest posts from fabulous people? Check! (Well, okay, I'm hoping to receive the ones I'm waiting for ASAP, otherwise it's "person" rather than "people", to be fair.) Because I've already gone through and reviewed all the Wuthering Heights adaptations I have, as well as reading the book, here's a re-cap of those posts: Book review: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) Paper/essay review: Witches and Devilry in Wuthering Heights by Jamie Freeman (2011) Miniseries review: Wuthering Heights (1978) Miniseries review: Wuthering Heights (1998) Miniseries review: Wuthering Heights (2009), part 1 / part 2 Miniseries review: Sparkhouse (2002)

Crazy about Cathy? Hankerin' for Heathcliff? Join the Wuthering Week here at The Squeee , 11-15 July 2011! If Wuthering Heights is your thing, or even if it isn't, join in! I'm looking for fellow Brontëites to guest blog about Wuthering Heights in one way or another during this week. Love it? Hate it? Both work! Please email me ASAP at blog@traxy.co.uk to sign up! :) Special guest during the week will be author Kay Woodward (who wrote the smashing Jane Airhead ), whose new young adult novel Wuthering Hearts is out in July. She'll be making a stop on her blog tour here on July 13th. Can't wait! I'll be posting a review of Wuthering Hearts and anything else is up to you. :)

We interrupt the regular broadcast of FanstRAvaganza 2 in order to have a rant about some mucking fuppets I just came across online and want to scream about for a bit. If you're the sort of person whose religious prejudices get in the way of, oh I dunno, education , you should really give this post a miss, or you're likely to be tremendously offended. Don't say I didn't warn you. The first one, Jane Eyre: Oblivious or Needy? tries to make some kind of point of Jane being oblivious for not realising there was something shady going on at Thornefield. "No one can be that oblivious" it says, and also goes on to claim that Jane was needy for ... St. John wanting to marry her? Does not compute? How can Jane be blamed for being needy when it's not as if she encouraged St. John's attentions and in fact, when he asked her to marry him, she flat out refused? If she was needy, surely she would have accepted his proposal and ignored his jibe about her being ma...

I was searching IMDb for info about Wuthering Heights '98 as I was going to review it, and while doing so, came across the entry for Wuthering Heights (2010) , which is currently in pre-production, apparently. Yet another version, and this one just a year after the last one?! Says it will be shot in Scotland and Ireland and star Gemma Arterton as Cathy and Ed Westwick as Heathcliff. So, who are these people? Let's have a look.

Over at Laura's Reviews , there's a challenge for 2010: read/watch anything by or about the Brontë sisters between January and June. Between three and six things. Sounds easy enough! For more info, and to officially sign up to the challenge, see All About the Brontes Challenge 2010 . I have eight Jane Eyre adaptations that can be watched (and obsessed over, naturally), two to listen to (have started one of them already, i.e. the one from '91 with Ciarán Hinds as Rochester), and then there's Tenant of Wildfell Hall that I could re-watch, and three Wuthering Heights adaptations. Two I've recently written about, so maybe I'll skip those, just like I'd probably skip Jane Eyre '34 and '83 for the same reason. I've not written about Wuthering Heights the book yet, and I have Agnes Grey still to read... maybe give Jane Eyre another read as well... maybe.

About 50 pages left of the book now, and have been re-watching Wuthering Heights '09 ... and formed a new opinion. WH'78, frightfully dull as it was, must be the one version closest to the book. Well, except that the book fails to be be dull. The book is rather engaging and not as tedious to read as, oh, Jane Eyre . Emily is more to-the-point than her sister, doesn't go off rambling in purple-tinted prose about stuff that doesn't have an impact on the story or characters. She also doesn't show off her French skills time and time again, although instead, she writes in dialect, which is only marginally easier to understand than the French. WH'98, what I remember of it, is also at least semi-true to the book, but not quite to the same extent.

Looked through the cast list for Wuthering Heights '09 and the only names/faces I recognised were Andrew Lincoln as Edgar Linton - who used to be in Afterlife - and Caribbean pirate Kevin McNally. The rest I'm completely in the dark as to who they are. The script writer did Desperate Romantics , which I didn't get around to seeing (any good?), and some medical dramas and other more modern-day shows. I dunno, I'm just not really taken with it. Maybe watching it will change my mind... on the other hand, there's still the problem of it being Wuthering Heights and not, oh, Pride & Prejudice , Jane Eyre or North & South ... so we'll see. Put the timer on, but the freeview signal on ITV normally isn't too great, unfortunately, but right now we're not at home, so it will have to do. ITV's catchup service on the website might work otherwise. Can't miss a classic story turned into a TV costume drama, after all!

It's that time again - a remake of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights , about a raving psychopath Heathcliff and his confused love affair with his foster sister Cathy. I honestly don't get the appeal of Heathcliff just because he's a proper psycho. I've not yet read the book (I have it, though) and I've only seen one adaptation so far ( 1998 TV version with Robert Cavanah and Orla Brady - and Matthew Macfadyen!) but I wasn't impressed. Still, have the harddrive recorder set for Sunday and Monday to see if this does a better job or if it's still just... dark and weird. Well, if it's not good, I've also set the timer for " Frozen " on BBC2 night to Monday. :D