#film-adaptation

#film-adaptation

Now in his 80s, Ian McKellen appears to have taken a strategically sedentary route for his appearance as Gandalf the Grey in the next year's Lord of the Rings weird-quel The Hunt for Gollum. You've probably heard about this thing: it's the new movie that's based on bits and pieces of JRR Tolkien's esteemed high-fantasy epic that were only mentioned in passing during the three original three-hour movies, and didn't get much more of a mention in the extended cuts that came out later.

The important thing about adaptations isn't what's taken out but what's put in. Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights"-or, as she'd have it, " 'Wuthering Heights,' " complete with scare quotes-is the season's second Frankenstein movie, because Fennell takes bits and pieces from Emily Brontë's novel and, adding much of her own imagining, reassembles them into a misbegotten thing that wants only to be loved. And paying audiences seem to love it, even if many critics don't.

This weekend brings the wide release of Saltburn director Emerald Fennell's adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. As is befitting Fennell's established style, the movie offers over-the-top sexual titillation (though, crucially, zero nudity) and elaborate production design. Plus, a contemporary pop soundtrack from Charli xcx. A horny film version of a 19th-century novel is as adult-skewing as it gets at the box office these days.

In Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, the moors of Yorkshire are wet with rain, fog-and symbolism. The rugged landscape separating the titular home from the neighboring estate, Thrushcross Grange, represents danger and harshness, but also a kind of wild freedom for the star-crossed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff, who explore the land together in childhood and spend their adult lives yearning for each other.

"Number one for me was not faking too much," Haley says. "Obviously you have to fake stuff and you have to pretend you're somewhere where you're not. But I wanted this film to be grounded and believable, and for it to feel like you were actually on vacation with Poppy and Alex. So it was important to me to shoot it with our boots on the ground."

"I remember things in retinal flashes," Yuknavitch explains in the book. "Without order." In another passage, she says, "All the events of my life swim in and out between each other," adding that, although her memory is nonlinear, "we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear." The liberation of time is central to modern cinema, because, once a movie is acknowledged as a work of first-person art as much as a book is, subjectivity itself becomes its overarching subject.

Out today, Woman Down centers on writer Petra Rose, an author who has writer's block and checks into a remote cabin to finish her next book. Petra, who took a hiatus after fans blamed her for a producer's decision to cut a fan-favorite character out of the film adaptation of her book A Terrible Thing, has "learned the hard way what happens when the internet turns on you," a synopsis states.

Hannibal Lecter's first movie appearance was in 1986's Manhunter, starring Brian Cox. It took director and writer Michael Mann just five weeks to adapt Thomas Harris's novel Red Dragon for the screen. But when it came to adapting his own work Heat 2, co-authored with Meg Gardiner as both a prequel and sequel to his 1995 film Heat Mann discovered the pain of self-editing.

But Hamnet has a distinctive atmosphere that sets it apart from many of this year's releases. That look and feel is largely due to cinematographer Łukasz Żal. Known for collaborations with Paweł Pawlikowski on Ida and Cold War, Żal has also worked with filmmakers like Charlie Kaufman and Jonathan Glazer. He approaches each shot with meticulous care, building layers into his frames so they convey emotion as much as narrative.

On 19 December 1974, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz went round to her friend Peter Hujar's apartment in New York, and asked the photographer to describe exactly what he had done the day before. He talked in great detail about taking Allen Ginsberg's portrait for the New York Times (it didn't go well Ginsberg was too performative for the kind of intimacy Hujar craved). He also described the Chinese takeaway he ate and how his pal Vince Aletti came round to have a shower.

You can't cut and paste large speeches of Shakespeare and put them into a novel,

It rooted slowly but firmly, like all "cult classics." It wasn't so much the story of her abusive childhood and the liberation she found in sex and substances, swimming, and writing as it was a polemic against the notion of a fixed past. Its emphatic embrace of subjective experience-celebrating a certain ownership and reframing of your own history-over static, objective fact made it a kind of guide. Words to live by.