New Jane Eyre Film.

Hooray!  I just read Jane Eyre a few months ago; it's easily in my top 3 novels of all time.  Cory alerted me that there's a movie coming out and it really looks good.  This adaptation is supposed to stick rather faithfully to the novel; here's hoping!

Says director Cary Fukunaga, "I’ve spent a lot of time rereading the book and trying to feel out what Charlotte Brontë was feeling when she was writing it. That sort of spookiness that plagues the entire story…there’s been something like 24 adaptations, and it’s very rare that you see those sorts of darker sides. They treat it like it’s just a period romance, and I think it’s much more than that.”

You can definitely see the Gothic bent in the trailer:  enjoy!

Becoming Jane.

film stills via Eras of Elegance

The other night when I was home alone, I watched Becoming Jane again, likely in the hopes of becoming Jane.  The 2007 film is a wonderful, smart imagining of what Jane Austen's life (and romances) might have been like and how they might have inspired her novels.  Unlike a lot of works that piggyback on the steady popularity of Jane Austen's novels, the movie is well done and of course, tres romantic.   

I may have saved a photo of the lovely, well-cast Anne Hathaway playing Jane Austen writing to inspire myself.  On my computer desktop.  I keep running into people talking about the power of visualization lately and it so happens that in addition to Jane Austen probably being my favorite writer ever (yes, even though not a children's novelist!), strangers sometimes tell me I look like actress Anne Hathaway a bit.  I must not look like her very much or those close to me would probably agree more, but I must admit I agree a bit with my students and coworkers.  That said, I also feel like I look a bit like Jeff Goldblum, who by the way acted like he knew me once at a press party in LA.  Maybe he thought I was a long lost illegitimate daughter.

I'm also working on convincing myself that there's something very glamorous about sitting in a chair and working on my novel (in order to get myself in said chair, because glamour seems a pretty good motivator for me.)  This helped.