Our colleagues at the French AbeBooks website, have put together a very nice feature on film literature to celebrate the Cannes Film Festival.
You don’t have to be able to read French to appreciate the items they have chosen including signed Steven Spielberg and George Lucas pieces.
Popularity: 8% [?]
The Guardian on why Ian Fleming might be a bit low brow but is still a brilliant read
As the 100th anniversary of his birth approaches, it’s tempting to characterise Ian Fleming as The Man With The Golden Pen, as a calculatingly commercial author of absurd misogynistic fantasies. Even his own wife Ann icily described him as “hammering out pornography” when he spent his disciplined three-hours a day writing the books in their Jamaican home.
Popularity: 21% [?]
I had no idea that so many of Philip K. Dick’s books and stories had been made into movies. So far nine have been made with two more in the works:
1. Blade Runner
2. Total Recal
3.Screamers
4. Total Recall 2070: Machine Dreams (based on a short story)
5. Impostor
6. Minority Report
7. Paycheck
8. A Scanner Darkly
9. Next
10. Radio Free Albemuth
11. Owl in Daylight (unpublished)
The blogger who posted this list thinks The Man in the High Castle will be the next PKD novel to make the move to film, and I think I agree with them
Popularity: 18% [?]
If you were listening to NPR today then you would have learnt that Lassie is 70 years old this year. Eric Knight created Lassie when the Saturday Evening Post published his short story, Lassie Come Home, in 1938. Two years later, it was published as a novel and we have some of those first editions for sale.
In 1943, Lassie was turned into that famous movie with Roddy McDowall and Elizabeth Taylor, and the collie never looked back. In the novel, Lassie is living in England and her coat is mahogany and sable rather than the sandy colour of the movies.
How sad that Knight, who also published Song on Your Bugles in 1936 and raised collies on his farm in Pennsylvania, was killed in a 1943 air crash when he was operating a member of the US Army’s special services. He never experienced the worldwide phenomenon of Lassie.
Popularity: 24% [?]
Prospect looks at the year in culture (books, theatre, art, movies etc) and gathers those that were overrated and underrated.
Popularity: 33% [?]