A Heathcliff of the Elvis world

Several news websites announce that Wuthering Heights 2009 will be broadcast in Australia through ABC in the near future:

ABC, Australia's national public broadcaster, has also acquired Mammoth Screen's new four-part adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights for ITV. The drama, which stars RocknRolla actor Tom Hardy as Heathcliff, is yet to get a confirmed TX date in the UK.
Wuthering Heights and The 39 Steps will form part of ITV Global Entertainment's drama slate. (Will Hurrell in Broadcastnow)

Four parts? The version we know is just 142 minutes long.

The Guardian brings back an article from 1955 which reports a visit to Haworth and the Brontë Parsonage in the year of Charlotte Brontë's death centenary:

The Bronte shrine - shivers and gloom live
26 March 1955
Norman Shrapnel

"Bronte Products - Cabinet Makers, Undertakers," a weathered signboard announces, and one sees what it means. None of the British literary shrines is stronger or more faithful in atmosphere. Haworth, for all its lively beckonings to the tourists who are now being drawn to it by Charlotte's centenary, cannot help conveying a sense of isolation and mortality.
A scowl of dark stone, hewn as it seems out of a recalcitrant hilltop, the place preserves a rigour that the Bronte postcards, the Bronte Guest House, the Bronte Cinema Company, the Bronte buses and tours, the Bronte fisheries, house furnishers, and cafe, and the Bronte Lodge of Buffaloes are quite unable to soften. And they would be wrong if they wanted to. For no true pilgrim would come here - however gay his plastic mac, however uneerie the Yorkshire pudding he can eat in the lurching main street without expecting to shiver a little.
Shiver he does. The humanisers may try their best but the ghosts win, hands down. The living seem upstarts. To all appearance it might still be, as it was then, a manufacturing village in the Honour of Pontefract, with 4,668 inhabitants. Now there is this other industry, bringing some 50,000 visitors in a good year. The Bronte Society runs its affairs with taste and restraint, and yet it is impossible to visit Haworth Parsonage, now a museum, without feeling that one is intruding upon a passionately private life.
The air is domestic, unbearably mournful, yet reproachfully vital. Samplers worked by little dead Brontes, those other sisters, are on the walls. Here is a Bronte book of music, published in 1894, with fugues built on the notes of the sisters' initials. But such light relief is a mere holding back of the pervasive sadness.
Emotion is the last thing you expect to feel in a literary shrine; here, even to the most stalwart non-reader of Charlotte Bronte, it is in every nook and corner. From Charlotte's window upstairs the outlook is much as she knew it. And there by the window, as if watching and listening for Branwell's tipsy return, stands Charlotte's lavender silk dress surmounted by an alert bonnet. This centenary summer will bring visitors from many countries. The silent watcher by the window in Charlotte's room will no doubt forgive the mass intrusion. Her legend and Haworth's are now one.
Back in Haworth the Baptist Church ladies are showing signs of a reaction against this atmosphere of female doom. They are producing a Yorkshire dialect sketch entitled "Anastasia Joins t'Domino Club". (Norman Shrapnel)

The writer Sarah Shun-Lien is interviewed in the San Diego Reader:

What book has been most life-changing for you?
“Jane Eyre completely killed me when I read it in eighth grade — it’s one of my favorite middle-school memories. I was totally gripped by the story, and I felt such a connection to Jane and was swept up by the figure of Mr. Rochester. And I think, in part because they had a picture of Charlotte Brontë on the cover, that it was the first time I began to think about the writer, the person out of whose imagination the story arose. I’ve read the book at many different points in my life — it’s interesting because Jane Eyre is also a teacher, and the book describes her both as a child and as a young woman. I never thought of the connection between Jane Eyre and Ms. Hempel Chronicles, but it’s funny to think that they cover somewhat similar territory. (Sonia Eliot)

What's on Stage reviews a Prima Artists entertainment showcase to clients in the cruise industry (verbatim) and finds the most improbable Brontë connection of the month:

The second Elvis impersonator of the day was another hunk of burning love by the name of Mario Kombu. This particular version of the king of rock and roll was of the sultry, brooding variety, more a Heathcliff of the Elvis world really. (Mark Ritchie)

Another highly improbably Brontë landscape is Spanish Bay (in Pebble Beach, California). But not according to the Monterey County Herald:

First, let me say unequivocally that no one can argue with the view off the patio that looks onto bonny, undulating greens and out to sea. Scanning that windswept horizon, you fully expect to see Heathcliff roaming about, tearing his hair and calling for Cathy. (Mike Hale and Melissa Snyder)

Austinist reviews the latest album by The Decemberists: Hazards of Love:

Leaning heavily on imagery from Wuthering Heights, Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, almost every Greek tragedy ever written and of course, Andrew Lloyd Weber, The Hazards of Love does live up to the story-telling heights Meloy aimed for. In terms of the music, we find it a bit stunted. (Paige Maguire)

EDIT: The Indie Credential gives more clues about the "Wuthering Heights imagery":

In fact, the characters in this tale remind me a bit of Heathcliff and Kathy (sic) in Wuthering Heights - another haunting tale - but one in which the lovers got what they deserved because of their own inability to handle their emotions and act like decent human beings.

It doesn't come as a surprise as The Decemberists covered Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights in the past.

The Chestnut Hill Local compares a passage of Jane Eyre to TV addiction:

Confessions of an addict: A power higher than any couch potato has mandated the switch to digital TV. The time has come to give in.
What followed was a passage equal in horror and desperation to Bronte’s description of Mister Rochester’s mad wife in Jane Eyre. You know, the hidden loony, the “dark secret” of the family, sitting in the gloomy attic, all hope gone.
It seems that, following the federal mandate to switch from analog to digital TV, Melissa was enticed to get Cable TV with some “On Demand” options. The addiction began almost immediately. (Hugh Gilmore)

Here are a few blogs: Gone to Falmouth writes about Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea and Hidden Attraction posts justs about Jane Eyre. The Absurd Heroine doesn't want Villette to end. And Inbetweenies reminisces about a trip to Haworth a couple of years ago. Incidentally, the road to the Brontë Falls is the subject of this picture uploaded to flickr by Charlotte.Taylor83. Finally on youtube, Jim Clark has posted a poem animation of Charlotte Brontë's Mementos.

Categories: Brontëites, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights