Cary Fukunaga's advanced screening in Westport

The Telegraph and Argus adds to the news about the appointment of Bonnie Greer as the new President of the Brontë Society:

Andrew McCarthy, director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth, said it was particularly relevant that Miss Greer was a woman.
“That she is a woman is important when representing the Brontës, who themselves were helping lead the way for women authors in the 19th century,” he said.

On the other side of the pond, via NorwalkPlus we have news of another advanced screening of Jane Eyre in Westport, Connecticut. In this case, Cary Fukunaga will also be there:

On Thursday, March 10th, the Westport Youth Film Festival (WYFF), a program of the Westport Arts Center, will host an advanced screening of Focus Features’ Jane Eyre — a film adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's classic novel. Following the screening, there will be a Q & A with Director, Cary Fukunaga.This advanced screening of Jane Eyre is WYFF’s biggest fundraiser in preparation for the festival, which will be held on May 13-14, 2011 in downtown Fairfield, CT."
WYFF is so grateful to Focus Features for making this event possible, as well as to Bowtie Cinema for providing the use of its theater for this special occasion,” says WYFF Program Director Kate Lupo. “Leading up to our annual film festival in May, WYFF is dedicated to working with the Westport Arts Center to create an exciting calendar of events and screenings that inspire conversation and bring the community together through a collective appreciation of the art of film. And we are so honored to welcome Mr. Fukunaga to Westport as our special guest. This is a night you won’t want to miss." [...]
The screening will take place at the Bow Tie Royale 6 Theater, located at 542 Westport Avenue in Norwalk, Connecticut at 7:30 PM (seating at 7:00 PM). There are a limited number of tickets available for this exclusive event and they are now on sale for $25.00 per person. To buy your tickets, please visit www.westportartscenter.org or call 203-222-7070.]

We haven't heard of any 3D screenings of the movie, but we are not sure whether this not-too-keen-on-3D columnist from The Picayune Item will be glad or sad about it:

Thankfully, chick flicks have been ignored in the 3-D venue, but wouldn’t a good English period piece be breathtaking in the visual affect? Mr. Darcy in 3-D! Jane Eyre! Or something in Shakespeare. (Tracy Williams)

He doesn't mention this one, but Kazuo Ishiguro discusses adaptations in the London Evening Standard:

"When I see films made from books, I make a huge effort not to remember the book," he says. "It's important to see the film as a film. Of course, it's easier with an old book. If it's Wuthering Heights or something, it's like going to the theatre and seeing another version; it might as well be Chekhov. This book came out in 2006, so it's harder to do that. But it's a movie. Every discussion shouldn't be dominated by a comparison with the novel." (Rachel Cooke)

We don't necessarily agree with it being easier in the case of old books but pretty much second the rest. But that's not all. Later on, on the topic of young writers, he says,

It's odd, then, that he complains now about not having been taken seriously as a younger writer. When Granta selected him as a rising star, he thought it patronising. "The illustration was of a baby with a fountain pen behind its ear. I wanted to say, 'Don't patronise us because we look vaguely young. Many of us have done our best work. We're not babies. We've written Money and Midnight's Children and Flaubert's Parrot.'" He lists several authors who, he says, wrote their best work young (though given that many of them also died young, it might in fact have turned out to have been their worst work - how can we ever know?): the Brontës, Jane Austen, Kafka, Chekhov, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. "Luckily, I noticed it [the trend for writers to peak early] when I was young enough to do something about it. I wanted to say to my peers, 'This isn't the time to start farting about writing travel pieces or getting that columnist's job. If you're serious about fiction, this is the time you're most likely to write a masterpiece.'" (Rachel Cooke)

Theatre Louisville reviews the current production of Polly Teale's Brontë:

I do not know how much of this painful history, as presented in Teale’s words and in Natalie Fields’
sure-footed direction, is based on factual research as opposed to pure speculation. And I don’t care. It is compelling, character-driven alternative theatre, with doses here and there of humor and melodrama, and fine acting from everyone involved.
Teale not only attempts an answer (speculative and rather pat, though it may be) to the question of how these magnum opuses of Victorian lit could have possibly been thought up by three uneducated spinsters, but by developing the sisters’ respective personalities and outlooks on their bleak situation, she shows us why The Tennant of Wildfell Hall could not have come from anyone but Anne (Abby Braune), why Wuthering Heights could not have come from anyone but Emily (Elizabeth Cox), and why Jane Eyre could not have come from anyone but Charlotte (Sarah East).
Fields, in turn, gives us a fluid, kaleidoscopic staging that puts every square inch of the space to good use, playing scenes on both of the Rud’s stages and often in the seating area as well.
I haven’t felt this absorbed by non-traditional theatre since Anne Bogart and the SITI Company premiered Under Construction at the 2009 Humana Festival! Indeed, the entire evening seems to owe a thing or two to the Bogart technique of estrangement that has been popping up more and more often in the commercial theatre (case in point: recent Broadway productions of Spring Awakening and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson).
Despite the anachronisms of the production (some inspired, some not), the story is really a fairly straightforward one, which follows a common trajectory for the artist biography, chronicling the sisters’ lives from adolescence to premature death as their great novels, and the decision to publish them pseudonymously, are largely shaped by circumstance. (Cory Vaughn)

HotPress places novelist and film-maker Neil Jordan in a 'Brontë-esque' setting:

On a blustery Brontë-esque afternoon in his home in Dalkey, Neil Jordan, whose fifth novel Mistaken has just been published. . . (Peter Murphy)

A writer from ...ology jokes about Axe:

Fact: I like the way Axe smells.
Addendum: When a male wears Axe, I find myself more attracted to said male.
In fact, there have been occasions during which I'm making a point during an intelligent conversation when somebody wearing Axe walks in, instantly killing my brain cells and resulting in a sentence that goes something like: "...and Charlotte Brontë was clearly the superior writer becauseohmygod, whoisthatwhereisthat." (Anna Breslaw)

A press release about the novel Van Diemen at 17 by Jeania Kimbrough introduces the book as follows:

There are many famous examples of star-crossed lovers in our culture, Romeo and Juliet being first among them. Their families feuded with each other. Catherine and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and Jack and Rose from the Titanic shared somewhat doomed relationships because of the disparity of their social standing. Lancelot betrayed a trust King Arthur placed in him to be with Queen Guinevere. Jake and Neytiri from Avatar were from different, warring worlds and Bella and Edward of Twilight were different beings, in fact, one the favored prey of the predator.
The debut novel by Jeania Kimbrough, Van Diemen at 17, published by Smoke Signal Press in December 2010, explores a less sterotypical, but perhaps more common than we think, kind of star-crossed love affair — that between an older man and a younger girl.

A local senior student says the last novel she read was Wuthering Heights in a brief interview by Eunice Today. And The Register-Guard lists the readers' choices for reading if snowed-in, Jane Eyre among them.

And now for a couple of alerts that unfortunately didn't reach us in time. Female First reports that yesterday, February 2nd,

BAFTA welcomes Nicolas Chaudeurge to the ICA.
Having trained at the National Film and Television School, Nicolas has been editing drama and documentary for seventeen years in the UK and France. His partnership with long-term collaborator Andrea Arnold has produced Oscar-winning short film ‘Wasp’ (2003) as well as BAFTA-winners ‘Red Road’ (2006) and ‘Fish Tank’ (2009). Nicolas has just finished editing Arnold’s eagerly anticipated ‘Wuthering Heights’ and will share insights into his fascinating career.

It would be interesting to know if he told anything at all about Wuthering Heights.

And the Arizona Daily Star lists an event that must have taken place a while ago:

Today
Leading Ladies of Literature - The Victorians - Oro Valley Public Library, 1305 W. Naranja Drive. A discussion presented by Marion Doane about "Jane Eyre," "Wuthering Heights" and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by the Brontë sisters. 10 a.m.-noon. Feb. 3. Free. 229-5300.

But we are in time to report that The Heroine's Bookshelf blog has a lovely text on Jane Eyre by Beth Dunn of An Accomplished Young Lady and is giving away an equally lovely painting of Jane Eyre by Kirby and audiobooks of Jane Slayre and Wuthering Heights. Tamarack Idea Factory and Palabras al Viento (in Spanish) post about Jane Eyre and Kate's Library writes about Charlotte Brontë.

EDIT: An alert for today, February 4 in Szczecin, Poland:

Creative Workshop Reading -
Start : 2011-02-04, hours. 17:00.
Location : Książąt Pomorskich

Temat: Sławne pisarki w lustrze swoich rękopisów.
Prowadzenie: Krystyna Maksymowicz - aktorka, specjalistka pracy z głosem

Tematem drugiego w tym roku spotkania sympatyków aktorskiego czytania są interesujące i mało znane fragmenty biografii znanych kobiet pióra, autorek ponadczasowych bestsellerów. Postacie m.in. Lucy Maud Montgomery, Margaret Mitchell czy też sióstr Bronte zostaną ukazane nie tylko poprzez fakty z ich życia, ale także poprzez sekrety analizy psychografologicznej. Materiały wykorzystane podczas warsztatu pochodzą z cyklu Znane Autografy publikowanego przez Aldonę Bindę na łamach magazynu literackiego Bluszcz. (Gazeta Wyborcza Szczecin) (Microsoft translation)

Categories: Books, Brontë Society, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Theatre, Wuthering Heights