Heathcliff to swear on the radio

Box Office Mojo comments on the Jane Eyre 2011 box office results so far:

Jane Eyre continued to build its case as a limited release hit: the movie added 24 locations for a total of 26 and improved 155 percent to $466,409. While it's average of $17,939 was way off from last weekend, it was still relatively strong and indicated that the movie has room to grow. In ten days, the Mia Wasikowska-Michael Fassbender drama has amassed $719,514 and will be expanding to at least 78 theaters this coming weekend. (Ray Subers)

The Los Angeles Times Company Town and The Huffington Post also comment on the good results.

And now for more reviews:

Positive

Arts & Entertainment, a ChicagoNow blog:

I know literary purists may balk and people who have their favorite "Jane Eyre" film may certainly balk, but I loved it.See it and judge for yourself. If you're a costume geek, absolutely see it, The costumes are mostly muted, but the moments of lushness are well worth it. (Trudy Seabrook)

Mostly positive

The Faster Times:

By being greater than the sum of its parts, this “Jane Eyre” should stay fresh for a while, at least until the next one. And if that doesn’t strike you as exciting, isn’t it at least sort of comforting to think that every generation gets a new cinematic way to cheat on its English homework? (Jonathan Kiefer)

Voice of America has an article on the film (with a couple of audio excerpts from the movie).

Film Music Magazine reviews Dario Marianelli's soundtrack:

But with the shining light radiating from Marianelli’s Oscar for Atonement (not to mention a nomination for scoring the adaptation of sister Jane’s Pride and Prejudice), this is one musician who knows his way around such romantic haunts- not to mention the incredible talent to give cinema’s literary “respectability” real passion- in this case with a soundtrack that sends chills up the spine, even as the movie itself valiantly tries to achieve them. [...]
Yet what just might make this the best Jane Eyre score done to date (and one of the year’s best scores right out of the gate) is how Marianelli sees this as the ultimate ghost story, its characters tormented by specters of the past both psychological and palpable. It’s an atmosphere full of haunted voices and anguished, overlapping strings that’s as eerie as it is romantic, once again proving no instrument can extract emotion like the violin (stirringly played here by soloist Jack Liebeck). [...]
The Brontë sisters couldn’t have found a better man to musically speak for their heroines in the form of an Italian who can so beautifully play England’s agelessly repressed class system and the mental wreckage it reaps. (Daniel Schweiger)

A few blogs post about the film: Seriously... and Anthony's Reviews have liked it while Irreviews hasn't liked it at all.

But it's not just the new Jane Eyre that has Brontëland in a flutter today. This Sunday, March 27, BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting a new dramatisation of Wuthering Heights at 8 pm and it's said to be quite 'shocking'.

From The Telegraph:

According to the new radio version’s writer, Jonathan Holloway, this adaptation will “capture the shock” that greeted the publication of the original book.
“What I wanted to elbow out is this idea that it’s the cosy greatest love story ever told – it’s not,” Mr Holloway told Radiotimes.com. “For me Wuthering Heights is a story of violent obsession, and a tortuous unfulfilled relationship. This is not a Vaseline-lensed experience.”
Mr Holloway said that the book was often trivialised by adaptations, specifically mentioning Sir Cliff Richard’s 1996 musical Heathcliff.
“The f-words are part of my attempt to shift the production to left field, and to help capture the shock that was associated with the original book when it was published,” said Mr Holloway.
Though fans of traditional Brontë adaptations will be horrified by the words put in the mouth of their heroine, the new version might be a more accurate reflection of what Emily originally wrote than more genteel adaptations.
Andrew McCarthy, the director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in the author’s native Yorkshire village of Haworth, said: “When the book was released, it was shocking. Some words were crossed out in the original text because they were too strong.”
He cites page 100 as an example: “No, I was told the curate should have his [blank] teeth shoved down his [blank] throat if he stepped over the threshold.”
The exact words that have been redacted have been lost, but Mr McCarthy added: “It doesn’t take too much imagination to fill in the blanks. Perhaps in the modern world, when many of the shocking themes have been further explored, the inclusion of expletives may help add that extra edge again.” (Neil Midgley)

The Telegraph then highlights the contemporary reviews that found the novel shocking, etc.

The Coventry Telegraph's Pass the Remote touches on the subject too:

A Radio 3 spokesman said: "BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting Jonathan Holloway's new adaptation of Wuthering Heights. It is a contemporary version of this classic story. The occasional use of strong language in the production reflects this modern perspective.
"The adaptor and director have attempted to portray with language the extremity of the lives and struggles of the characters. Language warnings will broadcast at the beginning of the drama." (Marion McMullen)

The Daily Mail also has an article on it, as well as a cartoon (source):

It is usually regarded as one of the last bastions of taste and decency at the BBC.
But now Radio 3 is to air an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights complete with foul language.
Romantic figures Heathcliff and Cathy will be heard using strong swear words in the station’s adaptation of one of literature’s most famous and tempestuous love stories.
It is understood the expletives are used in the heat of the moment as the two characters argue. But eyebrows have been raised at the decision to air the scenes at 8pm on Sunday night.
While radio does not have a 9pm watershed in the way that television does, stations are not supposed to broadcast unsuitable material when youngsters are likely to be listening.
Radio 3 has a low audience among young people, but there are concerns students who are studying the book could tune in to the adaptation without realising it has been given a more adult makeover.
The station was unable to provide a transcript showing the three occasions when swear words are used in the story, but said it did not affect any of the famous lines from the book. [...]
Mr Holloway added: ‘For me Wuthering Heights is a story of violent obsession, and a tortuous unfulfilled relationship. This is not a Vaseline-lensed experience. (Paul Revoir)

Let's face it: 'youngsters' know - and probably use - the F-word perfectly well and what this adaptation might achieve is making them take a fresh look at a novel that otherwise they might just regard as just another compulsory read for school.

BBC News, The Telegraph and Argus, Express, The Times and The Independent also echo the news.

The Sisterhood comments on the 'battle of the bonnets' and in an otherwise unrelated article The Hill's Pundits blog seems to have decided how things stand:

It is a shadow event; an event that follows, like a shadow; the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, Emily Brontë to Charlotte Brontë, as the dark will follow the power, like a shadow follows a person walking in the light. (Bernie Quigley)

The Chicago Tribune's Theater Loop also makes a sweeping statement in a review of a stage production of Sense and Sensibility:

After about half an hour, it suddenly hits you that [director Jon] Jory, the former head of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, is managing to dramatize this complex tale without recourse to a narrator. That may not sound like a big deal, but the vast majority of adaptations of the narrative works of Austen, or the Brontë sisters, find it much easier to stick one of the characters at the front of the stage and have them either spill their inner feelings or summarize a few minor scenes that there is no stage time to present, or both. You can take care of entire chapters that way. (Chris Jones)

The New York Times reviews Edward G. Lengel's Inventing George Washington but finds that

With the exception of one standout chapter about the manufacture of anecdotes and images about Washington’s religious beliefs, this book is a haphazard production, lacking the lucid cogency of works in this biographical genre like Gary Taylor’s “Reinventing Shakespeare”; “The Brontë Myth,” by Lucasta Miller; and “The Mozart Myths,” by William Stafford. (Michiko Kakutani)

Anglotopia has an article on things to visit in Yorkshire. Carlie Cooks & Reads Books and Twilight and Other Dreams post about Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights respectively.

Categories: Audio-Radio, Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights