Escape the gloom and doom: read Wuthering Heights

M & H Online covers the Red House Story and mentions the online petition launched in order to try and save it. As usual: if you haven't signed it yet, please take a moment to do so, wherever you are from.

HitFix's In Contention looks at the Oscar contenders for Best Adapted Screenplay and thinks Jane Eyre should be among them:

Of the plausible nominees, this is a very respectable lot. I was nonetheless disappointed that Moira Buffini‘s adaptation of “Jane Eyre” never got more traction. (Gerard Kennedy)

The Tri-City Herald's Mr. Movie reviews the film giving it 4 stars:

Purists may not love this version. There are flaws. But it’s Jane Eyre and to Jane Eyre is divine. (Gary Wolcott)

Movie City News looks back on Sundance and reviews Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights:

Arnold shifts the perspective of the novel away from Nelly Dean, the storyteller, and Lockwood, the rapt listener, by truncating the tale to focus almost entirely on the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff. This shift of perspective is subtle but important; as a literary device, the entire tale is filtered first through Nelly Dean’s perspective as a storyteller, a gossip, and a lover of stories herself, and then through Lockwood’s own class biases as he listens to the tale; this greatly affects how the events are interpreted. In other words, where the book never attempts objectivity because the tale being told is clearly an embellished one, here there is no observer within the story itself, leaving us to interpret the events as if they are, in fact, objective truths within the world of the story.
For me, this didn’t quite work because without Nelly Dean’s embellishment and romanticizing, Cathy feels even less sympathetic in that she comes across as caring solely about money and security rather than love (true enough), while Heathcliff seems to be always just stomping around glaring angrily, slamming doors, and being generally ungrateful and recalcitrant without the sympathetic glean of Nelly Dean’s interpretation of events adorning them. Without Nelly’s lens to focus the tale, we have two characters who aren’t, in and of themselves, greatly likable; thus this adaptation becomes more an observation of events than a tragedy in which we come to feel significantly invested. [...]
Visually, Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is stunningly beautiful, with desolate frames of windy moors, and the most realistic depiction of the sanitary conditions of its time since, perhaps, Tom Tywker’s Perfume. You can practically feel the chill, damp wind blowing you nearly sideways, the muck of the mud holding fast to your shoes with every step. Sound, too, is excellently used in augmenting the storytelling and creating a sense of time and place. But when we get to older Cathy and Heathcliff ( Kaya Scoldelario and James Howson), somehow we lose much of the passion that underlies the tale; the fire that smolders in Heathcliff’s breast, this ancient, destructive love, Heathcliff’s unrelenting fierce anger at being denied what he wants even after overcoming a lifetime of servitude and indignities, are played up by Nelly Dean’s sympathetic perspective, and that element is missing here. Arnold’s version of Wuthering Heights is certainly the most visually stunning of the film versions of this tale, but from a literary standpoint, Cathy and Heathcliff need Nelly Dean to soften them up a bit and make them more palatable. (Kim Voynar)

We are not sure whether this columnist from the Gloucestershire Echo has really read/watched Wuthering Heights:

AS the winter nights draw in, programmes such as Downton Abbey, Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations provide great escapism from the doom and gloom of the weather outside.

A Huffington Post columnist reminisces about reading (Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice) to an old lady. And as Valentine's Day is approaching, so the 'romantic' recommendations begin: Greensboro Books Examiner suggests Jane Eye and Wuthering Heights.

Very Aware recommends Hitchcock's Rebecca on Blu-ray if you like

Ghost stories like The Inkeepers or are excited for The Woman in Black this Friday, or like the Gothic elements in the newest take on Jane Eyre or like in novels like Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. (Manny Lozano)

Slant Magazine reviews the film The Woman in Black where

Daniel Radcliffe stars as Arthur Kripps, a lawyer whose namesake and familial distress (his wife died in childbirth and his cherubic son perpetually sketches him wearing a sad face) feels Dickensian, but after the single father travels to a village in order to sort out the very messy affairs of a recently deceased biddy who lived in its outskirts, he finds himself walking through Emily Brontë's foggiest nightmare. (Ed Gonzalez)

Laura's Reviews posts about Emily Brontë's poetry. At the Movies reviews Jane Eyre 2011 in Malay. Michael Peverett discusses Charlotte Brontë's sense of humour. Mystica reviews Justine Picardie's Daphne. Finally, an alert from Gainsborough:

The Gainsborough and District Fine Arts Society

The AGM for members of the Fine Arts Society will take place on February 2nd 2012 at l.15pm at Trinity Arts Centre.
The lecture will follow at 2pm from Mrs Elizabeth Merry on The Young Brontës and Art: visual influences on their creative development.
Drinks will follow at 3.15pm. (Gainsborough Standard)