Frank Cottrell Boyce will be writing a trilogy based on Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: “The new story is about a family where the father has been made redundant and sets about trying to reconstruct a VW Camper Van. He unwittingly uses the original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang engine for the camper van, which has its own agenda, to restore itself.”
Newbery Award winner Patricia MacLachlan has signed up with Albert Whitman & Company to write a prequel for Gertrude Chandler Warner‘s popular series, The Boxcar Children. I hope her prequel is better than the awful sequels/series extenders (over 100 of them) that were written and published starting in the 1990’s. Only the first nineteen books in the series were written by Gertrude Chandler Warner, and only those nineteen are worth the time as far as I’m concerned.
Walden Media announced that they will adapt The Magician’s Nephew next in the film adaptation of the Narnia series. I don’t know why they’re skipping over The SIlver Chair, but I would imagine that The Horse and His Boy, with its vaguely Arabic-culture villains would be way too controversial.
And Peter Jackson has finally started filming on his version of The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. I say, “Hooray for The Hobbit! Long live Bilbo Baggins!”
The King’s Speech, the account of King George VI’s stuttering problem that won the Academy Award for best picture, is coming out in a PG-13 version in April. The original was rated R because of a scene in which the struggling king uses some crude and profane language to try to overcome his stammering. I thought, despite the language which is mostly confined to that one scene, the movie was wonderful, and it would quite inspiring for Christian young people to see the persistence and character exemplified in this story.
Some tips on How to Read a Classic (Novel) at A Library Is a Hospital for the Mind. Sarah makes these suggestions in relation to reading Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, but her ideas are adaptable for most classic novels. Good stuff. Challenge yourself.
We’ve been watching mostly TV shows on Netflix here at the Semicolon household: Larkrise to Candleford and Psych. That’s an interesting combination.
I hope they do a better job of sticking the book of The Magician’s Nephew than they did with Voyage of the Dawn Treader! And we love Psych at our house. 🙂
That should say “sticking TO the book.” It’s late – I think I should go to bed!
I’m excited about the Hobbit as a movie (loved The Lord of the Rings), and I have The King’s Speech on my ‘to watch’ list. I’ve heard great things about it. I believe it’s based on a book, am I right?
My Sunday Salon this week is about reading strategies for getting through a huge TBR stack and can be found here: http://bookwormsandtea.blogspot.com/2011/04/sunday-salon-going-by-numbers-reading.html
That is strange that they’re skipping over The Silver Chair, especially since one of the last lines in the movie version of Dawn Treader is Eustace’s mother reporting that “Jill Pole” is at the door. I figured that was a natural lead in to Silver Chair.
I didn’t realize that GC Warner wrote the first nineteen of the Boxcar Children books. I shall certainly keep that in mind while looking for books for my eldest!