“[Reg, played by John Cleese, speaking:] All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Life of Brian (motion picture) (1979)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“A fantasy novel (1964) by Roald Dahl (1916-90), in which Charlie Buckett wins a ticket that allows him to visit a chocolate factory owned by Mr Willy Wonka and manned by tiny men called Oompa-Loompas. It was filmed as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), with Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. Dahl’s sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, was published in 1971.”
[A second filmed version of this book, starring Johnny Depp, appeared in 2005 as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.]
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
[I transcribe these posts directly from the reference books in which I find the, errors and all. This entry contains two: Hampton Fancher (not Fincher) wrote the screenplay for Blade Runner; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a novel, not a short story, by Philip K. Dick.)
“A bleak science fiction film (1982) directed by Ridley Scott, starring Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer, and set in Los Angeles in the year 2019. Ford plays a detective who is hunting down rogue androids or ‘replicants.’ The special police squads to which Ford belongs are called Blade Runner Units, whose job it is to ‘retire’ (i.e. execute) replicants. This is explained in the opening scrolling text, but no further explanation of the title is proffered.
‘The Blade Runner’ was originally the title of a very different science fiction story by Alan E. Nourse, where smugglers called ‘blade runners’ supply an impoverished society with medical supplies. William S. Burroughs wrote ‘Bladerunner (A Movie)’ (19790 after reading Nourse’s book, though the name is the principal similarity between the stories. Hampton Fincher, the screenwriter for Ridley Scott’s movie, found Burroughs’ book and Scott liked it enough to adopt the title for the screenplay, buying the rights for the use of the name.
The story of the film is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick (1928-82) entitle Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), which won that year’s nebula award.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Here, on a beautiful Saturday morning, is a reading on J.R.R. Tolkien, the esteemed author of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, along with a comprehension worksheet to accompany it.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Broadly speaking, the recasting of a work to fit another, such as the recasting of novels and plays as film or television scripts. For example, Stephen Hero, A Passage to India, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Les Liaisons dangereuses as stage plays; The Forsythe Saga, Daniel Deronda, War and Peace, Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown as television dramas. Sometimes a cycle or sequence is adapted: for instance, the dramatization of some of the Canterbury Tales as a musical comedy (1967). Short stories and poems are often equally suitable.
As an extension there are works like the Peyton Place and Colditz of which episodes continued to be presented long after the original stories had been used up.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, film/television/photography, term of art
“The first novel (1951) by James Jones (1921-77), who was serving in the US infantry in Hawaii when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. Twice promoted and twice reduced to private, he fought at Guadalcanal and was wounded in the head by a mortar fragment. The novel, which won a National Book Award, draws on his own experiences in Hawaii and caused a sensation for its expose of army brutality and its outspokenness about sex and military mores. The film (1952) was a slick, sexually oblique version directed by Fred Zinnemann. The title comes from the poem ‘The Gentlemen Rankers’ (1889) by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) about oppressed junior ranks:
‘Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha’ mercy on such as we.'”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“A film (1991) directed by by Jon Avnet and with a screenplay by Fannie Flagg, adapted from her own novel. Evelyn Couch, a middle-aged housewife, finds inspiration in the story told her by Ninny Threadgoode, an octogenarian lady in an old folk’s home. Her story from her youth concerns a relative, Idgie Threadgoode, an early feminist, who many years before had run the cafe in Whistle Stop, Alabama. Idgie rescues her friend Ruth from an abusive marriage, and Ruth joins her at the cafe, cooking such Southern delights as Fried Green Tomatoes.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“A poem of some 17,000 lines by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400). It was probably begun around 1387 and worked on into the 1390s, but apparently not completed. It was one of the first pieces of literature to be printed in England, in 1477 by William Caxton. The tales do not come from Canterbury but are, within the fictional framework of the work, told by various pilgrims en route to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury—one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in the Middle Ages. There is some uncertainty as to what order Chaucer intended the stories to be in, but the following is how they appear in the authoritative Riverside edition, following the Ellesmere manuscript:
• General Prologue
• The Knight’s Tale
• The Miller’s Tale
• The Reeve’s Tale (a reeve was a manorial steward)
• The Cook’s Tale
• The Man of Law’s Tale
• The Wife of Bath’s Tale
• The Friar’s Tale
• The Summoner’s Tale (a summoner summoned delinquents to appear before an ecclesiastical courts
• The Clerk’s Tale (a clerk was an ecclesiastical student)
• The Merchant’s Tale
• The Squire’s Tale
• The Franklin’s Tale (a franklin was a landowner of free but not noble birth, probably ranking below the gentry.
• The Physician’s Tale
• The Pardoner’s Tale (pardoner’s sold papal indulgences, a much abused practice)
• The Shipman’s Tale (a shipman was a ship’s master)
• The Prioress’s Tale
• Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas
• Chaucer’s Tale of Melibeus
• The Monk’s Tale
• The Nun’s Priest’s Tale
• The Second Nun’s Tale
• The Canon Yeoman’s Tale
• The Manciple’s Tale (a manciple was a servant who bought provision for a college or in of court)
• The Parson’s Tale
• Chaucer’s Retracion
It seems that Chaucer’s original idea was to have many more stories since in the General Prologue the host proposes that each of the 30 or so pilgrims tells four tales each.
A film version (1971) by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), focusing on the bawdier tales, was not well received.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
[As I’ve begun to transcribe entries from Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia for use as reference material on Mark’s Text Terminal, I have begun to notice that some of its entries disclose a blinkered and mildly Eurocentric view of writers from around the globe. This excerpt is no exception. I needed to conduct only cursory research to learn that the writer profiled here is better known as Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. Otherwise, this squib correctly describes Mr. Bandyopadhyay as a major figure in Bengali letters.
I frequently struggle with issues of style and formatting on Mark’s Text Terminal; indeed, I am working up a style sheet in the interest of maintaining something like consistency here. Still, when I excerpt from reference books and the like, I also feel an obligation to remain faithful to the style of the of book from which I draw, mostly out of respect for authors and editors smarter and more accomplished than I. Hence the header on this text, which is how this author is listed in Benet’s.]
“Bengali novelist. Banerji was an immensely popular author of over fifty books, including novels, short stories, translations, and books on the occult and astrology. His masterpiece Pather Panchali (1928; tr The Song of the Road, 1968), set in a small village north of Calcutta, is essentially an episodic childhood idyll of Apu and his sister Durga. The novel and its sequel, Aparajita (1932), became international classics after Satyajit Ray’s screen adaptations, Pather Panchali (1954), The Unvanquished (1956), and The World of Apu (1959).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Japanese film director. Kurosawa gained international recognition with Rashomon (1950), which won first prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. Other noteworthy films include Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954; remade by Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven, 1960), Throne of Blood (1957; an adaptation of Macbeth), Yojimbo (1961), Dersu Uzala (1975), Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985; an adaptation of King Lear), which received the National Film Critics Award for best picture of 1985.
Widely recognized as one of the greatest directors of all time, Kurosawa helped introduce Japanese film—and Japan itself—to the world. His distinctive ‘international’ style is immediately accessible to foreign audiences, whether the subject is rampaging Samurai or corporate intrigue. In this sense, his work many contrasted with the more understated, ‘quintessentially Japanese’ films of his great contemporary, Ozu Yasujiro.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
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