From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V3 #111 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Saturday, June 30 2001 Volume 03 : Number 111 Today's Subjects: ----------------- o/gormenghast2 ["Donald G. Keller" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 07:20:36 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: o/gormenghast2 And the second part was excellent as well, but if the first part was mostly Comedy, this one was mostly Tragedy, and piled grimness on grimness, and thus wasn't quite as much fun. (Partly because of much less of the twins.) Stephen Fry as Bellgrove was quite charming, it's true, though his courtship of Irma Prunesquallor was one thing firmly fast-forwarded in the adaptation; I seem to remember it occupying quite a bit of Peake's attention. And Neve Macintosh as Lady Fuchsia (boy, that's hard to spell) had much more to do in the second part, and did it well. I hadn't seen Jonathan Rhys-Meyers act before (he's a fave of my daughter's); he does a splendid job throughout with Steerpike. Anyway, in the end I'm very pleased with the whole project, and see quite clearly that I need to read the books again--it's been a very long time--since I don't remember a lot of the incidents included in the dramatization. Meredith: Are the books "a chore"? Possibly. Taste in fantasy style has changed a lot over the last twenty or thirty years; even Tolkien seems a little fancy to contemporary sensibilities. Peake is much richer and more long-winded than Tolkien, with a distinctly 19th-century feel; but I found the books well worth the effort. Interesting that, half a century after they were written (and after a couple abortive attempts in the one case), we are getting, in a very short time-frame, respectable adaptations of two of fantasy's classics, =Gormenghast= and =The Lord of the Rings=. What's next, =The Worm Ouroboros=? (Now =there='s a wild thought...) ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V3 #111 *****************************