'A Discovery of Witches' Is Coming to TV (and Other Reasons I'm Happy Today)

One of my favorite books in the history of time, A Discovery of Witches, is becoming a TV series, as reported by Entertainment Weekly. 

Matthew Goode, who appeared in The Imitation Game* with Benedict Cumberbatch, will play my fictional boyfriend, vampire-scientist Matthew Clairmont. 

Badass witch heroine and mother of dragon (technically, firedrake) Diana Bishop is to be played by Teresa Palmer, the Australian actress I thought was very good in Warm Bodies. 

Quite nice. Another favorite getting a TV adaptation is Robert Galbraith's (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling's) The Cuckoo's Calling. 

It looks like Cormoran Strike - another of my fictional boyfriends, although I truly want him and Robin to get together - got a bit of an adaptational attractiveness upgrade, but no matter. Holliday Grainger looks like she'll be an absolutely perfect Robin Ellacot. 

Elarica Johnson, who made a brief but notable appearance in the film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is playing Lula Landry. I still like to imagine that Lula is dating Fred Weasley in the afterlife. 

Grainger is also set to play the lover of Anna Paquin's character in Tell It to the Bees, a novel written by Fiona Shaw. Shaw did a stint on True Blood with Paquin, playing the lead witch of a coven, but is perhaps more famous for playing Harry Potter's witchcraft-phobic Aunt Petunia. 

"Telling the bees" is an ancient folkloric custom. 

Also adapted for TV was Charlaine Harris's Midnight, Texas series. I'm missing it because I don't have cable, but my parents are watching it. Maybe some day they'll put it on Netflix. 

*Which I never finished watching because sad LGBT+ history makes me sad. 

Recently Watched: Much Ado About Nothing at Notre Dame on Sunday, then my second viewing of Twelfth Night, with my niece this time, also at Notre Dame but on Monday. 

Currently Listening To: Wil Wheaton reading the audio book of Ready Player One.

 

Currently Reading: 

The Hanukkah Hotness, Night 3: The Franco Brothers

Tonight's Hanukkah Hotties are a 2-fer, like the Gyllenhaal sibs: James and Dave Franco. The Francos have a father of Spanish and Portuguese descent, and their mother is the Jewish one. James is the older of the native Californian brothers.



The first time I noticed James Franco was in Spider-Man (2002). He's in all three of the Spiderman films that star Tobey Maguire. I'm not a big fan of the first two, but I do have a certain affection for the third, as I wrote about in "Spiderman's Aunt May is a Goddess."

Lately, you may have seen him and Seth Rogan in "Bound 3," a frame-for-frame remake of Kimye's (Kanye West and Kim Kardashian's) "Bound 2."

By far my favorite James Franco project, though, is Howl, in which he plays Allen Ginsberg (like yesterday's Hanukkah Hottie, Daniel Radcliffe). His other literary projects have included the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's phenomenally popular Eat, Pray, Love (book review here by Mal at Lazy Boleyn blog) and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

The latter caused a bit of a flap in September 2013 when a tie-in edition of the classic was released with Franco's face on the cover.

This inspired Minh Le to postulate what might happen if Franco's face were on ALL the book covers.









Okay, so maybe James Franco isn't William Faulkner or Allen Ginsberg, but he does write. As Goodreads will tell you, he's written Actors Anonymous, A California Childhood, and more. He also wrote a foreword to Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth by Hermann Hesse (translated into English from the German by Damion Searls).



Some scoff at his Renaissance-man literary pretentions, but I think it's rather sexy.



Bonus: James rates his own page in Color Me Swoon, a coloring book for big girls.

Note last year's Hanukkah Hottie Joseph Gordon-Levitt to the left of Channing Tatum on the cover. I may have bought this for myself earlier this month at Barnes and Noble.

Dave is a bit less well-known than his big brother, but he's in one movie I particularly like: Warm Bodies. Unfortunately, his character gets eaten by a zombie. But Dave is still fun to look at.



I couldn't find a picture of him reading, though.



So, which Franco is your favorite Franco?

Movie Review: The Host

When I read Stephenie Meyer's novel The Host (book review here), it didn't quite work for me either as a romance or as a science fiction movie. Still, I consider seeing the movie based on a book something of a reward for having read that book, so I was excited to see the film version of The Host. I missed it in the theater, but I watched it at home last night.

This is one of those rare cases where a movie is better than the book. All the scenes of waiting around for some action to happen are neatly condensed into a scifi movie that isn't boring. It's a good-looking movie, pretty much the way it looked inside my head (except I thought that Healer Fords was an American Indian man), and the musical score by Antonio Pinto is gorgeous. If you're not familiar with the plot, here's a brief summary: the Earth has been conquered by a species that calls itself the Souls. They're symbiotic, living inside human bodies. The human personality disappears - usually. 

When Wanderer arrives on Earth, she finds herself bonded to the body of a young woman named Melanie, but Melanie refuses to disappear without a fight. The two share a body, and Melanie leads Wanderer to a small surviving group of symbiote-free humans, including Melanie's Uncle Jeb and Aunt Maggie, her younger brother Jamie, and Melanie's lover Jared. Because Wanderer shares her body, Melanie's relationship with the other humans is complicated. One man, Ian, attempts to kill Wanderer, but then ends up having feelings for her (which makes Melanie jealous). 

Wanderer uses the Souls' advanced medical knowledge to heal Jamie when he almost dies from an infection, then teaches the humans to nonviolently remove Souls from their human hosts, leading to increased peace between the band of humans and some of the Souls. Melanie Stryder and Wanderer are played by Saiorse Ronan. The last thing I saw her in was Hanna, in which she played a modern young warrior woman, which was pretty awesome. I've also seen her in two literary adaptations, both of books I haven't read - Atonement (the love story you watch when you want to weep your eyes out) and The Lovely Bones. Ronan was born in 1994, so she's still only 19, but she's grown into a very beautiful woman. I guarantee you that by 30 she will be a legendary red carpet beauty. Jared is played by Max Irons, who was in Red Riding Hood (loosely connected to Twilight in that it was directed by Catherine Hardwicke like the first Twilight film, and it featured Billy "Charlie Swan" Burke) and who is the son of Jeremy Irons. (Anagrams of Max Irons that might describe his personality include Arson Mix, Soar Minx, As In Mr Ox, and Ram In Sox.) 

I have the same problem with Melanie and Jared's romance in the movie as I had in the book - I just don't feel that there's a lot of passion or heat there, except in one brief scene in which Jared remembers kissing Melanie and sees his memory in a dream. Max Irons is very pretty to look at, though. He is an English model as well as an actor, so think young Rupert Everett. (I say this knowing full well that Rupert Everett has aged extremely well and is, in fact, sexier now than he was at 25.) My feels reside more with Ian and Wanderer - he falls in love with her personality, not her physical body, although he does find her silvery, wispy natural form to be beautiful. (It's one of the most touching scenes of the book; in the movie, Ian is depicted holding another Soul, not Wanderer.) 

Ian is played by Jake Abel, who was in I Am Number Four (with Teresa Palmer from Warm Bodies) and the Percy Jackson movies as well as appearing in The Lovely Bones. It would be a nice symmetry if Abel and Ronan had played love interests in that movie, but while Ronan played the main character Susie, Abel had a small role as Susie's best friend's boyfriend. (He has one major scene - mistakenly thinking Susie's dad is attacking his girlfriend and beating Susie's dad with a baseball bat, badly injuring the dad's knee.) 

The stubborn Seeker who pursues Wanderer beyond what is normal for the cooperative-minded, peaceful Souls is played by German actress Diane Kruger. I may remember her from such films as Troy (in which she played Helen), the two National Treasure movies, and Inglourious Basterds (the film in which I discovered the beauty that is Michael Fassbender). She's a character you love to hate, but Kruger plays this character beautifully. The Seeker has a secret - she's fighting a losing battle with the human whose body she inhabits, and she can't stand her own perceived weakness for not being able to conquer the supposedly inferior human mind. She gets her interplanetary comeuppance. I was a little disappointed in the book - I gave it three out of five stars - but the movie was better than I expected it to be. Unless you're a hardcore Stephenie Meyer fan, you can probably skip the book safely and see the movie. It doesn't suck. Four out of five stars.

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Erin O'Riordan's Movie Review of 'Beautiful Creatures'

I'm getting really embarrassed by how many movies I've seen lately based on books I did not read. I didn't read Cloud Atlas, Warm Bodies, The Silver Linings Playbook or Beautiful Creatures, but now I've seen all those movies. The next thing in my Netflix queue is the version of Mansfield Park with Jonny Lee Miller, and it's one of the Jane Austen novels that I haven't read. (Which is most of them. I've only read Pride and Prejudice thus far, unless you count Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.)

I do read, I swear. I just can't read everything.

To be honest, when I went to watch Beautiful Creatures, I hoped for a sort of gender-reversed Twilight, with the young woman (Lena) being the powerful supernatural being and the young man (Ethan) being the weak, helplessly enamored mortal. There was some of that in this movie.

It's a dark, sad, beautiful movie with an intelligent, delightfully sass-mouthed heroine and a hero whose pastimes include reading books that have been banned from his small Southern town's library. They can't be together because her supernatural powers are dangerous and she's afraid she might kill him. Beautiful Creatures isn't a Twilight knock-off, though.

Lena is a witch, but she prefers to be called a caster. When she arrives at the single high school in Ethan's town, her classmates accuse her of being a devil worshiper. One of them starts a loud prayer in the middle of their public school classroom, and the windows shatter - for which everyone immediately blames Lena. She's in danger of being kicked out of school.

The actors playing Ethan and Lena are fairly unknown, although the actress's mother is the famed director Jane Campion. Beautiful Viola Davis plays the woman who acts as a foster mother to Ethan since his bio mom died. Jeremy Irons plays Lena's foster parent, her uncle Macon. Macon is a dark caster, but he chooses to be "light" for Lena's sake. Male casters have a choice; female casters are Claimed for either the light or the dark on their sixteenth birthdays. Lena's 16th birthday is rapidly approaching.

Lena's bio mom, Serafine, is played by Emma Thompson. Serafine is supposed to be the most powerful dark caster, and she's convinced Lena will be Claimed by the dark. It seems all the women in their family have been claimed by the dark since an ancestor used forbidden magic to bring her lover, killed in the Civil War, back from the dead. Thus, the family is cursed.

If we've told you once, we've told you a million times, kids: do not use magic to bring a loved one back from the dead. Douglas Clegg told you so in Isis, and J.K. Rowling did again in the three brothers' tale within Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. What has been claimed by death is meant to stay dead, because that is way nature works. When our loved ones die, we wish them safe passage to the other world, commend them into the arms of the Goddess and, most importantly, do NOT try to bring them back. Lesson learned, kiddos?

Emma Thompson could tell you that; she was, after all, Sybill Trelawney in the Harry Potter movies. She was also in Sense and Sensibility, in the lovely version with  Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, and Severus Snape -er, Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon. Furthermore, she was Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing before Amy Acker took over the role. This all makes her sound very British, but Emma Thompson has some surprising American accent skills.

Jeremy Irons is very good in this, as the loving but imposing Uncle Macon. My favorite Jeremy Irons movie is still The Man in the Iron Mask (loosely based on a Dumas classic I have not read), and in my all-time favorite episode of The Simpsons, "Lisa's Rival," Lisa is challenged to form an anagram of "Jeremy Irons" that describes the actor. (It's much harder than it seems. The best option Wordsmith.org comes up with is, "Jeer, sir? My, no.") Lisa's best guess is "Jeremy's iron."

Uncle Macon thinks of a way to undo the curse, but only at the cost of a great sacrifice. For this reason, although she loves Ethan dearly, Lena is unwilling to be with him anymore. She makes him forget the two of them had ever met. It's heartbreaking stuff. (Yeah, it's a little bit like when Edward abandoned Bella in New Moon.)

The ending only served to make me want more. I liked this a lot, more than I liked Warm Bodies or Silver Linings Playbook. May I have the sequel now, please?

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Movie Review: Warm Bodies

Zombies - they're everywhere lately. On June 28th, Esther Wheelmaker will drop by Pagan Spirits to talk about her steampunk zombie novel  Gravely Inanimated. In the meantime, I've gotten into the Walking Dead graphic novel series after I took my nieces to the comic book shop on Free Comic Book Day 2013 and picked up a TWD book there. I'm halfway through Book Two.

But, as I must sometimes remind my dad, please don't spoil the TV show for me. I have only seen up to the part where Lori finds out she's pregnant and she doesn't know whether the baby is Shane's or Rick's. 

I didn't read Isaac Marion's book Warm Bodies. I came to the movie fresh, not knowing anything about it other than what I saw in the trailer on the big screen. If I remember correctly, the first time I saw the trailer was at The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Pt. 2. Appropriately, the DVD I got from Netflix featured the trailers for BD Pt. 2, The Hunger Games and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I intend to read Wallflower before I see its movie, but I haven't wanted to pay the $12 for that skinny lil paperback yet.

The movie centers on a zombie who comes to be called R; all he can remember of his name is that he thinks it started with an R. Eight years after the earth succumbed to the zombie apocalypse for reasons R can't name, he lives a bleak, sleepless existence with the other zombies, hanging around an airport. He wishes for more, but his cognitive faculties are limited. He does know that zombies all eventually deteriorate into what they call the Bonies, which look less human and more wraith-like and apparently have even less reasoning power.

Meanwhile, in what may be the last surviving colony of humans on the planet, Julie Grigio also dreams of more. She loves her boyfriend Perry, but wants to feel closer to him. Perry is loyal soldier in the military-like colony government run by Julie's dad. He'll have more time for romance once all the world's zombies have been shot in the head and re-killed.

Julie and Perry, along with Julie's best friend Nora and a handful of others, go out on a raid, collecting medical supplies for the colony from an abandoned pharmacy. They cross paths with a group of zombies, including R, who view them as lunch. Acting on what he refers to as The New Hunger, R chows down on Perry, eating his brain. Thus he receives some of Perry's memories, and strangely, he begins to feel protective toward Julie, saving her from other zombies.

After that grotesque start, the movie veers further from horror-comedy territory and more into the romance genre. Julie can see that R wants to be more like a living person again, and his efforts appear to be paying off. When Nora puts makeup on R to make him look less dead, he almost looks like a living person again. Eventually, Julie, her father and the other survivors have to question whether it's possible for the undead to return to life.

For most of this movie, I felt very bad for Perry. Julie doesn't seem terribly upset about his death or react very badly when R finally confesses that he ate Perry and hands her Perry's gold watch. The film's explanation is that the survivors have seen so much death, they've learned to get over it quickly and not get too attached to other people. Somehow, though, Julie becomes attached to R. When she thinks he's had to sacrifice himself to save her life, she's distraught.

Sometimes while watching this, I thought Julie's attraction to a walking corpse was a little weird. But then I'd think about how much I like vampires, and it didn't seem so bad. After all, Nora does inform us that R doesn't stink.

Except the skeletal-looking Bonies, most of the zombies in this movie don't look very deteriorated or grotesque - nothing like you see on The Walking Dead or in most zombie movies. R looks pretty normal except for his pale skin and eyes, which are weirdly blue with hardly any pupils. Their mostly-preserved state  is a hopeful sign that the ending will be far less bleak than in your typical zombie fare.

R is played by English actor Nicholas Hoult (the boy in About a Boy, young Beast in X-Men: First Class, and Jack in the recent Jack the Giant Slayer). Julie is played by Australian actress Teresa Palmer (6 in I Am Number Four, and the female lead in a quirky Australian thriller with Stephen Moyer that I enjoy, Restraint), and her father is played by John Malkovich. (I adore him.) Perry, whom this movie should really care more about than it does, is played by Dave Franco. He's a beautiful Jewish-American like his older brother James. He's been in a number of TV shows, including Greek, Scrubs, and Privileged.

Nora is played by Analeigh Tipton, which I understand was a controversial casting choice because Tipton is Caucasian and Nora is described in the book as being of East African descent. I would understand if you were to complain about this, because ethnic diversity in this movie is practically at zero. Does Hollywood seriously think that white people won't watch movies with African-American actors in them? Because whitewashing is ridiculous and stupid.

I didn't love this movie, but I did like it. I'm not sorry that I didn't read the book, which I understand is a little darker than the film version, because I think I like the more romantic version better. Three and a half stars, I'd say. Worth a watch, but not an instant favorite.

Did you read this, and if so, did you enjoy the book? Did you like the movie?

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Till Zombies Do Us Part by Celeste Ayers. $0.99 from Smashwords.com
Noah and Amy are two teens in love. There is however one problem; the world as they know it was turned into nothing but a pile of chaos and zombies. As they battle for survival they’ll embark on a journey into the unknown while facing new trials that will put both their love for each other and their humanity to the ultimate test. Just how far will they be willing to go?

Book Review: The Girls' Guide to Dating Zombies by Lynn Messina

The Girls’ Guide to Dating Zombies by Lynn Messina

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


When a publicist for Lynn Messina asked me if I'd like to read and review this novel, I said yes based on how much I enjoyed Messina's monster mash-up Little Vampire Women. It took me a little while to get around to reading it, but the release of the movie based on Warm Bodies renewed my interest in this charming "zombie chick lit" (the publicist's expression) novel. It was better than I was expecting. Rather than being written in the style of a self-help book, as the title implies, it's written from the point of view of Hattie Cross, a journalist who has written the self-help book of the title.

In the novel, the human male is a thing of the past. Since Hattie was a small child, all men have contracted a disease that transforms them into decaying zombies. (The one positive is that women fill every position in every occupation as a result of this plague.) They're not usually dangerous to women, since they mistake the human brain for a third kidney, but they feed on animals. With the aid of pharmaceuticals and some patience, women can date zombies, but the experience is completely different from human female-male relationships. Hattie is an expert on the perks of dating zombies and something of a talk-show-circuit celebrity.

Hattie hopes her star will rise even higher when she has the opportunity to introduce brilliant pharmaceutical company maven Matilda Stansfield. Like the clever, resourceful journalist she is, Hattie slowly uncovers a disturbing truth about Matilda and her role in the zombie apocalypse. She's also discovered another interesting complication - Jake Maddox, a living, breathing human male, alive and well and working deep within Matilda's laboratories. Hattie can't help but be fascinated by Jake.

There's romance, adventure, a little horror (this is a zombie novel, after all) and a hefty dose of humor. Readers who enjoy everything paranormal, are sick to death of vampires (personally, I'm not, but maybe you are) and haven't yet had their fill of zombies will love this light, breezy tale of terror and redemption.

As you have probably gathered, I received a free e-book copy of this novel in exchange for a fair, honest review, which represents my own honest opinion. I received no other compensation for this review. View all my reviews on Goodreads

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Till Zombies Do Us Part by Celeste Ayers. $0.99 from Smashwords.com Noah and Amy are two teens in love. There is however one problem; the world as they know it was turned into nothing but a pile of chaos and zombies. As they battle for survival they’ll embark on a journey into the unknown while facing new trials that will put both their love for each other and their humanity to the ultimate test. Just how far will they be willing to go?