A blog about Renaissance literature and academic life

Friday, March 30, 2012

Yet once more...the Paradise Lost Movie is Cancelled

I'm VERY late to this -- but hey, I'm on Early Modern Time -- it is with sorrow in my heart that I just saw here that Legendary Pictures pulled the plug on the big-screen adaptation of Paradise Lost, to be directed by Alex Proyas and star that guy from the Hangover as, surely, the worst Satan ever. This is the umpteenth time this has happened: people are always saying they will make PL into a movie, and then at some point I guess a producer says "why, exactly, are we doing this when we could just film another version of Hamlet? Maybe this time set in Columbia?"

As the story says: "Legendary also realized that in order to effectively bring to life Milton’s war between heaven and hell, it was going to need Avatar-like special effects. But Avatar-like effects call for an an Avatar-like budget, and execs realized the technology wasn’t there to make the movie in the budget range in which they were working."

The irony of this, for me, is that I've always thought Milton's war in heaven is something of a farce; as his angels hurl mountains, get punctured, and reinflate like self-repairing tires, I think he's taking the piss out of the epic equivalent of big budget special effects...

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Deceptively Shakeospherean

Disclaimer: Shakeosphere isn't really about Shakespeare: to the extent that it is about anything, it is about all things early modern, and I'll try to post bits and pieces about my research and teaching here on the rare occasions that I do something interesting or newsworthy. But "Shakeosphere" seemed vaguely sexier than "Miltonista," which was my other top choice for a blog title. And as everyone knows, everyone has to have a blog -- because how else would we fill those empty hours? But I'll also link to interesting articles about Milton, Marlowe, and yes, Shakespeare as and when they arise.

In case I'm just writing for myself, I'll keep these brief -- but this should also be a good place to post abstracts, link to conferences and papers of interest, etc, as well as post book porn: by which I mean pictures of old books that I encounter in my research...the kind of stuff that gets the professoriate all atwitter.

"that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day."