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Directed by Alan Govenar, the new film The Beat Hotel explores the legacy of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and other American Beats who took refuge in a cheap no-name hotel in Paris during the late fifties and early sixties.
The forthcoming film adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's second novel, which was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2005, stars Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, John Goodman, Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright, James Gandolfini, and 2010 Jeopardy! Kids Week champ Thomas Horn.
Director Simon Ennis's film Up in Cottage Country, an official selection of this year's Toronto International Film Festival, tells the tale of a man who finds himself in an alternate universe that turns out to be the basis of the story his wife is reading: Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony."
Much of Andrea Arnold's adaptation of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights was shot on a handheld camera. The movie, starring Kaya Scodelario and James Howson as Cathy and Heathcliff, will be released in the U.K. on November 11.
In November OR Books will publish Alive Inside the Wreck: A Biography of Nathanael West by Joe Woodward, a frequent contributor to the magazine who wrote "The Art of Reading Nathanael West: Simple Was His Pilgrimage and Brief" for the May/June 2007 issue. This is a clip from John Schlesinger's 1975 film adaptation of West's novel The Day of the Locust, starring Donald Sutherland, Karen Black, William Atherton, Burgess Meredith, and Geraldine Page.
First watch this introduction to America: Now and Here, then read Alex Dimitrov's article about the role poetry is playing in the national art project, in the current issue.
The documentary film Committing Poetry in Times of War tells the story of Bill Nevins, a humanities teacher and youth poetry coach who was suspended and later fired from his teaching job after standing up for a student who wrote a poem critical of the war in Iraq. The entire film can be seen at Snagfilms.com.
The anime art film Spring & Chaos, directed by Shoji Kawamori and created exclusively for Japanese television, is based on the life of Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa, who died in 1933.
Adapted from the 1891 novella by Anton Chekhov, The Duel, starring Andrew Scott as Laevsky and Fiona Glascott as Nadya, was released last April to rave reviews. Widely considered a successful literary adaptation (no small feat), the movie will be available on DVD later this month.
Despite a bestelling novel as its source—and a score that was composed by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood—the film adaptation of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, directed by Anh Hung Tran, has been met with decidedly mixed reviews that boil down to: The book is better. The movie was released in Japan and Russia last December and in the UK in March.
