Ripper Street Review of Episode 2 (DEN OF GEEK)

Review Jamie-Lee Nardone

This week's Ripper Street plays out like a post-watershed Oliver Twist. Here's Jamie-Lee's review...


This review contains spoilers.

1.2 In My Protection

Imagine your worst nightmare: a plague of zombies, an infestation of giant spiders under the bed, or a massive scratch on your limited edition The Dark Knight Rises Blu-ray ... Now try and fathom something far more evil and you will have a vague idea of the level of depravity that the second episode of Ripper Street approaches. That’s right. Last week, it was Victorian snuff movies. This week, it’s Children Who Kill. And how. Think Oliver Twist, if Tarantino had been around offering advice to Dickens during a session in the local ale house, after devouring a year’s worth of penny dreadfuls.

The episode starts with the killing of a toymaker. A fourteen year old boy carrying the dead man’s possessions is brought to the police by a group of vigilantes who seek justice for the streets of London. This group is lead by George Lusk, played by Michael Smiley who, as usual, does not fail to impress. Assuming the role as a voice of the people with lynch mob mentality and the kind with lack of attention to details, he stirs up tension among the public and openly taunts Detective Inspector Reid (Matthew Macfadyen), claiming that he and his force are ineffectual and his mob need to do his job for him. Lusk rallies them to court and seeks the ultimate punishment for the boy, who refuses to neither speak nor deny the charge and is sentenced to death.


Enter Carmichael, played by the phenomenal Joe Gilgun of This is England and Misfits fame to stir things up as Whitechapel’s very own X-rated Fagin. Leading an army of orphan-criminals, he plays the perfect psychopath, demanding respect at all costs. And he’s not merely teaching them to pick a pocket or two. There’s something much darker going on with him.

But Reid is perturbed by the child’s silence, and aided by a concerned lawyer and orphanage governess, decides to get to the bottom of what actually happened and what is currently going on at the hands of Carmichael’s thirst for unyielding subservience, obedience and crime. Oh, and his army of teeny, tiny assassins.

READ MORE: http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/ripper-street/23985/ripper-street-episode-2-review-in-my-protection

Ralph Fiennes, Helen Bonham Carter: Great Expectations trailer (INDIEWIRE)

Mike Newell's take on Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations" makes its world premiere at TIFF in September, and the first international trailer for the movie has dropped giving a rather substantial peek at what's in store. Featuring a pretty strong cast with veterans Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter and Robbie Coltrane starring alongside rising talents like Jeremy Irvine and Holliday Grainger, the David Nicholls' penned film will hopefully do something to make it stand out from the countless versions that have come before. Certainly, the strong ensemble is a good way to start, and while it looks compelling, we'll see if its one worthy of distinction soon enough. There is no stateside distributor for this yet, but it will open in the U.K. on November 30th. Watch below.

 


http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/watch-international-trailer-for-great-expectations-starring-ralph-fiennes-helena-bonham-carter-20120813#

You know you're old when even Miss Havisham looks young: Helena Bonham Carter to play embittered spinster in new Great Expectations film By LARA GOULD PUBLISHED: 19:08 EST, 11 August 2012 | UPDATED: 19:12 EST, 11 August 2012 (MAIL ON LINE)

She's the embittered spinster living in the faded grandeur  of her decaying mansion and described as ‘the witch of the place’ in Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations.

So you know you’re getting older when English rose Helena Bonham Carter is cast in the  role of wealthy recluse Miss Havisham in a lavish new film adaptation of the novel.

With her youthful looks and blemish-free skin, Ms Bonham Carter, 46, couldn’t be further from Dickens’s original Miss Havisham, the heiress locked in the past after being jilted at the altar as a young bride, and now living out her days in her ruined mansion, still dressed in her wedding finery.


Read more:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2187187/You-know-youre-old-Miss-Havisham-looks-young-Helena-Bonham-Carter-play-embittered-spinster-new-Great-Expectations-film.html

First pictures released of Ralph Fiennes as Charles Dickens British actor Ralph Fiennes plays Charles Dickens in The Invisible Woman, joining an illustrious list of actors who have portrayed the author, including Simon Callow, Derek Jacobi and Anthony Hopkins. (TELEGRAPH)

Fiennes directs and stars in The Invisible Woman, which is based on Claire Tomalin’s biography of Nelly Ternan, a woman with whom Charles Dickens had a secret decade-long relationship.
Felicity Jones - best known for appearing in romantic drama Like Crazy last year - plays the role of Ternan in Fiennes’ second acting and directing project, following the award-winning Coriolanus.


read more:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/9274910/First-pictures-released-of-Ralph-Fiennes-as-Charles-Dickens.html

Matthew Macfadyen: Little Dorrit - Being shown on line (MASTERPIECE CLASSICS)

Little Dorrit Episode 1 being shown on-line beginning March 12, 2012.

Amy Dorrit's (Claire Foy) gentle spirit has never been dampened by the confining walls of the Marshalsea Prison she's lived in her whole life. Despite the dark shadow of debtor's prison, Amy lovingly cares for her father William Dorrit (Tom Courtenay), the longest serving inmate. A possibly redemptive light unexpectedly shines in the form of Arthur Clennam (Matthew Macfadyen), who has been left with the intriguing threads of a mystery after his father's death — threads that will intertwine his family and fate with the Dorrits. Clennam's exhaustive search for answers involves murder, fortunes gained and lost, the upper echelons and lowest dregs of society, and most surprising of all, a tender romance. Adapted by Andrew Davies (Bleak House, Pride and Prejudice), Little Dorrit, based on the book by Charles Dickens, is a sprawling story as timely as it is moving.

Click her to see Little Dorrit on Masterpiece Classic, on-line

Charles Dickens: World's oldest surviving Charles Dickens film from 111-years ago found after going missing for half a century, 31 yrs after his death. (DAILY MAIL)

Film made in 1901, 31 years after Dickens' death Thought to have been inspired by Dickens' novel Bleak House

By RACHEL RICKARD STRAUS PUBLISHED: 06:09 EST, 9 March 2012 | UPDATED: 19:04 EST, 9 March 2012

 The oldest surviving film based on the works of Charles Dickens has been discovered. The Death Of Poor Joe, inspired by Bleak House, dates back to March 1901 but lay unnoticed in an archive for decades. The minute-long clip, made by British film pioneer G.A. Smith, was given to the British Film Institute in 1954 by a collector, but was catalogued under the wrong name and date.


  


‘It’s wonderful to have discovered such a rare film so close to Dickens’s bicentennial,’ she said. ‘Not only does it survive, but it is the world’s earliest Dickensian film. It looks beautiful and is in excellent condition. 'This really is the icing on the cake of our current celebration of Dickens on Screen.' The film beats the previous record holder, Scrooge; or, Marley’s Ghost, by several months. It depicts the crossing-sweeper from Bleak House – played by Smith’s wife Laura Bayley – being found by a nightwatchman as she freezes to death in the winter snow.


Read more:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2112542/Charles-Dickens-film-111-years-ago-going-missing-half-century.html

Masterpiece: Great Expectations April 1 & 8

Watch Great Expectations Preview on PBS. See more from Masterpiece.

An orphan boy meets an escaped convict, a crazed rich woman, a bewitching girl, and grows up to have great expectations of wealth from a mysterious patron, on Great Expectations, Charles Dickens' remarkable tale of rags to riches to self-knowledge, starring Gillian Anderson (The X-Files, Bleak House), David Suchet (Hercule Poirot), Ray Winstone, and Douglas Booth.

Anderson appears as one of Dickens' most haunting creations: Miss Havisham, a bride-to-be who was jilted at the altar years before. Newcomer Booth stars as Pip, the promising young man who is snared in Miss Havisham's lair. Great Expectations airs during the bicentennial of Dickens' birth and marks the fifteenth Masterpiece adaptation of the great novelist's works.

Three video-based lessons will be posted in April on the free teacher resource, PBS LearningMedia. Using video clips from Great Expectations, English Lit classrooms can compare and contrast the film with the book, learn about the moral underpinnings of the work, and explore Dickens's writing process.


Masterpiece Classic:  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/greatexpectations/index.html

Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson) meets the Queen (Mirror)

Mr Bean actor Rowan Atkinson was among the guests as the Queen hosted an event at Buckingham Palace to celebrate Charles Dickens.

 The comedian, who also starred as Fagin in the West End's Oliver!, was joined by a host of other faces from TV and film at tonight's reception, which was also attended by members of Dickens's family. Atkinson managed to avoid the calamities of his Mr Bean character, who memorably headbutted the Queen in an episode, as he spoke of his "privilege" at being invited to today's events.

 He said: "I think it's an extremely important evening. Dickens is an invaluable part of British literary heritage and his work is well worth celebrating. "I am making the most of the opportunity to do it now as I probably won't be around when we celebrate it in another 100 years' time.

Read further:  http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/the-queen-meets-mr-bean-stars-684966

Happy birthday Mr Dickens! (University of Helsinki)

 

From Downton Abbey to X-men and The Wire, the celebrity Victorian writer strides on.

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in the naval town of Portsmouth in south-west England. In the turbulent times that followed, with a maritime empire to exploit and continental revolution to contain, the celebrity author Dickens saw the drama of London, a collection of villages, turning into a modern metropolis with no shortage of opportunities, traps, characters... and smells. With a precarious place on the social ladder in a pre-welfare state, (the land of great estates becoming a land of estate agents) he experienced first-hand family humiliation brought on by debt. Money - the lack of it, how to get it, and how to hold on to it - was to run as a theme throughout his apparently exhaustive, and just occasionally exhausting, body of writing.

Self-styled as 'the Inimitable', Dickens fought ‘the battle of life’, writing manically to meet deadlines, satirising the mongrel English race and the chaos all around him. Dickens met life head on. He was a man of enormous energy. Whether walking the distance from London to his new home in north Kent (say, Helsinki to Porvoo) or giving readings at the ‘Boz Ball’ in New York with an audience of 3,000, Dickens was the nervous hub of all his characters.

His own life – that of the parliamentary reporter, the popular comic writer, the ambitious devoted family man, the exhaustingly prolix hoaxster, the keen moral commentator, and finally the incompatible husband – provided him with a wealth of material, material that cost him his life. He died in 1870, exactly five years after the railway accident which he and his protégée, the young actress Ellen Ternan, and her mother narrowly survived. His last great retrospective novel Great Expectations and the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood arguably mark the beginning of the thriller genre.

Times change, and literary tastes change, but Dickens has proved oddly resilient. In the determinedly hard times of 1940 Europe, George Orwell asked 'Is Dickens merely an institution?', noting the civic duty to have read at least some Dickens. Was he just a relic of the Victorian era? 'No modern man could combine such purposelessness with so much vitality.' Orwell wrote.

Virginia Woolf thought she would have crossed the road to avoid his showman vulgarity. And yet despite professional literary disdain for his popular fame, we should remember his contemporary John Ruskin's balanced comment: 'But let us not lose the use of Dickens's wit and insight, because he chooses to speak in a circle of stage fire'. Dickens was to writing what the ringleader is to the circus.


TO READ FURTHER:  http://www.helsinki.fi/news/archive/2-2012/7-15-49-21.html

Downton Abbey’ a lavish costume drama with strong cast (The Kansan.com)

By Ashley Bergner

Entertainment industry insiders probably weren’t predicting a British costume drama set in the early 1900s about a wealthy family and their household of servants would become one of the most buzzed-about TVs shows last year.

Yet “Downton Abbey” achieved the difficult task of becoming a favorite with both critics and viewers. The show’s lavish sets and costumes, and its depiction of scandals, heartbreaks and class struggles during one of England’s most dramatic eras of change, make this one of the most fascinating period dramas produced in recent times.

The show takes some cues from the works of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and another famous British drama, “Upstairs, Downstairs,” but it presents a vision and tone all its own. The series (the second season currently is airing on PBS in the United States) follows the rich Earl and Countess of Grantham, Robert and Cora Crawley, and their daughters, Mary, Edith and Sybil, who occupy an elaborate estate in England called Downton Abbey. Yet despite a veneer of splendor and wealth, all is not well at Downton. The Earl’s daughters will not be able to inherit their family’s money or estate (it must pass to a male heir), a fact that creates a certain amount of resentment. The Earl’s oldest daughter, Mary, is pushed to marry the heir, the Earl’s young cousin Matthew Crawley, who works in the law profession. Mary snobbishly turns him down, only later realizing she actually does love him.

However, only about half of the show’s air time is devoted to the aristocratic Earl and his family, and the other portion — which is just as fascinating, if not more so — is devoted to the family’s staff of servants, who must deal with their own set of scandals and struggles. Though most of the servants are content with their social class, others are not, and they envy the Crawleys' wealth and position.

I’m a big fan of British shows and period dramas in general, and if you like “Pride and Prejudice” and other BBC dramas, you’ll probably like “Downton Abbey,” as well. Yet even if these aren’t the type of shows you normally watch, consider giving it a try.

My friends and I good-naturedly joke about “Downton Abbey” being our “historical British soap opera” ;) but it’s actually more than that. Yes, there’s plenty of romantic drama — will Lady Mary and Matthew still end up together, even though he’s currently engaged to someone else?; will the family’s young Irish chauffeur confess his feelings for Lady Sybil, even though they’re not from the same social class?; and will head housemaid Anna Smith and Lord Grantham’s valet John Bates finally tie the knot? — but that’s not all the show is about.

Despite their differences in social classes, the aristocratic Crawleys and their servants really aren’t that different: They all have hopes and dreams that don’t always come true, and both groups are, in a way, limited by their social classes. Although the servants sometimes regret they aren’t able to have their own lives and families because they’ve given their lives to serving the Crawleys, the Crawleys’ daughters also feel pressured by their social status: i.e. to always behave like proper ladies, to marry well, etc. Both classes sometimes wish they could trade places.

There’s a lot of strong performances in this show, so it’s difficult to narrow it down to the best characters. The sweet-natured housemaid Anna Smith (played by Joanne Froggatt) and the self-sacrificing Mr. Bates (Brendan Coyle) have emerged as fan favorites, as has the Dowager Countess, played with razor-sharp wit by the great Maggie Smith, who supplies many of the show’s best lines.

The show has already aired in the United Kingdom, so if you research the series online, be warned you may run across a few spoilers. A few reviews seem to indicate critics thought the second season was a little too fast-paced, but I’ve only seen the first two episodes of season two so far. There were a few plot details that seemed a little rushed in the first episode, but I didn’t find any pacing problems in episode two.

The third episode of season two is airing Sunday on PBS, but if you’ve missed the first season, you can catch it on Netflix. The first episodes of season two also are available for instant streaming on http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/watch/index.html for a limited time

http://www.thekansan.com/community/blogs/x255287598/-Downton-Abbey-a-lavish-costume-drama-with-strong-cast

Sir Ian McKellen vows to keep the Dickensian spirit in new role as pub landlord (London Evening Standard)

Hosts: Ian McKellen, Sean Mathias and Evgeny Lebedev at The Grapes, Limehouse

Simon Freeman
13 Jan 2012

The clientele may become a little glitzier, the menu a dash more up-to-date and the decor subtly freshened, but the new owners of one of London's oldest pubs today pledged it would retain its spirit as an old-fashioned East End boozer.

At the reopening of The Grapes, in Narrow Street, Limehouse, film and stage star Sir Ian McKellen, who took over the lease of his local three months ago, said the 17th-century pub immortalised by Charles Dickens would not become "a star-studded bolt hole, a theatre cabaret or a gay bar" on his watch.

Sir Ian has teamed up with his former partner, director Sean Mathias, and Evgeny Lebedev, chairman of the Evening Standard, to keep the Dickensian spirit of the creaky riverside watering hole flowing in the 21st century.

He said: "Dickens wrote that 'it had outlasted and clearly would yet outlast many a better trimmed building'. It's simply sentiment from my point of view that I wanted to make sure it continues to do so."

But Sir Ian, who will fly to New Zealand to finish filming The Hobbit this month, is sure to attract a few A-listers now his name is above the door. "It was quite fun on New Year's Eve when we had a party and the locals saw Patrick Stewart, Kristin Scott Thomas, Frances Barber, Stingeven Boris Johnson got a reasonable welcome. They weren't coming down to slum it, or to patronise us, and the regulars simply accepted them as friends of ours.

"Tonight Martin Freeman, who plays the Hobbit, is coming here."

The trio took the lease over from Barbara Haigh, a one-time Bunny at the London Playboy Club who ran the pub and its upstairs fish restaurant for 17 years. Mr Mathias said: "There's no telly, no fruit machines, no kids, no recorded music. It's a boozer for people to come and chew the cud. We don't want to lose that authenticity."

Mr Lebedev, who met Sir Ian and Mr Mathias in 2009 while trying to engineer a transfer of their production of Waiting For Godot from the Haymarket to the Moscow Art Theatre, said: "Russia has destroyed all the physical signs of its own history and you would be hard-pressed to find a drinking hole from a Dostoevsky novel. It's a great privilege and honour to own such an incredibly charming piece of London's past."

Regular Martin Onslow, 49, said: "If Kristin Scott Thomas comes in again, I'm sure I'll be happy to buy her a pint."


http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-24027607-sir-ian-vows-to-keep-the-dickensian-spirit-in-new-role-as-pub-landlord.do

BBC tribute to Charles Dickens: unexpected endings for Great Expectations (The Telegraph)

For many he is the finest British author, but the BBC has altered some of Charles Dickens's greatest work for a season celebrating the bicentenary of his birth.

Gillian Anderson and Helena Bonham Carter starring in Great Expectations Photo: BBC

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent

7:00AM GMT 19 Dec 2011

 

The ending of Great Expectations has been changed in both a film and a TV series adaptation, while the corporation has also completed the author's final, unfinished, novel.

Gillian Anderson, 43, who stars as the youngest ever Miss Havisham on BBC One a week tomorrow, has been described by a Dickens expert as playing a "cougar rather than a crone".

The BBC has also completed the unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood in another effort to find new ways to perform the novelist's work.

They are part of 18 radio and television productions based on Dickens's work to come out in the next few weeks.

Literary purists fear that the BBC is meddling, while commentators fear Dickens "overkill".

 

Dickens wrote two endings to Great Expectations, but, controversially, both new productions have an entirely new outcome. The two new adaptations are both a commentary on our moneyobsessed times as the hero Pip struggles to keep his head after the equivalent of a lottery win.

The television series chooses a "compromise" ending between the "happy and unhappy" endings that Dickens wrote about Pip's eventual relationship with Estella.

The cinema version, written by David Nicholls, an author, will have a totally new ending. The BBC has helped fund the film, starring Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter, which will be released next year.

The BBC is also producing other surprising new interpretations, including an adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit set in modern Mumbai, a production of The Uncommercial Traveller based around life in contemporary Pakistan and a one–woman play on the women in Dickens's life.

A comedy night entitled The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff, featuring the comic actors Stephen Fry and Johnny Vegas and airing on BBC Two, will make fun of Dickens's dramas.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, an Oxford don and author of the book Becoming Dickens, said it was impossible to run out of ways to interpret the writer.

He said Miss Havisham as a "cougar rather than a crone" is "absolutely right" and added that Dickens always wrote his endings so they could be interpreted in different ways.

"I think Dickens is strong enough to withstand anything we do to him," said Dr Douglas-Fairhurst. "He has a chameleon-like ability to adapt to changing circumstances."

He added that it was fine to mess with both the time structure and the endings of Dickens' novels. "Dickens is inexhaustible," he said.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8964329/BBC-tribute-to-Charles-Dickens-unexpected-endings-for-Great-Expectations.html

Charles Dickens Adaptations to Unspool During British Film Institute's Screen Season

10:12 AM PST 11/17/2011 by Stuart Kemp          

 

BBC Films

Trevor Nunn, Martin Jarvis and David Threlfall among the names on the event's roster of participants.

LONDON – Hollywood interpretations, rarely seen silent movies and British adaptations of the work of novelist Charles Dickens will all unspool as part of the British Film Institute's Dickens on Screen season beginning next month.

The season will kick off at the BFI Southbank in December with a brace of BBC TV preview shows -- The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Arena: Dickens on Film, a fresh exploration into Dickens’ contribution to film and TV history co-produced by Film London, written and narrated by season co-curators Michael Eaton and Adrian Wootton and directed by Anthony Wall.

From January through March 2012, the BFI Southbank will then play host to previews, screenings and panel discussions, with Trevor Nunn, Martin Jarvis and David Threlfall among the names scheduled to take part.

Movies set to unspool include everything from silent films such as Scrooge - or Marley’s Ghost (U.K. 1901) and David Copperfield (1913) to Hollywood’s interpretations including The Only Way (1926) and Jack Conway’s A Tale of Two Cities (1935) starring Ronald Colman. Also on the bill are British adaptations of the same story such as the 1958 version A Tale of Two Cities starring Dirk Bogarde.

BFI organizers said at the season’s heart will be David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), considered by many to be the defining movies made from Dickens’ canon.
Carol Reed’s Oliver! (1968) and Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist (2005) are also on the big screen roster.

The season is part of Dickens 2012, the worldwide celebrations throughout 2012 marking the 200th anniversary of the writer's birth.

BFI Creative Director Heather Stewart said it is not surprising Dickens remains the most adapted author of all time.

“Working with our partners, and with the BFI National Archive so rich with interpretations of Dickens’ work, we have the perfect opportunity to present the biggest and widest ranging ever retrospective of Dickens on screen – from the lesser known works to the classics,” Stewart said.
The appetite for adaptations continues unabated.

Mike Newell is currently shooting a big screen adaptation of Great Expectations starring Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter, due to be released in fall 2012. At the same time, the BBC is backing a television adaptation directed by Brian Kirk.

Hollywood reporter

Helena Bonham Carter As Miss Havisham In 'Great Expectations' Film (PHOTOS)

Huff Post Books

First Posted: 11/4/11 03:38 PM ET Updated: 11/4/11 03:38 PM ET

 

Charles Dickens , Helena Bonham Carter , Book Adaptations , Great Expectation Photos , Great Expectations , Great Expectations Film , Great Expectations Movie , Miss-Havisham , Books News

 

The sweetheart (or miscreant, depending on the flick) of period piece films, Helena Bonham Carter is making a silver-haired return to the silver screen as Miss Havisham in an adaptation of Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations." Previously starring as a deranged witch in the "Harry Potter" series, a faithful matriarch in "The King's Speech," and a cold-hearted Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland,” the actress seems a perfect fit for the wry, manipulative, wild-haired villain. Eerie and opulent, Havisham has nothing but her father’s inheritance and her bitterness from being left at the altar to keep her company. She adopts a child, Estella, seemingly for the sole purpose of teaching her to break the hearts of men, including the novel’s protagonist, Pip. The first photos of Bonham Carter in the role were released today, and sure enough, her wide eyes and silky, rag-doll wedding gown epitomize Dickens's spinster, who, thirty some years after her break-up, still refuses to change clothes. "In a sense, she's a feast for the eyes," says Elizabeth Karlsen, the producer of the BBC Films and Number 9 Films movie, set to release in 2012. Directed by Mike Newell, the film began shooting last month. The lead role of Pip will be played by newcomer Jeremy Irvine, who is also starring is Steven Spielberg's film, "War Horse" later this year.

 

Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter - Film adaptation of Great Expectations to be shot in Medway

Kent OnLine

Read all comments on this story.

by Jenni Horn

jhorn@thekmgroup.co.uk
A news star-studded film adaptation of one of Dickens’best-loved books is to be shot in Medway.
Scenes for the Great Expectations movie will be filmed after dark in Chatham Maritime next month.
The production will star Hollywood’s Ralph Fiennes as convict Abel Magwitch and Helena Bonham Carter as spinster Miss Havisham.
The two recently shared the screen as the evil Lord Voldemort and Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter franchise.
Jeremy Irvine, who stars in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, has been chosen for the lead role of Pip, but it has not yet been revealed who will play his love-interest Estella.
The screenplay, said to remain faithful to the original story, is being directed by Mike Newell – best known for directing Four Weddings and a Funeral.

It is due to be released towards the end of next year to mark the bicentenary of Dickens’ birth.
A chase scene for the movie is being filmed in Chatham Maritime from Wednesday, November 16 to Saturday, November 19.
The scene, which will involve two rowing boats and a paddle steamer, will form part of a botched escape plan that appears towards the end of the story.
The filming will take place at night in Basin 2, next to St Mary’s Island. The action takes place entirely in the water, but the film crew will also be using pontoons around the basin. The cameras are expected to be rolling from 3pm to 2am each day.
A letter has been sent to St Mary’s Island residents, warning them of possible disruption.
Medway recently provided the backdrop for a new short film called Magwitch, a prequel to Great Expectations.
The 20-minute production was shot at Upnor Castle, Chatham’s Historic Dockyard, Eastgate House in Rochester and Yantlett’s Creek, in Allhallows.
There have been several versions of Great Expectations on the big screen. David Lean’s 1946 adaptation starring John Mills as Pip was also filmed in Medway.
The opening sequence of the novel is thought to be inspired by the graveyard at St James’ Church, in Cooling.

Monday, October 31 2011

Great Expections - Helena Bonham Carter are Miss Haversham. I love these period series!

I don't care what this reviewer says - I LOVE PERIOD SERIES.  Can't get enough. (Karen)

 

Ditch the costumes, says Arifa Akbar: it's time Great Expectations was updated

Tuesday, 11 October 2011

BBC

Just as you'd expect: Charlotte Rampling (centre) as Miss Havisham