The past couple of weeks I've been thinking of how to translate The Bell Jar into a script and a film since I started thinking of colour schemes for it in the bath one day. And now I've just read this:

Julia Stiles Cast in The Bell Jar | BuzzSugar

They're going to make a film of it already, but the worst part is they've cast Julia Stiles as Esther. Which is just bleh. It's going to be shitty.

you are a filmmaker?? how cool.

oh no I'm not a filmmaker. I'm in uni.
I just started having great ideas for that film. Which will now never be realised. Instead Julia Stiles will probably be making a feckup of it.

never read it. but julia stiles. ugh.

I actually only bought the Bell Jar after seeing Julia Stiles read it in 10 Things I Hate About You in 1999

I heard about this a while ago, on KR, I think. It is almost certainly going to be awful.

I didn't know she was still allowed in movies.

Julia Stiles To Star in Happy Version of Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar'! - Cinematical

Bourne bait Julia Stiles has signed up to play Esther Greenwood in an adaptation of Sylvia Plath's classic 1963 novel The Bell Jar. Tristine Skyler, a playwright and actress whose most prominent screen credits seem to be the Dominique Swain movie The Intern and Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, is writing the thing, and Plum Pictures is producing it. Get a load of what Plum exec. Celine Rattray had to say about the project: "Esther Greenwood has a strong outlook on life, and we're really looking to bring out the humor in the character. We don't want to do a depressing descent into the world of suicide." Wow. You might want to back up and read that again. This is a book about a woman (loosely based on Plath herself) whose struggle with clinical depression is so overwhelming that it drives her to madness and leads her to be subjected to gruesome, primitive shock therapy treatments. Throughout the course of the book, she attempts suicide several times. And they're going to turn it into, what, Mrs. Doubtfire?

The producers hope to get the project going next year, and no other cast members have been signed as of yet. Stiles will serve as a producer of the film, along with Rattray, Daniela Taplin Lundberg and Galt Niederhoffer. The story also notes that Stiles has been trying to bring this book to the screen for several years, but why? Here's hoping that either Variety or Rattray got it wrong about the whole "uplifting" angle, which is so laughable that I'm sure the Plath estate will go bananas when they catch wind of it. The last big-screen adaptation of The Bell Jar was back in 1979.

whyohwhyohwhyohwhy

Wow I do hate this book with a passion, but this is just WRONG. This book means something to people. At least do it justice.

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"We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation," she told the crowd.

Seriously. The book used to mean a lot to me, and it really doesn’t anymore, which I kind of find comforting (nothing wrong with liking it, but it’s also just good to know that you actually did change over the last 25 years), but why do this? It makes no sense.

Well, it makes Hollywood-sense, which is basically no sense. I bet they think if they lighten it up, they’ll get an audience beyond depressed teenage girls. But they WON’T, because it’s the fucking Bell Jar, and no one is going to see it on film if they don’t like the book. It reminds me of that horrible Scarlet Letter movie – they so obviously thought if they sexed it up and violated Nathaniel Hawthorne’s corpse by giving it a happy ending, people who only associate the book with some American Lit 101 class they hated would go see it. But of course people who only associate the book with some American Lit 101 class they hated didn’t go, because they really hated that stupid class, and people like me, who liked the book, didn’t go, because The Scarlet Letter doesn’t have a happy ending. Grrr. Why can’t people just film the book they bought the rights to?

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We are sorry, the mind you have reached is not a working mind.
Please hang up and die again.
Please hang up,
And die again.

just stay with the book and give the film a big fuck you

I thought the main fault with The Bell Jar was that it did have an "American" happy ending, like she magically got well or something and was released from the hospital. Just my opinion, then again I enjoy depressing books.

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Here's a spoiler for you: Chinese Democracy is shit

Yeah the ending was a bigger cop out than suicide.

Yeah, but you always know what actually happened to Plath, so that's like another ending. I believe it was not even published when she died. But I guess it's still a literary cop-out, her death is just part of The Thing.

__________________
We are sorry, the mind you have reached is not a working mind.
Please hang up and die again.
Please hang up,
And die again.

Someone was going to send me the bell jar but she didn't. I wonder what happened.

I'm curious about this book, I feel I'll relate to it, given my current depressed state.

forget the book, pull a plath and stick your head in the oven.







this is really sacrilege. i will see the film, but i may walk out.
and as for the ending, i didn't really think it was a cop out because it didn't really say she got better. i always assumed that if it had gone on a few more chapters should would have ended up dead..

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dithyrambic does not:
have a husband
have a child
fight over ice cream
care that you dont know who she is.

It was published before she died, just under a pseudonym Victoria Lucas I think.

I haven't read the belljar in about 2 years I just started having ideas for it for no apparent reason. That and another book.

I forgot to copy and paste that bit about them trying to make it more humorous. I can imagine. The stupid thing is I know I will wind up watching the thing just so I can agonise over how shite it is.
I don't know, maybe we'll all be proven wrong but - Julia Stiles!

You have a copy of the bell jar by your bed?

lol i love that quote from my first mister.

Stiles? hmm how about Leelee Sobieski? she is cooky. collecting human hair and all.

That book did nothing for me. I kinda wanted to slap her.

I have a feeling julia stiles only got the part because of that dumb scene where she is seen reading The Bell Jar in 10 things I hate about you.




but goddamn a HUMOROUS BELL JAR? :