Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Warning to Mr. Hollywood

The film rights to Love In the Time of Cholera, the 1985 novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, have just been sold for close to 3 million dollars. If the movie is ever made, here is my warning to the gentleman at Stone Village Pictures who struck the deal:

Love in the Time of Cholera is quite possibly my favorite novel of all time. If you hurt it, if you disrespect it, if either Jennifer Lopez or Catherine Zeta-Jones finagles her way into the role of Fermina Daza, I will hunt you down in your multimillion-dollar Malibu home and stomp on the hood of your Porsche with steel-toe boots that I purchase especially for the occasion. Do not test me. Do not.

(I'm reminded here of "The Princess Bride": My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.)

If you haven't read Love In the Time of Cholera, do it before They ruin it. Here is Florentino Ariza's first glimpse of Fermina Daza:

...As he passed the sewing room, he saw through the window an older woman and a young girl sitting very close together on two chairs and following the reading in the book that the woman held open on her lap. It seemed a strange sight: the daughter teaching the mother to read. His interpretation was incorrect only in part, because the woman was the aunt, not the mother of the child, although she had raised her as if she were her own. The lesson was not interrupted, but the girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later.

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