JMK, you were absolutely right about the Lemony Snickett movie. What a nothing! Another big, empty, predictable, unsuspenseful, over-produced nothing! The most inventive thing about the movie were the end credits. I am also fed-up with movies that are not self-contained. Where they hold things back to reveal in future, hoped-for sequels. I don't mind series pictures, but they must be complete in themselves and tell a full story. Lemony Snickett set-ups and teases us with all sorts of mysteries and secrets (the most intriquing stuff in the movie) and then leaves it all unresolved at the end. Blechhh! It just seems like an unfinished story...which is exactly what it is. What happened to the well-made play. Stuff like this just defies the rules of sound dramaturgy.
As a Tarzan purist, I am not fond of what film and TV has done to Tarzan. The Weissmuller films as inaccurate as they are, are closer to the tone and spirit of Burroughs' original Tarzan than most of the latest TV incarnations, which have saddled him with all sorts of political correct crap and try desperately to make him "hip and relevant for today's audience". All they have succeeded in doing is making him bland and uninteresting...far from his iconic mythic-ness. Though Panni, I do think your Jane...Lydie Dernier?...is a big hit with the Burroughs fans as she shows up at a vast number of conventions and sells a lot of photos and autographs and seems like a very nice woman.
Jane, as well as a Tarzan aficianado, I am also a Richard III aficianado. I have probably two shelves of books on Richard and the War of the Roses. Both fiction and history. Hope you like DAUGHTER OF TIME. Terrific book. I have my own theories, which don't always mesh with detective Grant's, but this book puts the arguments out there.