As newspapers desperately attempt to shore up their circulations, they keep giving things away. The best of today’s “gifts” was a copy of The Killing Fields DVD in The Times. This is a great film that I haven’t watched for years. It’s remarkable that the film’s director Roland Joffé made this film and The Mission over a couple of years and then barely anything else noteworthy since. Those two films have a couple of the best film scores ever recorded which probably didn’t do any harm. IMDB tells me that Joffé has some kind of low budget thriller called Captivity coming out shortly, in the States at least, featuring Elisha Cuthbert amongst others. Then there’s another title, perhaps called Singularity, that’s set in Western India during the time of the Raj during the First Anglo-Maratha War. This sounds more like a return to Joffé territory, but we’ll have to see if it gets made.
Elsewhere, The Guardian brought me an excellent Cycling Guide with plenty of advice and route maps. And The Telegraph had a voucher which got me a copy of Jane Austen’s Emma in a handsome Everyman edition. More Austen novels are being given away all next week, so I’ll have to find a Costa near work. That shouldn’t be hard even if their website is most unhelpful in this regard. Although not directly tied in, ITV has a new season of Austen films coming soon, including a new version of one of my favourite novels, Persuasion. Like the wonderful 1995 version, this production has also been shot on location in Bath and at Lyme Regis. We shall have to wait and see.