Road to Jerusalem part dos ( the movie)

As I have been reading this novel I keep thinking what a good movie it would make. I mean the book does have everything. Epic scale, great battles, love story, family struggles, everything. Well for once the world listened to my brilliant ideas and last year a swedish film company went and made a movie of the trilogy ( the Road to Jerusalem being the first) and the movie was entitled
" Arn". This past summer, when i was in Sweden, I was able to get a hold of this movie and watch it. There was the small problem that half of the movie was in swedish ( they spoke english in the Holy land) but i got around that by knowing the story.
The overall verdict was that the movie did do a pretty good job of capturing the story. The scale was epic and the battles bloody, but thinking back I do have a slight problem with the lead( or rather the way Arn is portrayed). In the movie Arn is portrayed as a young warrior inexperienced to the ways of the world. Movie Arn is skilled with a blade but to me in the first part of the movie to inexperienced. He stares around a lot and tries to stay out of fights but is not presented exactly the way I pictured him from the books. While book Arn is young and semi-inexperienced he is very deadly. He is almost the James Bond of his time, he can weild the sword and bow with deadly efficiency and doest even wear armor. I guess i just want to see a more dangerous Arn, because when Arn gets to the Holy Land he does many amazing things, including feats of arms. I just want to believe the transition for the first book and the second. It would be much easier to believe if Arn was already deadly Pre-Holy Land instead of coming from nothing and going to amazing. But apart from that little gripe the movie was very good. I still support my opinion that it should be made into an american movie. There are two few of these epics anymore ( the last one being the Lord Of The Rings) and i miss them. Arn is a perfect opportunity because it not only has an epic scale but great characters to. One could argue that in a sense Arn was already made into a movie with the movie Kingdom of Heaven by Riddly scott staring Orlando Bloom in 2005. But while Kingdom was very good I think Arn would be much better because we have room to see Arn grow over the three chapters of his life into a character we know and care about. Balien ( from Kingdom of Heaven ) is kind of just thrown at the viewer and into the holy land leaving us to wonder about his character. Anyway hopefully someone in america , not just sweden, will recognize that i have brilliant ideas and then make a lot of money.

Annotated Bibliography

1. The author , Aaron Caplan, is a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington where he often represents public school students and families. The article is written to educated mostly parents on the situation of their child in public schools. In his article Caplan cites a large amount of court cases and their ruling to provide accurate detail in his article. The court cases present a solid verdict on the laws regarding free speech.

2. The author, Reynolds Holding, is a well researched writer who has gathered up several accounts of people experiencing free speech issues and put them in a compelling article set to inform other parents and older children. Along with witness accounts Holding also cites a few court cases. The witness accounts show how common free speech issues are in modern life.

3. Suit blends internet,free speech and school.

The author, Victoria Kim, is a staff writer from the Los Angles Times. The article is intented to be read by parents of kids in schools. The article focuses on one main court case and occasionaly making reference to other cases as well. The article talks of a case involving Youtube which could be considered as a common way to speak out to others and speaks of the punishment for usuing such a common site.

4. The author,

Kirsten Scharnberg

A new novel of swedish decent

So as those hardcore fans of this blog will already know, I have recently finished  "The Road" and now since i really needed something to read i picked up an old favorite ( that seems to be happening a lot with my reading). Anyway the book I chose to grab of the shelf this time is titled 

 "The road to Jerusalem" by Swedish author Jan Guillou. This book was introduced to by my father a couple years back. In Sweden the book is apparently very popular so i decided to read it. I was instantly swept up in the adventure of the story, but unlike the road did nor fully understand the writing. So I prepared myself for round two as i picked up the book. 

The story as one might guess by the title is set in the 12th century in Sweden. A young boy named Arn grows up Arnas where one fateful day he falls and severely wounds himself. All think Arn is going to die and Arn's mother in desperation promises Arn to God should He save him. Arn lives and is soon sent to a monastery . There he spends most of his childhood where he learns many things from latin to sword fighting. Soon , as Arn leaves the monastery and he goes out into a now war torn sweden. He gets involved with different clans and eventually a forbidden love that sends him to the crusades.

I haven't read that much yet to be honest so i cant say much on writing style, but I will have later ideas in later posts.