A movie you’ll be seeing soon is Bright Star, the true story of the Romantic Poet John Keats and the woman who became his muse and inspiration, Fanny Brawne. The reason you’ll be seeing this movie is simple: You want to support great art and to discover how great artists get their inspiration.
Little movies like this are having a harder and harder time getting made. There’s no money in them, or so the studios say. Without any explosions, special effects, space aliens, or other “popcorn movie” elements, Hollywood is saying “no” to more and more projects like this.
So find your way to your neighborhood theater and make sure you vote with your wallet. One of the many reasons I loved this movie was due to the way it dealt with Keats’ creative process. Most of the time he was frustrated and trying to figure out what he wanted to say. Once he met Fanny, she inspired him to reach new heights in his work and inspired his greatest expressions. Here is the poem many think was his last, written to her shortly before his death (at age 23!)
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art–
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–
No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever–or else swoon to death.
Here’s also a wonderful little site that explores the production of the movie. See Bright Star soon. It is not one of those movies that will be spending a lot of time in the theaters.
