Poor old Javier Bardem. Fresh from his success in 'No Country for Old Men' he's about to hit our screens in a film version of 'Love in the Time of Cholera' - Gabriel García Márquez's masterpiece of magic realism.
What was he thinking? More to the point what was Mike Newell thinking?
Anyone who's read the book will know just how futile an endeavor adapting it for the screen is. With its lush and sensual imagery of love that spans decades, majestic flights of fantasy and a cornucopia of eccentric characters, it's about as suited to the big screen as 'Finnegan's Wake'.
Yet for some reason the world of great literature is regularly plundered by eager studio heads desperate to wrest the magic from between it's pages and force it into two hours of dodgy period drama. For the most part this can only ever end in failure, because cinema just can't compete with the complexity of a novel. Scriptwriters usually end up discarding all the interesting bits and concentrating on plot. The joke here of course is that a lot of great literary fiction doesn't have much of a plot, so our confused hack ends up in a real mess. You only have to watch the 1967 version of 'Ulysses' to realize this.

Of course modern fiction is another kind of beast entirely. Most of it seems written with one eye on the movie rights already - with writers such as John Grisham and Stephen King practically writing the script before the novels even finished.

Perhaps if Hollywood are so keen to mix with the world of high art, they should just employ some of our greatest writers to write original screenplays. It worked pretty well for William Faulkner and Graham Greene.

Otherwise I fear my nightmare of Will Farrell, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson as the 'Brothers Karamazov' might be one step closer to reality.