Sally Potter's Orlando

Once upon a time in a magical land far far away, a young girl with a large nose was born. She was very very smart and a very very brilliant writer. One day this girl fell in love with another girl and decided to write a book for her. This book was called Orlando. Many many years later, after the book was very successful and the young girl with the big nose had killed herself, another young girl decided to make this classic novel into a film.

Casting was very hard because the characters were so complicated. The young girl decided Tilda Swinton should play Orlando and a gay man should play Queen Elizabeth. This was all fine, but one character still stumped her. Orlando's handsome sailor husband, Shel. She just couldn't find anyone right to play Shel. All the men were either too ugly, or too good looking, or too tall, or too short. Eventually they had no time left to look for more men and they had to start shooting, so the young girl quickly hired the cheapest actor in Hollywood, Billy Zane.

A few years later, a young girl was attended university and studying literature, in particular Orlando and the film adaptation. The young girl had only read 2 books on the course, and had already done essays on both of those. She needed to pick another text to do her final essay on, so she compared the length of The Portrait of a Lady and Orlando, and Orlando was thinner so she read that one. To her surprise, she truly really enjoyed the book! It was brilliantly funny and cleverly written and was jolly good fun. She was quite excited that she had chosen, by chance, a book that she actually enjoyed to write an essay on. Now she had to watch Sally Potter's film adaptation. It was quite boring and badly shot, but very aesthectically pretty, and Tilda Swinton was quite awful, but she swallowed her disappointment and continued to watch.
Then Billy Zane appeared.
The girl laughed out loud. This couldn't be serious, she thought. No one would actually cast Billy Zane in such an important and heavy role. The movie continued. Apparently it was serious. The girl tried to stifle her laughter, but when Tilda Swinton gave Billy Zane a foot bath, it was all too much and the girl had to leave the theatre to laugh loudly and continuously.


In short, Sally Potter, shame on you for destroying a fantastic, classic piece of literature. Shame.
As punishment, I think you should write my essay for me, Sally. It's only fair.