Brideshead Resurrected

Our delightful pal John Polly over at the NewNowNext blog posted an interesting item today -- it seems that the young-dandies-in-platonic-love classic Brideshead Revisited is heading to the big screen, starring two of the hottest young British actors currently on the market, Matthew Goode and Ben Whishaw (by "hottest", I of course am referring strictly to their talent. This is a serious blog, after all... but OMGOMGOMGOMG they are SOOOOO cute!).

Goode memorably played the brother-in-law of the lead scoundrel in Match Point, and Whishaw recently starred in the thriller Perfume -- the former will play Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons played the role in the much-loved 1981 miniseries), and the latter will play hot mess Sebastian Flyte. These characters' names alone sound like something out of gay porn -- and while there's no explicit gay plot to the story, the men's ambiguous relationship has long been popular with gay audiences (Polly calls the miniseries the Brokeback Mountain of its time).

To prove the point, Polly links to a YouTube fan video of clips from the original -- I took a look around, and there's a bunch of the crazy things. Here's my favorite:

Here's the bad news: the Wikipedia entry for Brideshead notes that the 2008 film version will focus "solely on the relationship between Charles and Julia" (Sebastian's sister). That would be a total bug in my bonnet. We'll be keeping an eye on this one, to be sure -- maybe two!