Dear Hollywood

Next time you want to do a "Three Musketeers" movie, please could you have someone actually read the novel and then adapt that? Don't just have someone watch the old film versions and then steal the 'best bits'.

To be honest, "The Three Musketeers" is actually rather amusing in places. Other places are just stupid, and then there are bits that are worse. And it's really very noticable - the closer the film is to the novel, the better it is. The further it gets from the novel, the stupider it becomes.

But the thing that was really annoying was that they were clearly stealing large bits of the film from the Keifer Sutherland/Charlie Sheen version of the movie. Now that's also quite an enjoyable, if stupid, movie, but it's certainly no adaptation of the novel. In fact, in several places it's actually closer to "Star Wars" than anything else - to the extent that I was able to predict several parts of dialogue on my first viewing of that film.

"The Three Musketeers" is a great novel, one of the best I've read. (I'm not so fond of the sequel, though!) And it probably is ripe for a proper remake - although the Michael York version is pretty definitive, it is also very old, and now largely forgotten. So a new adaptation could be good, without the need for lots of invention by inferior writers.

Still, I did enjoy the bit in Versailles. Firstly because it reinforced the notion of the "Versailles Triangle", but also because the film is set in the reign of Louis XIII, and Versailles was build by his son, Louis XIV.