Director Mike Newell (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time) will direct an adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.  From what I gathered about the tale when South Park adapted it, it's about an old woman who uses the tears of men to power her Genesis device.  Of course, the more famous adaptation is David Lean's 1948 film and the book was adapted again in 1998 with Alfonso Cuaron at the helm and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Ethan Hawke, Anne Bancroft, and Robert De Niro.  Strangely, neither Lean nor Cuaron's versions featured the Genesis device.  THR reports that Newell will have a "fresh take" on the material, but doesn't specify if Newell will go classic like Lean's version, modern like Cuaron's, or absurd like South Park.

Newell's Great Expectations will be part of the Dickens' bicentenary in 2012.  Hit the jump for a real (read: no Genesis device) synopsis of Dickens' classic novel.

Here's a synopsis for Charles Dickens' Great Expectations:

Pip, a poor orphan being raised by a cruel sister, does not have much in the way of great expectations between his terrifying experience in a graveyard with a convict named Magwitch and his humiliating visits with the eccentric Miss Havisham's beautiful but manipulative niece, Estella, who torments him until he is elevated to wealth by an anonymous benefactor. Full of unforgettable characters, Great Expectations is a tale of intrigue, unattainable love, and all of the happiness money can't buy. Great Expectations has the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language, according to John Irving, and J. Hillis Miller declares, Great Expectations is the most unified and concentrated expression of Dickens's abiding sense of the world, and Pip might be called the archetypal Dickens hero. [Amazon]

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