My opinion about the three fantasy and/or historical dramas that premiered this spring, summed up as succinctly as possible:

And the thing is this: neither Camelot, nor Game of Thrones, nor The Borgias, is terrible. (Well, maybe Camelot. We’ll get there.) Game of Thrones and The Borgias both have some excellent acting, which is 85% of what I look for in a show. David Oakes, seen above making a truly marvelous bitchface, is one of many other actors bringing amazing stuff to every episode of their respective shows.

Here’s where the trouble starts, though.

To talk about how great David Oakes is in the Borgias (and he really is), I have to talk about how great he was in Pillars of the Earth, which I have still not finished recapping. Also, it seems odd to talk about The Borgias when I haven’t yet talked about how I first saw Holliday Granger in Sparkhouse back in 2003 when she was OUTSTANDING in a part that could have been a disaster, and how pleased I am to see her on something that doesn’t require a PAL converter, or watching the later seasons of Robin Hood (where, I will never stop reminding people, Richard Armitage, who had played her stepfather in Sparkhouse like four years prior, played her love interest).

So, fine, speaking of under-appreciated actors coming into their own, we could talk about Camelot, where Philip Winchester and Eva Green are doing the heavy lifting in the middle of one of the oddest casts on television, including the prepubescent Jamie Campbell Bower and the always-off-putting Joseph Fiennes, who has thrown his hat in the Ham-Off ring (against, I am assuming, his more talented brother, Ham-Off veteran Ralph) to mixed results. However, that requires discussing a show that releases this image as a PRESS PHOTO:

And a show that thinks this photo represents it in the best possible light is not a show I am ready to recap right now, you know?*

So, I could recap A Game of Thrones instead, but I just can’t.

Also, did you know that the week before last, at least two of these three shows had graphically-depicted rape in them? I heard rumors that Camelot also had one, but by then I was a little tired of rape as a plot device, especially inserted into the Game of Thrones narrative in which I am told the whole initial point of the scene was Not-Rape, thank you very much for THAT, HBO, and so Camelot is still sitting on my TiVo, where I look at it from time to time and make Juan Borgia face at it and then just go to bed early.

Short version: Yes, I plan to review them all…as soon as I can pull it together. Also, expect a lot of concurrent reviews of things that came out between 3 and 8 years ago, because that’s how my mind works.

* I mean seriously, that is not a screencap. That is a Showtime-stamped OFFICIAL PRESS PHOTO, which means someone looked at this photo, and instead of saying, “This looks like rehearsal,” they said, “Such ACTION! Such DRAMA! Quick, get this to the Associated Press! Now let’s see that audience just ROLL IN!” And someone else stamped it, and sent it to the publicity department, and THEY signed off on it and sent it to the press, and the press, snickering, made it available, and now you have to wonder what on earth is going on with this show, seriously.

This was the eighth adaptation of Jane Eyre I’ve seen (not counting the George C. Scott version, which I bailed on like a day player in a skydiving movie). There have been at least twenty adaptations made. There have been abysmal versions and serviceable ones, hysterically off-the-mark ones, ones that are overpraised, and ones that are close to my heart even though they’re deeply flawed and sometimes really terrible (lookin’ at you, Samantha Morton and Ciaran Hinds).

But the thing is that even though it’s been filmed so often, there’s never been a version so good it can be claimed as the definitive version. (Pre-emptive: the 2006 version is often described this way, and it certainly looks good and hits some of the right notes, but there are so many characterization problems and Handsome Rochester issues that from a textual standpoint it’s not the case). Thus, Jane Eyre becomes a one-woman course in the difficulty of adaptation; it seems like a straightforward-enough book, but when you try to bring it to the screen it’s easy to let something crucial slip through the cracks.

This Jane Eyre is also not the definitive adaptation, though Cary Fukunaga managed a movie that does more than just stage scenes from the book, which is where many adaptations stop; this Jane Eyre focuses on Jane herself, in a way not many of the others have. As a character study, it’s a new enough take to have something to say, and though there are some missteps, what it does well it really does well.

Below the cut, more specifics, for those who don’t want to be spoiled about what’s in the attic (it’s a puppy mill).

“The shadows are as important as the light.”

We begin with Jane on the flat and wild moors, wracked and walking aimlessly, and as she wanders (and recuperates at the Rivers place), the movie unfolds in long flashbacks to her childhood and time at Thornfield. It’s a strong starting point, in that the first several minutes of the movie focus entirely on her, and the idea that this is a movie about Jane herself carries nicely through the film.

The aesthetics of the film are unimpeachable, from the costumes to the haunting score (maybe my favorite part if the film). It’s the sort of film where, after Jane talks of feeling stifled in her life at Thornfield (to Mrs. Farifax, not to her herself, this movie has no narration), we see her repeatedly crisscrossing her own snowy steps in the garden and walking alongside the garden wall.

Everything is done in a very understated way, though; in fact, I’d say that, for better or worse, the theme of this movie is Jane, Understated.

The actors are, by and large, excellent. The biggest surprise for me, and most pleasant, was that Adele (Romy Settbon Moore) was fantastic. Normally one just has to cringe and bear it through all the scenes with the child actor they’ve wrangled for the part, but this Adele has a gravity and stillness that really works, both to keep her from being too Shirley Temple, and to enhance the quiet repressiveness of Thornfield.

This is not to discount Mia Wasikowska, who manages to be compelling in a very understated (ding!) way. There were a few moments where I felt as though they were understating too much (we’ll get there), but she definitely inhabited the role in her own way, and was as plain and grave and as could be wished by any Eyre fan.

Judi Dench is the driest, sassiest Mrs. Fairfax ever, of course, and somehow manages to deliver a couple of laugh-out-loud moments in the midst of the very effective Gothic gloom.

That is the face of a Mrs. Fairfax who has seriously considered smothering Mr. Rochester to death in his sleep eight hundred times, because he’s a weenie.

Everyone else makes the most of their parts…such as they are. In fact, the biggest drawback here is that a movie simply can’t cover the scope of a novel like Jane Eyre and cover everything thoroughly and effectively. It’s just the way things go; since the movie’s a little over 90 minutes, Blanche Ingram gets four lines, Grace Poole is not even MENTIONED until the scene in the attic, Diana and Mary Rivers get two lines each, Helen Burns pops up for five lines they pack to the gills with chastely homoerotic undertones, and Mrs. Reed gets half a dozen sneers, which means that a lot of Awesome British Actor Camp alumni showed up for costume fittings, spent a week on set, and partied right off home.

Someone who does gets his due is St. John Rivers, played by Jamie Bell at his manliest*.

(That kid grew up looking like a Roman statue. Way to avoid babyface, Bell!)

Since the Rivers sisters get shafted (I honestly don’t think Holliday Granger got ten words in), it’s up to Jamie Bell to carry the idea of Jane’s interlude with them as being illuminating and fraught. Verdict: not bad! His St. John Rivers has the right amount of passion choked with austerity to make you invested in a section of the story often glossed over; also, he and Mia have quite a bit of chemistry. “Hides a fever in his vitals,” indeed. (Heyooo!) In fact, they should do something else together. Preferably set in an era where that facial hair is frowned upon!

Speaking of facial hair, I’m going to just say it: the movie’s other biggest drawback is Michael Fassbender.

Don’t you look at me that way, you handsome jerk.

Here’s the thing about Michael Fassbender; he’s an excellent actor. (It’s why I yelled about him so much when he was just getting started!) He’s also a total movie star, in the best sense of the word. He’s also miscast here.

I mean, he absolutely does his best, and he does a very good job of being a lonely man, sometimes cruel, who is willing to take huge risks for love, and there’s no guessing why Jane falls for him like a ton of bricks. But he is so good-looking that when he asks, “Do you find me handsome, Miss Eyre,” and she says, “No,” you can only think, “Are you sure? Did the light near his face go out? Maybe you were looking over his shoulder at something else.”

He also turned on his trademark slightly-psychotic rakish charm as much as he possibly could, which just enhances his natural tendency to hit on everything in the frame – his horse, Pilot the dog, Mrs. Fairfax, Jane, the walls, the cameraman – so at times it feels like she’s just succumbing to the inevitable Fassbender Sextimes instead of falling deeply in love with a difficult, moody person.

(No one can blame her. In Blanche’s two scenes, we’re supposed to think she’s a gold digging skankpants, but all we ever see her do is sing – appallingly, IMOGEN POOTS – and stare into Rochester’s extremely handsome face, which makes sense because of the extreme handsomeness.)

He and Mia have good chemistry, at least. A lot of their early scenes are delightful! In terms of the Big Scenes, two of them fell a little flat with me for different reasons, both victims of Understated Syndrome. One is the proposal, in which I think Jane doesn’t display nearly the anger and passion indicated by the text. The other is the departure, in which it’s Rochester who doesn’t evidence any anger. (Though to be fair, in the movie’s darkest moment, in the middle of his pleading, he wraps his hands around her throat and murmurs the “could bend her with my finger and my thumb” thing, which brought the scene from understated to WHOA NELLY in a hurry.)

Mia and Michael, pictured here moments before WHOA NELLY occurs.

Miss Fairfax, entering the scene unexpectedly and passing Jane a note that says RUN GIRL RUN.

I’m always a stickler about that scene, because it’s so important to her character that he try begging, and shouting, then despair, and throwing himself onto the couch and sobbing (drama queen), and she holds up against all three and then extricates herself. In this version he mostly looks sad about it, then suggests strangling her, then sort of falls asleep in her lap and she gets up and wanders away quietly, which I completely understand from a standpoint of someone whose boyfriend just suggested strangling her, but is not quite that amazing declaration from Jane that she has more self-respect than all this nonsense wrapped up with a nice, staunch, textual “I am going.” (/English major)

There were a few lesser and hilarious things that were sacrificed for atmosphere’s sake, like the scene in which Jane is tasked to clean Mr. Mason’s wound, and she moves with horror to the tapestry and slowly pushes the secret door open, which is definitely atmospheric, but by then Rochester and the doctor are already back and that wound is still just spitting out blood like a fountain at the Plaza Hotel. SUPER HELPFUL, JANE.

Favorite scene: the attic with Bertha. First of all, Bertha’s Valentina Cervi, and I like when Bertha is hot, because when you sell a lady into marriage based on looks she should be pretty good-looking. Second of all, since it’s Michael Fassbender, he hits on her while he’s up there, because he’s conscious and she’s in his eyeline and so he might as well, so when she comes close to him he cradles her and caresses her hair and they have a Moment, and then Bertha spits a dead fly onto Jane’s dress. ACES. LOVED IT.

(Second-favorite scene: when Jane comes back, Mrs. Fairfax chastises her for going without telling her, because she would have helped. Judi Dench is worth her weight in per diems, seriously.)

Anyway, despite some small missteps, this is a perfectly serviceable, sometimes insightful, always pretty adaptation of the book that is a very nice movie on its own, and an able adaptation of the text. It didn’t capture my passion in the way some movies do, but I can totally see its merits and feel it was time well spent. (I AM THE SWITZERLAND OF THIS MOVIE, LOOK AT THIS.)

* I have not seen The Eagle. He might be manlier in that; someone else can go see it and tell me.

Ostensibly, we were going to talk about writing, but as we had both quite recently seen Tron: Legacy, there was really nothing we wanted to talk about more than what an utter mess that movie ended up being.

For those who want a more concise review, here’s a list of things you should know before you go see Tron: Legacy. (Spoiler alert obviously in place.)

“I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day… I got in…to the theatre and realized I’d made a huge mistake not seeing True Grit.”

1. Tron: Legacy is a sequel that loves its source material, which I suppose is to its credit. Unfortunately, like most love affairs, it starts out worshipful and attentive, and slowly degenerates into recriminations and blame, until finally Tron is throwing lines of dialogue out the window of their apartment and screaming at Tron: Legacy to just take the references already and leave Tron alone, for God’s sake. To watch this breakup happen, you will pay money and have to wear dorky glasses for two hours. You make the call.

2. The plot is really bad. I say this as someone who figured the plot would be terrible anyway. I say this as someone who prizes many things far above plot in her favorite artistic pieces, and who, despite watching eight thousand cop shows a year, often hits the big reveal and goes, “Oh, it was THAT guy? Huh,” because I hadn’t bothered to guess, figuring someone would eventually tell me. I can guess your plot several twists in advance (more than once!), your movie is seriously not even trying.

3. Another place this movie seriously did not even try: the special effects. I was prepared for a clunker script (fact: I was not prepared for the script that actually happened), but was very surprised to find that, despite being a serviceable update of the general aesthetics:

The new movie falls down on the effects in some major ways. The most major way is in its animation of C.L.U., the Kevin Flynn avatar who now rules the dystopian Grid. They managed skin tone that hit the Uncanny Valley, and a mouth that…fell a little short:

His face didn’t improve with motion (when it moved at all). All his scenes felt like we’d stumbled drunk into a screening of The Polar Express.

4. People who tried something in this movie and succeeded: Daft Punk, in making a lovely soundtrack. They may go home; the rest of this movie must stay.

5. The dialogue, in general, sounds like it was taken from a Magic 8 Ball and some fortune cookies.

6. This is the sort of movie where a character who has an incriminating body mod on her upper bicep wears a bodysuit with deep shoulder cutouts. Later, when her body mod is revealed by the bad guy, all present are very surprised that someone would have thought of something so dastardly as pushing down her open-shoulder sleeve one inch.

(This same character is admirably not sexualized – she’s also infantilized, and painted as a master fighter even though she performs poorly in her one badly-choreographed fight scene, so I’m honestly not sure if this is bad writing, or if she’s supposed to be dumber than a box of hair.)

7. Related: Sam Flynn, our hero, is the world’s most gullible human.

“Oh, my dad paged me from beyond the grave and told me to hit the arcade? That’s great!”

“Oh, you’re my dad? That’s great!”

“Oh, get in the car with you, stranger? That’s great!”

“Oh, YOU’re my dad? That’s great!”

“Oh, you have a friend who will for sure help us and not betray us at all? That’s great!”

“Oh, you’re worried about destroying yourself facing CLU again but insist on coming with us to fight him without giving your reasons? That’s great!”

To be fair, he might have a concussion from living in a garage on a pier that apparently doesn’t have a fourth wall:

(Seriously; the garage door is on the other side of the apartment, and closed, but suddenly he turns around and Alan is in his apartment delivering his contractually-mandated exposition, and neither of them mentions the fact that they’re chatting al fresco.)

8. Cillian Murphy is in it! His character is an insufferable hipster, played for laughs. Several audience members looked self-conscious throughout his cameo.

9. Also in it: James Frain.

At least he’s suitably embarrassed.

10. I often joke that Michael Sheen is locked in a Ham-Off death match against someone I assumed at the time to be reigning camp-master Tim Curry. However, I may be wrong. Michael Sheen is not hamming off against anybody any more! He has managed to perfect the art of getting wasted drunk, showing up for two scenes, go so over-the-top it passes embarrassing and comes back around to hilarious, and swanning back to his bank account.

YOUR MOVE, CURRY.

I’m actually a little sad that Tron: Legacy ended up being as bad as it was. Even imperfect movies can often have a kernel of something interesting, and this dystopian take on the optimistic Tron of 1982 might have given us plenty. Of course, a sequel has already been greenlit, so, uh, better luck next time?

Well, blackjack.

At first glance, this trailer seems to be mostly, “Oh, PLEASE, Lit Majors, PLEASE come see this movie twice so we can recoup some of our financial outlay! Look how accurate!”

And in some ways, trying to advertise a Jane Eyre adaptation by emphasizing “authentic” moments from the book seems like a waste of time – I mean, your favorite line might fall by the wayside, but you generally don’t worry that Mr. Rochester will open the attic door and reveal his illegal puppy mill.

On the other hand, the last feature-film adaptation of Jane Eyre had freaking William Hurt in it, and they must know they have a little groveling to do if they’re going to get butts in the seats for that. (Especially since there was a questionable-taste-licious A&E TV movie and a perfectly serviceable miniseries adaptation in the meantime. MY GOD, HOW MANY ADAPTATIONS OF THIS THING DO WE NEED?)

But, in defiance of my all-caps, there’s still plenty to chat about. Let’s!

“But sir, I heard a sound in the hall, as if a hundred adorable puppies were playing at once. It’s Grace Poole, sir, I’m sure of it!”

The trailer doesn’t even pretend it’s not a Cliffs Notes of the movie, so we go pretty much straight along the plot, beginning when Jane is a youngster and going right on through to the moor-wandering. This makes recapping super-handy!

I am a terrible Lit Major and have never been remotely interested in the baby Jane segment (except maaaybe when she was Georgie Henley), but this shot caught my attention:

It’s always nice to think that someone really cares about how everything is framed as well as just raking in your Lit Major dollars. But things are otherwise pretty standard, and that was really the only thing about the first half of the trailer that caught my eye, until:

Surprise Sally Hawkins! She plays evil aunt Mrs. Reed, though as always, sleeves that awful are a mitigating factor. The 1830s: the ugliest decade. (Well, top ten.)

Blah blah childhood blah. As if in an instant, our grown-up governess Jane is on her way to meet her gruff employer Mr. Rochester!

That’s going to go super-smoothly and not be creepy or unfortunate at all!

Now for the biggest controversy so far. Mr. Rochester is supposed to be less than handsome. Because they cast this movie on Opposite Day, he is instead played by Michael Fassbender:

This is the moment when he asks Miss Eyre if she finds him handsome, and she replies, “No, sir.” Fassbender is duly amused, because he owns a mirror.

Despite knowing how bizarre this is, I have to say – let’s be fair. This is the movies. Most people in the movies, even if they are not marquee-chiseled, are generally compelling to look at, because that’s their job. Thus, most Rochesters have been relatively good-looking. (Though their interpretations have varied wildly.)

I’d say Ciaran Hinds is one of the most physically true-to-type Rochesters, because you could make a solid case that Ciaran Hinds has a face that has to grow on one (even though I personally think he’s a stone fox). However, other people who have played Mr. Rochester include Timothy Dalton and Toby Stephens, and no matter what things you have to say about Timothy Dalton and Toby Stephens, “off-puttingly unhandsome” is probably not one.

On the other hand, based on this trailer, Fassbender seems to know he has an uphill battle trying to be unhandsome, and so rather than go the blustery route (covered extremely well by Ciaran Hinds, to the point of Ham-Off), he decides to go for a little of the old Hannibal Lecter and handsomely creep the shit out of Jane until she gets Stockholm Syndrome.

“So, when you say you could just eat me up, we’re speaking metaphorically? Just checking.”

He also psychologically tortures her by pretending to love someone else! (He’s a real catch.)

These facial expressions are amazing out of context, aren’t they? It’s like a drunk Facebook photo.

Also, if Blanche Ingram looks familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this pair together before in Centurion, where they had no chemistry. I’m willing to chalk that up to the fact that the movie sucked appallingly, and hope for better things here. (On the other hand, Imogen has her work cut out for her, because in the 2006 miniseries, Christina “I Play All the British Bitches Now” Cole knocked Blanche Ingram out of the park. YOUR MOVE, POOTS.)

So things are looking up! But after the chaos of the running-away portion of the trailer and before we can see Jamie Bell and Holliday Granger bringing two Venn Diagrams of Awesome British Actor Camp together, a French Expressionist film breaks out and ruins everything.

IT’S A SYMBOL.

Oh well, I guess when you get a director who wants cross-dye drapes, you get a director who wants flies crawling over symbolically abandoned reference texts. We’ll pick our battles and give this a pass.

Frankly, all in all, most of the movie seems to be in order so far. The two things we can’t tell from this trailer that will make or break this movie are:

- How well the movie manages to fit four hours of material into a two-hour film. I hold the Samantha Morton version close to my heart because I like both her and Ciaran as the leads, but that thing is only two hours long, and it shows, because baby Jane and St. John Rivers each get about 10 seconds of screen time and there’s a lot of, “Oh, there you are, back from that enormous Mrs. Reed interlude we entirely cut out!” We’ll see if this movie manages to compress the plot and still keep some balance.

- Mia Wasikowska’s performance.

I actually have decent hopes for the latter. I would be inclined to say she’s more suited to modern stuff than period pieces, but that’s not entirely fair since it’s based on Alice in Wonderland, when she was constantly on green screen and having whimsy forcibly squeezed out of her pores. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say that she might not be the best Jane Eyre of all time, but I think she’ll be fine. It’s really all up to the script at this point.

Not that it matters – I’m still going to throw my 12 bucks at this movie to watch Awesome British Actor Camp convening inside a dank abbey, and I’m only a little ashamed of it.

Jeremy Irons will!

Irons, suffering indigestion from overeating scenery.

In some ways this is bad, because Euro History students across the nation will be using this as the basis for papers in the coming years, so teachers can expect a lot of “Manipulation of Public Perception as a Source of Political Power for the Smoking-Hot Borgia Family” papers. In some ways, though, it’s sort of great, because there’s something sort of delightful in thinking they’ll screw up historical accounts so badly that you can end up with a spoiler alert for something that happened in 1491. (That delusional dude who keeps underestimating the world’s circumference is still totally going to get his funding from Isabella. PLOT POINT: RUINED.)

On the other hand, historical accounts of the Borgias are still pretty soapy, so there’s plenty to draw from, not least the incest scandal between Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia.

Also worth hanging your hat on: a surprisingly interesting cast, which includes Joanne Whalley (escaped from Willow at last), David Oakes (fresh from playing William Intensse in Pillars of the Earth, and now playing Intensio Borgia), and Holliday Granger as Lucrezia.

(Side note about Holliday. I first saw her in Sparkhouse back in 2003, in which I thought she delivered a really amazing performance. She was 15. Also in Sparkhouse: Richard Armitage, who played a father figure to her. He would go on to play her love interest in Robin Hood, six years later. I bet THAT was fun and not at all awkward! Also, I am not kidding when I say there’s a British Actor Camp and everyone goes.)

Anyway, all this to say: this looks like it’s going to be a cheesy mess, and I will be tuning in pronto.

(ETA: I don’t know if we’ll get that far, or how much this show is compressing time, but if they get a few seasons in, I better see some Isabella d’Este, is all I’m saying.)