In case you didn’t catch the last fifteen Austen adaptations on the BBC, they’re tackling Emma later this year.
Good news: Romola Garai, Johnny Lee Miller, Jodhi May, Michael Gambon, Blake Ritson (poached from Mansfield Park!), Rupert Evans, and Head Bitch in Charge (Except in Hex Where She Died) Christina Cole means that place is Awesome British Actor Camp. Plus, Emma wears a collar during the day! Progress!
Bad news: Johnny is much too young and cute to really capture the ridiculous WHEN YOU WERE NINE skeeve of Mr. Knightley. The adaptation with Kate Beckinsale and Mark Strong comes closest to the age differential, where she’s seventeen and he’s SIX HUNDRED YEARS OLD. Not that I don’t love Mark Strong – he’s quite foxy! – but Austen really highlighted the fact that he decided to express his romantic feelings for her, which he’s had since she was LESS THAN THIRTEEN, by acting like her dad and telling her that’s what he’s doing. Ah, romance!
Preview! Spoilers for people who haven’t read the book; though, let’s be fair, you’ve had since 1811 to get on that.
I’m catching up on wordcount at the moment, so I’m not blogging as much as I’d like. When I’ve recovered from WisCon, expect some more of the Catherine Cookson Experience, a pile of Questionable Taste Theatres, and a response to Darin Bradley’s challenge.
In the meantime, mad respect to these dancers, who have better spacial memory than I ever will.
Even more respect to the dancers of the period, who did this dance in crowded, smoky rooms, basically in the dark (candles never give off more light than absolutely necessary, the bastards), forty pounds of embroidered clothing, shoes with no demarcated left and right, and the stench of unwashed humanity constantly crawling up their noses. Ah, romance!
So, the problem with a character like Sherlock Holmes is that you can, in theory, take any element of him and run with it until you have a two-hour movie. It’s just – it’s a plan. As evidenced above, it’s not a GOOD plan, but it’s a plan.
(Related: I didn’t remember that Sherlock Holmes dodged quite so many explosions. Learn something every day!)
Also, Rachel McAdams should be famous enough by now to be allowed to wear clothes in the preview, right?
It’s not even that I’m a purist – I thorougly enjoyed the remake with Rupert Everett and Ian Hart and Michael Fassbender and Perdita Weeks and Rachel Hurd-Wood in it. It was well-made, and it’s really useful for Awesome British Actor Camp bingo. But for real, even with all the liberties they took, there was not a lot of useless slow motion and running-from-explosions.
I know Guy Ritchie has a pretty small bag of tricks, but damn.
So usually I’m a nerd or a bastard, but sometimes I’m just a huge sap. It happens. Like when I watch Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
There is not even a pretense of objectivity here, you guys. This movie is amazing. It’s like the director woke up one morning and said, “I’m going to recruit a bunch of character actors from Awesome (Sorta-)British Actor Camp and slap them in ’30s England and let them all have happy endings. Every single one of them.”
Nutshell: Miss Pettigrew, an unemployed governess, accidentally becomes social secretary to American nightclub singer Delysia Lafosse. They hit the town with a bunch of adorable people, run around for a day putting on awesome dresses, and get happy endings. It is not Rashomon, is what I’m saying. It is awesome, is what I’m saying.
There could not be any more spoilers, or pictures, under this cut.
