Like I said before, I'm sort of into Jane Austen lately. I wanna spend some time talking about it, but I don't want it to take over the blog or anything, so I'm thinking I'll devote Saturdays to Jane for a while. That way it's additional content that doesn't displace anything else.
Okay? Okay.
Next week's Fringe Benefits column will be about the Gothic Classics comics anthology that has an adaptation of Northanger Abbey in it. You can catch that on the Newsarama blog, or I'll also link to it from here.
Just started re-reading Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor today. It's an awesome mystery, but I'll do a real review after I've finished it again at the end of the month.
Don't know if I'll review the remaining Masterpiece versions of The Complete Jane Austen. It feels weird to start talking about them in the middle of the series, but they have been very good and were my first introduction to a couple of the stories. And I did talk about the ones they've shown so far a little bit in that other post, so I'll probably at least mention them as I watch them.
Like the Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice? I finally see what everyone's been talking about there. I've always liked Colin Firth okay, but never really saw what everyone else did until now. He's an awesome Darcy. The looks he gives Elizabeth are freaking heart-breaking.
I've got the Keira version at home now from Netflix and I'm actually procrastinating watching it. It'll be interesting to see if I can even get my wife to watch it at all. She's burnt out on Keira anyway and is also suffering a post-Firthian P&P apathy towards all other TV. We watched The Jane Austen Book Club last night and she enjoyed it, but not nearly as much as I did.
I loved trying to put together the connections between the movie's characters and Austen's. Jocelyn (Maria Bello) is a matchmaker a la Emma. So much so that she even breeds dogs for a living. She wants to fix up her recently divorced friend Sylvia (Amy Brenneman from Private Practice), so she invites a potential candidate to join their new, Austen-only book club even though he's never read anything by Jane.
Like Fanny in Mansfield Park, Sylvia has always been the stable element in her otherwise tumultuous family. Now that she's single again, she's shy about relationships, unlike her daughter Allegra (Lost's Maggie Grace) who always falls in love quickly. The two of them are a lot like Elinor and Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility.
Then there's prim and proper Prudie (Emily Blunt) who -- like Persuasion's Anne -- has convinced herself that she doesn't care for the man who really should be the love of her life.
The guys in the movie are all amalgams of various Austen men. Sylvia's ex-husband (Jimmy Smits) has fallen from his pedestal (sort of like Darcy, but more like Edmond in Mansfield Park, who ignored Fanny for another woman). The guy Jocelyn wants to set Sylvia up with (Galahad from King Arthur), is a wealthy, but unaffected dude named Grigg whose qualities aren't immediately obvious to the woman he's interested in. That covers most of the rest of the Austen men.
Grigg's into science fiction the way the rest of the book club is into Austen, which immediately connects him to Northanger Abbey, Abbey's only experiment with genre fiction. Through the club though he comes to appreciate Austen, as do a couple of the film's other guys. I like how he doesn't turn into a total Austen zombie, but simply adds her to his repertoire. I also love how he buys a huge, collected volume of Austen's novels expecting them to be sequels. He's surprised when the club decides to make Emma their first discussion. "Oh, we're starting in the middle," he says, referring to the order in his collection. I totally connected to that guy. Except for the part where he likes reading Austen and doesn't complain about how long and boring The Mysteries of Udolpho is (like any genre geek, he decides to read it because it's so prominently featured in Northanger Abbey).
If the movie has a flaw it's that most of the other characters are (or turn into) Austen zombies. It's Jane or nothing for them and that's a bit creepy. But the movie is about Jane and why people like her stuff so much, so I'll forgive it for that. It's a wonderfully acted, smart, literary movie and if it's a bit sentimental and cheesy in parts, it comes by it honestly. Austen certainly has that quality often. And besides, sometimes I like cheesy sentiment.
Five out of five Keiras (you thought I was kidding about that, didn't you?) if you like Austen stories.
Probably one out of five if you don't.
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