7 Reasons Why the Keira Knightly Pride and Prejudice is Going to Suck, Based Solely on the Trailer

  1. Elizabeth Bennet is not a 'ahead of her time'. Her refusal to marry Mr. Collins is not modern (indeed, the notion that mercenary, loveless marriages are somehow a thing of the unenlightened past is quite naive). Elizabeth is very much a woman of her time. She doesn't want more from her life than marriage and family. She doesn't want to break out of a woman's place in society, or out of her social class. What she wants is a husband she can love and respect, and there's nothing modern about that.
  2. "From Jane Austen, the beloved author of Emma and Sense and Sensibility". Gee, I wonder why those books? Could it possibly be because they're the ones that have gotten the Hollywood treatment most recently?
  3. No one who really thinks P&P is a book about a woman "who discovered the one person she can't stand is the one person she may not be able to resist" has any business coming near an adaptation of it.
  4. Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth are pulling in for a kiss during the first proposal scene.
  5. "From the producers of Bridget Jones' Diary and Love, Actually"
  6. "You have bewitched me, body and soul." That's coming from Mr. Darcy. It's finally becoming clear--this is Pride and Prejudice by way of Wuthering Heights.
  7. Because anyone who thinks the world needs another P&P after the Firth/Ehle version is clearly insane.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Amen.

(Also, Keira Knightly looks like she'd collapse into a heap of panting bone if she walked three miles unassisted.)
August 09, 2005 11:02 PM
Anonymous said…
what a load of poo, its not going to suck because keira knightly is in it at all, infact i think she wil make the film a whole lot better, i think you all need to get lives instead of slagging people off that give you entertainment, if its someone who you really liked you wouldnt do it would you ?!?!?!
September 05, 2005 8:12 PM
Anonymous said…
I confess that I'm really looking forward to seeing the film, although I'm sure to be disappointed. I know that Austen's story will be quite bastardized and conformed to some skewed perception of what the audience wants, but the A&E/BBC version was too close to perfection (to what could possibly be done on film/television) to think it would bear replicating only ten years later.

I think that the new adaptation will be enjoyable on a different level -- I'm a bit of a sucker for ridiculous romantic stuff, so I think I'll be able to deal with the Bronte-esque bits. :) Although the Austen-lover in me stomps her feet in protest at the outrage, I'm going to make an attempt to enjoy it regardless. (I wish myself luck.)
October 21, 2005 7:23 AM
Anonymous said…
Hello,

I'm one of the interlopers from Bookslut. And a Jane Austen fan. Great list. I was punching my husband in the arm during the trailer: "They're about to kiss! They're Austen characters ... they shouldn't kiss!" I didn't mind the romantic license in Persuasion but Miss Bennett is not Anne Elliot.

However, I have no plans to compare this new P&P with the BBC/A&E version. My benchmark will be the 1940 Olivier/Garson movie: if the acting is half is good and the editing of the narrative only half as distracting in the new movie than it was in the old, I'll leave the movie theatre quite happy.
October 23, 2005 5:06 AM
Abigail Nussbaum said…
This isn't the first time I've heard the Garson/Olivier version spoken of so highly, Eli - a lot of the folks on the Readerville Austen thread think it's better than the Firth/Ehle version. I've never seen it, but the more I hear about it the more I think I'll have to look it up.
October 23, 2005 10:07 AM
Anonymous said…
Speaking as someone who was fearful of the new adaptation, but has now seen it: do not be fooled by the stupid trailer. It's very good, KK is surprisingly good, and really, aside from moving around a couple of locations/times of day it sticks to the book.

I really enjoyed it (and I'm a fan of the BBC one), and while it's necessarily contracted for time, it is by no means a bastardisation.
October 25, 2005 9:08 AM

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 2025 Hugo Awards: You Win Some, You Lose Some

Image
Specifically, at least night's Hugo award ceremony held at the Seattle convention center, my book, Track Changes , did not win the Hugo for Best Related Work, but I did win—for the second time—the Hugo for Best Fan Writer. This last development was a total and delightful surprise, and as I expressed in my speech I had prepared no remarks against what seemed like an impossibly remote eventuality. As a result, I can't recreate my acceptance speech the way I did after winning Best Fan Writer in Helsinki in 2017 (though you can hear what I said in the official Hugo award ceremony stream , around the 40-minute mark). But the general gist of it was: I am grateful to the award's administrators and everyone who voted, deeply appreciative of my fellow nominees, and take this award as recognition of the importance of SFF criticism to the ongoing health and vitality of the field. I was disappointed not to win Best Related Work for a book that I am incredibly proud of, but I think its ...
Read more

X-Men: First Class

The first installment of the modern film incarnation of the X-Men franchise came out in 2000, and is generally held to have been the harbinger of the following decade's deluge of superhero and comic book films.  I remember going to see the film several weeks after its US release had been greeted by effusive reviews, which praised it for taking the comic book adaptation an enormous step forward, and wondering what all the fuss was about.  Even knowing next to nothing about the comics, it was clear to me that here was a complex setting that had been shoehorned into the standard Hollywood template of a single hero backed by a team.  The creakiness of that process's result was only exacerbated by a dull story, thin characterization, and lackluster action sequences.  I liked X-Men 2 a little better, but the third film was terrible, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine was even worse.  The franchise, which never seemed to have much life in it to start with, was clearly on i...
Read more

Recent Reading: In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

When Paul Lynch won the Booker last year for Prophet Song , a near-future dystopia in which Ireland falls under the sway of a fascist government, there was the predictable hoopla over whether the book could, or should, be read as science fiction. But it seems to me that the SF community missed a trick several months earlier, when it failed to herald the longlisting of Martin MacInnes's In Ascension for the same award. Not only is In Ascension undeniably science fiction, featuring such core tropes as interstellar space travel, new star drives, and contact with aliens; it also seems very much in conversation with some key genre works which deal with these very topics, most obviously Carl Sagan's Contact and the movie adapted from it. As in that story, the novel is told from the point of view of a young, female scientist who ends up at the center of a global effort to respond to indisputable evidence of the existence of alien intelligence. But whereas Contact used that premise...
Read more