P&P is an astonishingly flexible novel. It’s been adapted twice into movies that soften the characters and leave out half the plot, and one surviving miniseries successfully hits most of the important notes (and finds room to embellish here and there) in six episodes running around 24 minutes apiece, for a total of slightly under two and a half hours. The version I am daydreaming about here is funded by a streaming service as a series of 8 episodes, running around an hour apiece. I do not have strong ideas about how to break down the individual episodes, but I feel that with more vignettes to illustrate character and setting and turn narration into events, we should get there without much difficulty…
Continue reading “Thoughts on Adapting Jane Austen: The Bennets and Their Friends and Family”Category: Jane Austen
Thoughts on Adapting Jane Austen: Introduction
This is one of those topics that a lot of people have opinions about, and I am one of them. I intend to dump some thoughts about that on this blog, specifically what I would do if some insane person put me in charge of new adaptations of the novels I find most interesting. This initial post is about the ground rules I’m working from:
Continue reading “Thoughts on Adapting Jane Austen: Introduction”Likeable and Unlikeable Main Characters
Elsewhere on the web, there was a discussion going on about whether readers of popular fiction would tolerate an unlikeable main character, and I stuck my oar in – well, a whole galley’s worth of oars actually. I thought I would try to summarize some of my opinions here:
Continue reading “Likeable and Unlikeable Main Characters”Thoughts on Mansfield Park
I recently listened to Karen Savage’s excellent reading of this book on Librivox, and it reminded me that I have opinions about this flawed, messy novel by Jane Austen.
-The absolute most important thing to understand is that Austen thinks Fanny and Edmund are a couple of intelligent, well-meaning introverts with an adorkable lack of self-knowledge and social “polish.” Take Mia Goth’s Harriet Smith from the 2020 Emma, make her more intelligent but still humble, earnest and insecure, still someone who makes you chuckle indulgently at her awkward moments. Take one of the more dignified and less half-witted versions of Charles Bingley (the 1980 guy is good, for instance) and make him more introverted and religious, but still faintly absurd and still oblivious about stuff that’s not Right Under His Nose. That is how the omniscient narrator sounds about the two romantic leads in Mansfield Park.
-They’re also ridiculously, boringly compatible and (to the narrator’s mind) obviously destined for each other. The whole drama about him pining after Maria Crawford and Fanny pining after him and then it all wraps up in a highly abstract, fourth-wall-breaking handful of paragraphs in the last chapter…it’s something of a bitter joke. The fact that Edmund is emotionally dependent on Fanny (note his reactions when he’s all peopled out at the end of the ball) while he’s obsessing over Mary is part of the joke. The fact that he thinks he molded all Fanny’s opinions and personality while the author drops hints that nature as well as nurture was involved…also part of the joke. The fact that they’re first cousins? That, too, I regret to say, is part of the joke.
Continue reading “Thoughts on Mansfield Park”Weird Wednesday: Explaining the Fan Casting for P&P
Let me just pause and say: I’m not covering Mr. Collins here, because I can’t think of any choices I like. (My only guiding principle would be: “as much unlike David Bamber as possible.”) I’m not covering the other four Bennet sisters because it seems like pretty much every version manages to come up with acceptable if not necessarily great versions of Jane, Lydia and whichever of Kitty and Mary are included. Ditto the Lucases, the Hursts, Anne De Bourgh and Georgiana Darcy. Where these characters are concerned, I’m open to anyone who could be a plausible relative (if relevant) to the characters I’ve mentally cast.
For accompanying pictures, and accompanying disclaimers of disinterest in making actor demographics perfectly match the book character demographics, see Monday’s post. Please note that I namecheck some pretty obscure actors from older versions below, feel free to search-fu their names.
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Explaining the Fan Casting for P&P”Midjourney Monday: Fan Casting for Pride and Prejudice
Today we have a bunch of contemporary actors in Regency dress, as generated by Midjourney and cleaned up by me. I will invite you to guess who I was casting in which Pride and Prejudice role. Yes, some of them are not very good likenesses, and no I am not going to reroll in Midjourney again. Yes, very few of them are in the age bracket now that the characters were in the story. No, I don’t really care. Yes, a couple of them have been in Pride and Prejudice before, and no, I am not casting them in the same roles.
Continue reading “Midjourney Monday: Fan Casting for Pride and Prejudice”Weird Wednesday: The Austenland Decoder Ring
About ten years late to the party, I watched the Keri Russell film Austenland (2013) about an American woman who goes to England to participate in a Jane Austen LARP at an English manor, only to discover that she bought the basic package, which is a lot less fun than the top end package which her two co-LARPers bought. I’d avoided the film for years due to bad reviews, and then on watching it decided I rather liked it. (This, too, is the story of Pride and Prejudice 1980).
I’m not sure if I can recommend it to other people. The slapsticky, PG-13 comedy at the surface is rather dull – lame gags about women talking/acting bawdy and men being either uncomfortable with it or encouraging – but the core romance track is sound and there are some interesting in-jokes and subtexts that the reviews seemed to overlook (or not talk about). I thought I would summarize them here. Warning: spoilers below, including for a core plot twist from late in the film…
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: The Austenland Decoder Ring”
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