Becoming Jane - A First Look Demanded a Second and More Will Come
Becoming Jane - A First Look Demanded a Second and More Will Come
As an advocate for all things Jane Austen, why did it take me so long to watch the movie Becoming Jane? I missed the enjoyment of its wondrous story for so long. As I do with many movies that I particularly like, I watched it again the next day. And I knew that I was going to watch it again and again just as I have watched the other movies adapted from Jane Austen's novels over and over again. Becoming Jane is also an adaptation from a book, one I never did read.
I reveled in detecting the weaving together of the dialogue and situations of the movie with her novels, specifically Pride and Prejudice. The scenes were magnificent, the chemistry between Jane and Tom Lefroy palpable as it developed, many of the characters in what is thought to have been in her real life the impetus for those in her novels.
There are excellent comprehensive reviews of this movie, and if anyone is interested, I suggest that these are good ones:
Austen Flowers (Roger Ebert) LINK -> https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/becoming-jane-2007
Becoming Jane: Sorting Fact from Fiction (Jane Austen Society of North America) LINK -> https://jasna.org/austen/screen/other/becoming-jane-sorting-fact-from-fiction/
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Not many will have an interest in this movie, it not being about current politics or conflicts between nations, but is more involved in depicting characterizations, relationships between individuals, blossoming love and disappointment - the gamut of emotions and intentions of those rich or poor. It is a cornucopia of visual beauty and plethora of scenery and activities of its time period.
The one thing that I think would have been more realistic is that Jane's sister Cassandra (Anna Maxwell Martin) looks a lot more like the one actual portrait of Jane Austen than Jane in the movie (Anne Hathaway), but that might not have been best for the popularity of the movie.
The miniseries adaptation of the P. D. James "sequel" to P&P, "Death Comes to Pemberley", starred Maxwell Martin as Elizabeth Bennet, and from what I understand, that was a main source of criticism of the series. Maxwell Martin is a good actress, and I've liked her in everything I've watched her in, but she's not conventionally pretty, and I think we often want our female leads to be pretty.
An important moment in the film - a dance at a ball, showing Jane, Tom, and the very wooden Mr. Wisley.
I haven't seen this film, but we often see other Jane Austen films on the ABC and SBS, which I enjoy. I also enjoy many of the films from the Charles Dickens novels. ( I'm a bit of a history nerd !!! )
If you have watched Pride and Prejudice you will really appreciate Becoming Jane. The Dickens movies I can at least remember watching are A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol (the Alastair Sim one of course, but others as well), Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations.
Not my kind of movie, but if I come across I'll give it try. My wife and I constantly clash - If it doesn't have explosions, a car chase and/or at least one gun fight I'm not sure I normally want to watch it. LOL!
Not only do I enjoy movies made out of great literature, such as Becoming Jane, but I also enjoy watching the same kind of movies you do, such as the Jason Bourne series. I just watched Star Trek Generations. I don't know if the editor was on LSD, but it was so chopped up and repeating scenes over and over again, and starting as a sea-faring tale, or the TV channel that showed it played a joke on viewers. I think you're able to tell me whether that movie runs normally or as a crazy jigsaw puzzle.
Like many movies these days, writers, directors, studios want to throw the kitchen sink at a movie. They put too much in there. Sometimes it works, but most of the time it's just too much. Generations wasn't as bad as some movies, but it's not great.
And yet another article on a literary or cultural topic gets shoved off the Front (Home) Page within a day by much more "magnetic" articles about military and political conflict. F*ck this, I'm going to watch some movies.