Pride and Prejudice (the movie version)

I saw the movie version of Pride and Prejudice a couple weeks ago, so this entry is a bit late. I saw this with a friend of mine, as this movie was not on the list of flicks I'd bother seeing on my own.

I read Pride and Prejudice several years ago as part of a Victorian English fiction class, and I found the novel to be well outside my paradigm. In fact, I am not a fan of Austen's writing in general, in large part because she focuses on things I detest, such as etiquette, manners, and good breeding. This book was, naturally, full of that garbage.

OK, then, so why was I open-minded about the movie? Mainly, I figured (correctly, as it turns out) that such stuff would be vastly diluted in the movie version. Stuff like is much harder to do on the screen, because the pages and pages of that stuff just gets whittled down naturally. Also, if I am going to see a chick flick (or something that has a good chance of being one), it might as well be based on a book (even if I don't think too highly of the book). I could also add 'and it might as well have Keira Knightley in it', but I agreed to see the film before I knew that.

As it turns out, the film was very good. There were a lot of humorous moments in the film version, so even if the book annoys you, definitely give the film a chance. (If you liked the book, then you should definitely see the film version because it manages to be a pretty faithful adaption without the heavihandedness that bothered me about the book.) Knightley's having an actual accent helps here, although the random giggling of her and her on-screen sisters---there was even one time that they looked at some random place off-screen and giggled at something unseen; I had absolutely no clue what was so funny to the characters---and it was interesting seeing her in this film given that the last role I saw her play was bounty-hunter Domino Harvey. That movie and this movie are practically polar opposites in style, although both characters do possess a sharp tongue (just with extremely different external trappings) and some related internal similarities.

For films based on Victorian fiction, the one that was superlative was Vanity Fair, which (1) was based on an awesome book with the cynical attitude I so love and (2) was cast almost perfectly.

(I also plan on writing an entry on Shopgirl soon, which I found to be decent but which didn't come close to meeting my expectations. More on that later.)