Reviewing Jane: It Is Not Everyone Who Has Your Passion For Dead Leaves

In which we review every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen, as I read through her extended bibliography for the first time.

Year: 2011

Director: Angel Gracia

Cast: Camilla Belle, Alexa Vega, Nicholas D'Agosto

Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Lionsgate's Pantelion Films was created in 2010 with the mission to create and distribute Latino films to wider audiences in the U.S., a noble goal if there ever was one. Over the years, they have brought us films both good and bad, like this year's Manolo Caro remake Perfectos Desconocidos, last year's Overboard, Ken Marino's How to be a Latin Lover, the biopic Cantinflas, the animated film La leyenda de la Llorona (coming soon), and basically everything you'll see on the Spanish language shelf in Walmart. 

Their arrival on the scene was heralded by From Prada to Nada, an update of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility set in modern East L.A. (there's nothing a budding production company loves more than a popular property in the public domain). It's both good and bad, so in terms of a debut it couldn't have been more appropriate. 

Also the opening is scored to Katy Perry's "California Gurls" to remind everybody just how 2010 it was.

The sisters going from riches to rags in this film are Nora (Camilla Belle) and Mary Dominguez (Alexa Vega). After their father passes away and their mansion is passed into the hands of their long-lost brother and his venal wife, they must move to a house in East L.A. Nora, the more capable of the two, is a law student and gets an entry-level job in the office run by their sister-in-law's brother (it's just as complicated to explain in the original Jane Austen, don't worry) Edward Ferris (Nicholas D'Agosto).

And while Mary chases the hot T.A. at her university, she is initially fearful of their thuggish neighbor Bruno (Wilmer Valderrama) but learns that he has a heart of gold. Can the buttoned-down Nora learn to embrace her feelings and vapid superficial Mary learn to approach the world with a little more good sense, both finding love in the process? Yeah, probably.

Also, when did Wilmer Valderrama get hot and why did nobody tell me?

OK, let's start with the good, shall we? As an update of the Austen material, From Prada to Nada does quite a fine job. Like Clueless and Bride & Prejudice, this movie finds a way to keep pretty much the exact same characters and plot structures, but completely translate them into a new culture and apply modern context that revitalizes the concerns and dramas of the text that might seem trivial or outdated in this century.

Every Jane Austen novel is about class either explicitly or implicitly, but Sense and Sensibility is especially ripe for reinterpretation around that theme. For one thing, there's the fish-out-of-water aspect, which modern comedy-goers still love. But by translating the Dashwoods' fall from grace into a modern Latino context, it gets to grapple with the divide between whites and Latinos, but also between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans (Mary, raised completely American, doesn't speak Spanish at all), also exploring how minorities in this country are too often forced to the poverty level by the structures in place.

There's a beautiful scene where Nora helps organize a class action lawsuit against an employer who is cheating their workers, where the Latino staff of many major firms come together, showing how much reach and power they have even though the higher-ups ignore the menial laborers they see as beneath them. This film is certainly no racial manifesto, but it's taking a hot-button American cultural issue and putting it front and center, showing us how little the class structures have really changed between Austen's time and now, they've just moved into a different area.

Yes, stay cheerful girls! The not-so-nice things I have to say are about to come tumbling out.

So... this is definitely a first-time film, both for the production company and the director, and it shows. There is a lot of shoddy work here, even in the script. As I mentioned, the central nugget of the plot is terrific, and I can't really fault the comedy which is generic but fine. But it loses itself a little too much in imitating Austen, with Nora's final romantic resolution making absolutely no sense in a modern context and a weird devotion to representing their dead father as a topiary bush for reasons I will always fail to understand.

There are bad filmmaking decisions here literally from the title card on down (there's a failed attempt at comedy in the drop of the title card, which hits right after their father's death and thuds against the sincerity and gravity of that moment). The lighting is flat (just like the acting), but in certain scenes especially at night you can't see anything, and the colors all bleed into a dreary wash of grey. And the physical comedy is terrible. There is a moment where Mary is supposed to fall out of bed, but set design made the bed too big and she has to roll a couple feet "in her sleep" in order to properly fall out. It's just so effortful, ditto Nora's big drunk scene.

And don't even get me started on the jaw-dropping number of needle drops we have of the classic song "Cielito Lindo." It's played in the intro, the closing, in between scenes, recontextualized as score, translated into a minor key, and just about everything one could possibly do to disguise the fact that they blew all their soundtrack budget on that one Katy Perry song.

So no, it doesn't land in the pantheon with the films I compared it to earlier. It wasn't an insufferable travesty like some films I could mention, but it doesn't do more than just exist in two dimensions for one hundred vaguely pleasant minutes.

TL;DR: From Prada to Nada is an interestingly faithful update of the material, but it's just not a very strong comedy.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1013
Other Films Based on Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility (Lee, 1995)
Kandukondain Kandukondain (Menon, 2000)
Material Girls (Coolidge, 2006)
From Prada to Nada (Gracia, 2011)
Scents and Sensibility (Brough, 2011)
Sense, Sensibility, and Snowmen (Winning, 2019)

They Don't Move In Herds

Year: 1997

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn

Run Time: 2 hours 9 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG -13

In between the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993 and The Lost World: Jurassic Park in 1997, two very important things happened: 1) Jurassic Park became the highest grossing film worldwide, and 2) Schindler’s List. Both of these explain, in turn, exactly why The Lost World exists and why it’s not so great.

Much like Scream 3, which I also happened to review recently, The Lost World is a sequel helmed by an auteur that had, quite frankly, checked out. Spielberg had already mentally moved on to his, arty, Important phase and was only directing the film out of a beleaguered sense of commitment to the fact that – if the franchise had to be screwed up, it might as well be by him.

It’s the popcorn movie version of senioritis.

The Lost World is helmed by returning screw-up Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), the rock star mathematician – an oxymoron which could only exist in a Crichton novel. In a scene that’s clunkily written and contradictorily sequelly in the most threadbare, irritating way possible, he learns from the defamed billionaire John Hammond (a palpably bored Richard Attenborough) that not only is there another island of dinosaurs (on which the monstrous creatures have roamed free for four years, only recently revealing themselves by attacking a young Camilla Belle in a desperate attempt to prevent her from remaking When a Stranger Calls), but his girlfriend Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) is already there, part of a crack team that Hammond has put together to study these creatures in the wild.

When Malcolm joins the team along with Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn) and Dead Guy (Dino Meat), he only does so to rescue Sarah and get the hell out of there. Unbeknownst to him, his daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester) has snuck along for the ride because she feels neglected. The lesson here is the becoming an Important Filmmaker does not make the daddy issues go away.

Once on the island, Ian and the team discover that Hammond’s company InGen, which has been taken over by his nephew Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), is leading a safari team to capture the animals and take them to the mainland and create a zoo, because that idea worked so well the first time. So it’s Good Science vs. Bad Capitalism until Big Scary Monsters get pissed and start eating everything that moves, leading the groups to band together in an attempt to escape the island intact.

Also, Sarah is studying the parenting habits of T-Rexes because dinosaurs can have daddy issues too.

The Lost World is to Jurassic Park as a paper cut is to an axe wound. It’s much shallower, less visually interesting, and you can make a big deal about it if you feel like it, but it’s just not the same. It’s an utterly flat film. Where the original comes alive and crackles with tension at nearly every second past the hour mark, The Lost World squelches along, reading a newspaper, pausing only at intervals to look up and remember that it’s supposed to be doing something and ramp up the tension once more.

The film is wracked with a profound sense of weariness, going through the motions without ever challenging itself to be something more than a routine popcorn pic, save for two sequences. One of these sequences I have the profound and annoying pleasure of being able to name drop: My father was the film’s liaison from Fleetwood, the company which provided the mobile home that hangs off the cliff in the only truly memorable scene. So you’re welcome. Without him the film would have nothing to recommend itself save a raptor attack so short it could buy ad time on the Super Bowl without breaking the bank.

Industry jokes always kill in these reviews, you’re welcome.

Of course, John Williams has the audacity to score all of this – even the pulse-pounding, genuinely thrilling RV sequence – with some hideously limp, sanctimoniously light bongo music. It is perhaps the single worst tune the man has ever composed, and I’m counting any particularly on-key flatulence. What the film hasn’t already torn to shreds in terms of tension, characters (Ian Malcolm’s behavioral traits are put in a blender and almost completely rearranged for this film), and logic (Did I not mention that they bring a T-Rex to San Diego? Well, they bring a T-Rex to San Diego), are blasted into smithereens by this woeful, dreadful score and flushed straight down the U-bend.

With that out of my system, it must be said that, for all my complaining, this film is only truly bad by the high standards set by Jurassic Park. Except for that John Williams score. Screw that John Williams score and the whimsical island mule it rode in on. It’s a disappointment that The Lost World is nothing more than a popcorn movie, but it’s reasonably diverting and at the very least, it’s not as woefully idiotic as Jurassic World.

Again the film is well shot (this time by long-time Spielberg compatriot/best friend bracelet-sharer Janusz Kaminski), with well placed shafts of lights delicately playing amidst the dusky forest. Again the dinosaurs are well realized, though none have the sheer weight and terror provided by pre-Schindler Spielberg’s keen direction. Only the effects on the raptors are in any way improved from Stan Winston’s master class in animatronics.

And finally we get some goddamn stegosauruses!

The thing about The Lost World is that it’s outrageously uneven, which is why this lumpy review is jerking from place to place like a scooter on a gravel driveway. There’s a dollop of cheery humor here, a dash of undercooked gore there… It’s like Spielberg got out the Jurassic Park mix packets and was busy whisking the ingredients together in the bowl when he noticed the he’d accidentally thrown away the box with the instructions on it.

There’s some jabs at a theme in the beginning (Malcolm is only a good boyfriend/father when he can make dramatic gestures, not in the everyday things) that get completely lost by the finale (a T-Rex visits a swimming pool!), the acting is largely decent but totally forgettable (Moore hasn’t quite yet settled into her talents, and Chester is at least more palatable than the Murphy siblings), and the action is shallow but present.

The most I can say about The Lost World is that it’s there, and I don’t begrudge it of that. It’s an absolutely workable film and sometimes that’s all a film is. It’s not awful. It’s not great. It’s not Spielberg, that’s for darn sure. And that’s why it’s so painful to watch, despite its blandly pleasant qualities. The loss of what could have been is so plainly, palpably there, throbbing behind the screen.

Oh well, at least they never made any more of these.

Ah. Damn.

TL;DR: The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a disappointment after the high standards set by the first film.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1185

Reviews In This Series
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997)
Jurassic Park III (Johnston, 2001)
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Bayona, 2018)