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)

All We Are Is Dust In The Wind

Year: 2011
Director: Steven Quale
Cast: Nicholas D'Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Sibling bonding: complete.

Because Lauren is awesome and lets me torment her, we got to watch the (current) final entry in the Final Destination series last night. After last time, virtually anything would have been a welcome presence on our TV screens, but luckily enough this film was solid as a rock. Specifically, a hurtling concrete slab.

It starts simple enough. A group of randy young workers hop on a bus to an office retreat. They throw around their share of "even if it kills me"s and 180 references until Sam (D'Agosto) has a terrible premonition of the bridge they're on collapsing into the river, taking most of them with it. And the film already throws a new wrench into the works. This premonition is the most involved of the entire series. Clocking in at about five minutes, a lot of time is spent on the victims and their attempts to escape. Not to mention the lovely Molly (Bell) actually survives the premonition.

That cone is symbolic of something, I'm sure.

Sam wakes up, screams for everybody to get off the bus, and eight of them do. The inevitable investigation begins. I mean, wouldn't you check out the kid who screamed the bridge was going to collapse thirty seconds before 80 people plunged to their demise?

That's just called having a brain stem.

Anyway, it turns out it was just the wind (It's never just the wind) and the charges are dropped. Same old, same old. This exact scenario happened in the original film. But. The detective is still suspicious and decides to do some snooping around.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, this is the first Final Destination film to have a legitimate B-plot, and that is something worth celebrating.

I think I'll spring for some of that laser eye surgery, myself.

Anyway, there's 8 survivors. Sam and his ex-(ish)girlfriend Molly, Peter (Fisher) and his girlfriend Candice (Ellen Wroe), Nathan (Arlen Escarpeta) the young factory foreman, and Olivia (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood) who thinks this is an appropriate outfit to wear to work...

Also there's the lone adult, Dennis (David Koechner, who plays Todd Packer on The Office - the company in FD5 is a paper company. This is weird.) and Isaac (P. J. Byrne), who is the title character of my upcoming children's book The Douchiest Douche.

Do I need to say they all begin to die in mysterious Rube Goldbergian ways, usually aided and abetted by water leaks, loose screws, and their lucky charms? No.

Author's Note: The characters that are killed because of their lucky charms are my favorite. These movies have such a dark theme: "Your God has no power here."

Anyway, the gore isn't super convincing (partially because this movie was filmed in 3D and my DVD was not rendered that way), but it's a big step up from The Final Destination and it's nice and splattery. Likewise, this is the one film that doesn't need the gore as a crutch. I was practically almost as interested in the goings on outside of the death scenes as I was in the gore shots.

This film, with its frequent twists on a scenario that has not been strayed from even a smidge for four whole movies, its stressful and even more complex pre-kill sequences, a fight scene (and a good one at that), and Tony Todd turning in his fourth hammy performance as the omniscient coronor, Vincent Pricing it to high heaven, comes very close to being an actual good film outside of the splatter genre. No wonder this is the only Final Destination film to get a fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes (Although it's by the skin of its teeth - if they dropped one percent lower, they'd be toast).

There's even a structural joke! That's right! This film plays with the idea of intrinsically being a movie. Isaac goes to a spa to get acupuncture (It ends well! Just kidding!). He can't understand his Chinese massage therapist and asks if she comes with subtitles. Next time she speaks, subtitles appear on the bottom of the screen. It might seem stupid and obvious, but that is (no joke) Arrested Development level humor, and this movie isn't even trying to be a comedy. I squirmed with nerdy pleasure.

This is a film that has absolutely no right to be anything more than another milquetoast clone of the original, but it approaches its core concept with deft skill that is leaps and bounds beyond any of its predecessors which, despite their high concept and hearty fanbase, are pretty much just run of the mill slashers.

If anyone could make this film good, the Candyman can.

TL;DR: Final Destination 5 is way better than it has any right to be. The first actually good movie in the franchise.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This DVD? Why do I even have this section anymore? I liked this movie. Borrow it from me.

Word Count: 850

Reviews In This Series

The Final Destination (Ellis, 2009)

Final Destination 5 (Quale, 2011)