Reviewing Jane: I Come Here With No Expectations

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen.

Year: 2011

Director: Brian Brough

Cast: Ashley Williams, Marla Sokoloff, Nick Zano

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

It seems like all the most popular Jane Austen titles have their own fallow period. Emma received three film adaptations between July 1995 and November 1996 alone. And while Pride and Prejudice has been pumping out nonstop reimaginings since the success of the BBC miniseries, that title hit that same number of adaptations in just a five month span in 2018. Well, it seems like Sense and Sensibility's fertile patch came in 2011, when two adaptations hit shelves before the midpoint of the year. First came From Prada to Nada, a Latinx spin on the classic story, followed swiftly by today's subject: Scents and Sensibility, which while not specifically a Mormon adaptation did come to us thanks to Mormon money.

White people just couldn't bear letting it out of their hands for more than a season.

In Scents and Sensibility, socialite sisters Elinor (Ashley Williams) and Marianne Dashwood (Marla Sokoloff) are brought to their financial knees when their father is arrested for embezzling. Their mother instantly leaves the house to get a job with their aunt, taking their younger sister Margaret (Danielle C. Ryan) with them. In this adaptation, Margaret is a sickly child suffering from Movie Disease where she is perfectly energetic and capable of doing whatever she wants except she's a little pale and apparently at death's door unless she gets her Medicine, which is very expensive and only talked about when the screenwriter remembers it.

Marianne, an English major and amateur lotion-maker, gets a job as a copy clerk at a Business Firm, where she begins a flirtation with handsome Senior Executive of Business, Brandon (Nick Zano). Elinor finds her work experience at Dashwood Enterprises (or was it Dashwood Investments? Who could care, we never find out what they do) suddenly a stain to her name and the only job she can get is as a custodian at a spa run by the capricious and cruel Fran Farris (JJ Neward). However, her lawyer brother Edward (Brad Johnson) takes a liking to her. When customers at the spa get wind of Marianne's new lotion recipe, which make one woman's feet feel like they did "when I was 20 years old," they might just get a foothold back into making the money they need if Fran and her duplicitous employee Lucy (Jaclyn Hales) don't get in the way.

Also is love with the pair of handsome white man in the cards? Yes? What a shock!

One thing that helped this particular adaptation stand out from its contemporaries (I'm including the Hilary and Haylie Duff modernization Material Girls from five years before in this assessment) was that it (mostly) used the actual names from the novel for its characters, showing that it had a bit more interest in actually representing the material from the novel. Not that Austen's heroines were trying to break into the lotion business, but the world is littered with enough faithless adaptations that I'll take what I can get.

The plot gets away from itself by the end, and the relationship with Brandon really has no relation to any element of the novel (though we are gladly spared the huge age gap this time), but beyond that it does its best to actually dress the core of the novel in modern clothes, which I really appreciate. It doesn't succeed at much more than the bare minimum, but I've come to learn that expecting even the bare minimum from something like this is to seal your doom.

Scents and Sensibility is at least entirely watchable and enjoyable the entire way through, even if it doesn't push itself beyond that for a single millisecond. There are no laughs, no tears, no romantic swoons to be had, but it's mildly charming in its banal plainness. It's the kind of movie you put on when you need white noise to hide the sound of you and your partner furiously necking on the couch.

A use which the Mormon producers almost certainly did not intend.

The cast is game to provide exactly the amount of nothing that the film asks for. Ashley Williams is probably the standout, a tireless workhorse never being less than appealing and sweet during every second she's onscreen. She's an uncrackable Formica countertop of charm, and while her resolute positivity prevents the stakes from wrenching any sort of drama from the material, she capably tempers Brad Johnson's maniacally cheerful Edward.

Come to think of it, maybe the ultimate appeal of Scents and Sensibility is in fact how ruthlessly generic it is. If you're looking to be challenged exactly zero times by a motion picture, you've come to the right place. And its goofy approach to anything resembling a real world enterprise (business, medicine, patent law, lotion making) by taking pains to be as nonspecific as possible is quite endearing. I think I finally get why straight people have the impression that Mormons can be so charming. This film is toothless, jovial, and completely unwilling to leave you with a single unpleasant thought.

That's not the instinct that leads to great cinema, but Scents and Sensibility didn't have to be great cinema for me to enjoy it. It just had to be better than Material Girls and From Prada to Nada, which is a low bar indeed.

TL;DR: Scents and Sensibility is deeply generic, but not unpleasant.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 931
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)

Reviewing Jane: I Found Myself, By Insensible Degrees, Sincerely Fond Of Her

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen.

Year: 2000

Director: Rajiv Menon

Cast: Tabu, Mammootty, Aishwarya Rai

Run Time: 2 hours 28 minutes

Now I wouldn't exactly say I am the most qualified critic to be reviewing Bollywood cinema, even though I spent the better part of this year familiarizing myself with the form before reviewing Aisha (I did this for fun, not for Aisha, but it's a happy coincidence nonetheless). But I am DEFINITELY not the most qualified critic to be reviewing Kollywood, the Indian Tamil-language cinema out of Kodambakkam. Although this particular entry, a Tamil adaptation of Sense and Sensibility titled Kandukondain Kandukondain (I Have Found It), shares a lot of its DNA with the Bollywood films I have seen, there is a distinct dreamlike quality to the film that I will dive into in greater detail. I can't say for sure whether this is an aspect unique to Kandukondain Kandukondain or Tamil cinema in general, though I do hope I have further opportunity to educate myself on that.

I'm just saying, I will be approaching this review specifically as a Jane Austen adaptation rather than as a piece of Tamil cinema. I am completely ready to weather any criticism of me misunderstanding what it means to be the latter.

You should ALWAYS take any movie review with a grain of salt, but I'm just saying that in terms of personal experience you should perhaps trust my judgment on, say, 80's slashers, more than Indian musical romantic comedies, though both have given me great joy in my time.

The sensible Sowmya (Tabu) and the passionate Meenakshi (Aishwarya Rai, who also starred in the Bollywood-style Bride & Prejudice in 2004, so I guess she found herself a niche) are two sisters in a palatial Indian estate whose mother is constantly trying to marry off. Sowmya worries that the gossip about her being unlucky might turn out to be true, because her first fiance committed suicide after an affair in America, and her new lover Manohar (Ajith Kumar) has refused to get married until he finishes his first film, which is beset with problems. Meenakshi, on the other hand, is aware that wounded veteran Bala (Mammootty) is hopelessly in love with her, but she spurns the older man in favor of the dashing banker Srikanth (Abbas), though she is unaware that his constant poetry-quoting and sweet nothings are partially an attempt to distract her from the fact business is on the brink of ruin.

When their grandfather dies, leaving the estate to a capricious uncle and his wife, who kick out the family, they must start from scratch. Sowmya finds menial work at a software company despite her great computer skills, and Bala helps Meenakshi get a job at a music college. 

Because one of her great talents, aside from crying, is singing.

What's truly remarkable about Kandukondain Kandukondain is that, despite the requisite 2 and a half hour run time, the plot moves at a blistering clip. Especially when it comes to the heaving drama of Meenakshi's storyline (which tracks, because she's the resident Marianne), hardly a minute goes by where she's not stumbling into some new disastrous predicament or other. Some of this might have to do with the interesting choice to rearrange the order of events from the novel, not plunging the sisters into poverty until about halfway through rather than at the very beginning. We get to spend time with their romantic travails before their sink into ruin and watch how those dynamics shift afterward as well. 

Despite playing it fast and loose with the chronology, this is actually the modernization of the material that captures the flow of the novel best, actually realizing every major moment of the romantic arcs rather than just paying lip service to "rich sisters are poor now, whoops." Perhaps one other reason the plot appears to move so quickly is the fact that it needs to squeeze itself between the extended musical numbers. This is hardly unusual from the Bollywood movies that I've seen, but Kandukondain Kandukondain has an even more fixed devotion to unreality. Although the Bollywood musical numbers I've seen could hardly give a rat's ass about things like visual geography or narrative realism (to their credit, I might add), Kandukondain Kandukondain does them one better by having its numbers take place in what I would almost describe as a dream space, transporting its characters to new locations entirely, ones that we've never seen before and never will again, rather than having song and dance break out in the general setting in which the film takes place.

It's like a series of music videos keep breaking into the movie and running away with the characters. Some of these videos are Salvador Dalí nightmares (Meenakshi's first solo song sees her accompanied by backup dancers in a series of increasingly surreal costumes, including blue and black body paint, elephant heads, and big flat masks of the same turbaned man), some of them are gothic romance (including a dream ballet in a crumbling castle), some are classic Hollywood (one takes place on a giant film set of a boat, even though the movie Manohar is making is about a train) and some are... on train tracks in front of the Sphinx? They average out at about six minutes long apiece, and they pepper the film with a surreal quality that is compounded by how many opportunities there are to have musical numbers in a 150-minute film.

I don't think I disliked it at all. In fact, I might have loved it. But I certainly don't fully understand it. It's languorous and weird, and not given clarity by the film's tendency to transition between completely unrelated scenes introduced by characters we've never met with reckless abandon, but the music is generally pleasant and while the dancing is not particularly inspired, especially by the standards of what I have seen come out of Indian choreographers, it's certainly an inimitable experience.

Look, I've seen a loooot of movies. If you give me something I haven't seen before, that counts for a lot. Even if it's... whatever this is.

Even though the storytelling frequently leaves me flummoxed, the visual eye that brings the musical numbers together is clearly at play during the dialogue scenes as well. There's a beautiful, heart-rending sequence at the grandfather's funeral that fades to the workers cleaning his funeral petals off the floor in an empty ballroom, and the camera sometimes launches into wild positions to match the mood of the scene, capturing lonely anguish from an isolating bird's eye view or diving deep beneath the water when you least expect it.

Kandukondain Kandukondain also hits the mark by once again showing that Jane Austen's works, despite the tutting of certain pretentious folks who take her work altogether too seriously (this coming from a guy who's reviewed 26 movies based on her novels), are hilarious romantic comedies. The film embraces that spirit with moments like the wacky Hollywood satire on Manohar's film set, a romantic moment involving Sowmya being hit in the eye with a piece of paper, or a scene of mistaken identity that provides a cringe-inducing spot of mirth.

Altogether there is a lot to like, and perhaps even love, about Kandukondain Kandukondain. I certainly have my doubts about lifting it into the rafters as a minted classic Austen adaptation (once again, the age difference between the Colonel Brandon and Marianne characters doesn't translate too too far past the 1800's), but as a detour into an avenue of cinema I didn't even know existed until turning it on, it was certainly a delight.

TL;DR: Kandukondain Kandukondain is a spellbinding experience, despite its many eccentricities.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1297

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)

Reviewing Jane: I Am Only Kept Back By My Natural Awkwardness

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen.

Year: 2006

Director: Martha Coolidge

Cast: Hilary Duff, Haylie Duff, Anjelica Huston 

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

We have had an unusually high number of female directors in this movie marathon, even considering that being a Jane Austen adaptation lands you squarely in Hollywood's "chick flick" corner, where they sometimes, grudgingly, let women have jobs. Most of the genre's best entries have come from women, surprise surprise. And Material Girls, the 2006 modernization of Sense and Sensibility that seems to have kicked off a small glut of copycat adaptations in the late 2000's, didn't lack a pedigree. It comes from director Martha Coolidge, after all, of the original Valley Girl. 

But here's the thing. I don't really like the original Valley Girl, and stars Hilary and Haylie Duff are no Deborah Foreman and Nicolas Cage.

Material Girls is the story of sisters Tanzie (Hilary Duff) and Ava (Haylie Duff) Marchetta, two ditsy Paris Hilton analogues who are the faces of their late father's makeup line. When a recall scandal hits the company's newest product, hawkish cosmetics mogul Fabiella Du Mont (Anjelica Huston) seeks to buy the company out from under them. The girls are left with nothing, forced to live with their former maid Inez (Maria Conchita Alonso), and build themselves back up from the ground up. Just kidding, they do what rich people do and cause chaos while never really actually suffering, but they do have to ride the bus. Despicable!

Also there's some men in their lives. Pro bono lawyer Henry (Lukas Haas) and chemist Rick (Marcus Coloma) both help them along their journeys. I didn't see fit to mention him here, but also Brent Spiner is skulking around playing the oily businessman in charge of the company's interests.

But why did I even bother listing any other cast members? ANJELICA HUSTON is in the movie, people! This is not a drill!

Would you believe that Material Girls opens with Hilary and Haylie Duff embalming a cover of a Madonna song beneath a heavy layer of shiny mid-2000's pop lacquer? Guess which song!

The movie exists as a vehicle for the Duff sisters, not so much for their talents, but rather as an excuse to hold them up to the light to let them sparkle and distract tweens for 100 minutes. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's just that nobody else making the movie bothered to give the girls any sort of support system, including - let me check my notes - a screenplay.

Instead, we get a parade of gags that indulge in the basest instincts of mid-2000's film comedy. Suicide jokes, multiple queer characters who exist only to be mocked, and gags about nose jobs and eating disorders are just the tip of the iceberg here. 

Are you sold yet?

I think I've discovered the flaw of Jane Austen's work that has allowed for so many mediocre modernizations. Her most popular novels have become so iconic they can be boiled down to a simple log line that everyone knows, so nobody has to actually read them. That's how we get a million Pride and Prejudice clones that toss a vaguely handsome man named "Darcy" at a woman and have them not get along at first before falling in love. The world has accepted that this is what Pride and Prejudice is about, ignoring the nuances of the storyline and characters.

The same tragic fate has befallen Sense and Sensibility. "Sisters were rich and now they are poor" is an absolute brutalization of that sharp, shimmering satire, and not even all the movies can get that right. Let us not forget Sense and Sensibility and Snowmen, which is about sisters... and one of them doesn't get along with a guy at first before they fall in love. 

Sadly, Material Girls opts to fill everything around that paper thin log line with bloviating nonsense and references skimmed off the very surface of contemporary culture. Martha Coolidge might have directed herself an iconic teen movie once upon a time, but that time has passed and Clueless this ain't.

TL;DR: Material Girls is a shallow, unaffecting, unsurprisingly loose adaptation of an Austen classic.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 717

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)

Reviewing Jane: I Will Be Mistress Of Myself

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen.

Year: 1995

Director: Ang Lee

Cast: Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant

Run Time: 2 hours 16 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Emma Thompson is a force of nature, y'all. After over a decade of acting (and the occasional dabbling in TV writing) she undertook her first feature film screenplay, an adaptation of a literary giant. Although the Oscar-winning Sense and Sensibility was part of the banner year that brought Jane Austen into the rabid mainstream popularity that she still enjoys today (also in 1995, the culture was buffeted by BBC's Pride and Prejudice miniseries and Amy Heckerling's Clueless), this was still a daunting undertaking.

She didn't even break a sweat, assembling a cast of future A-list superstars to breathe life into what still stands strong as one of the best Austen adaptations to date. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Let's jump back to the early 1800's for a moment, shall we?

In Sense and Sensibility, rich sisters Elinor (Emma Thompson) and Marianne Dashwood (Kate Winslet, two years before Titanic would change her life forever) live with their parents and kid sister. Unfortunately, their father passes away before either of them marry, leaving them penniless (his entire estate went to their half-brother, whose avaricious wife talks him out of supporting them). They move to a small cottage out in the country (with three bedrooms and two servants, the sheer poverty is overwhelming), where they have a variety of romantic adventures in which Elinor leads with her logic and Marianne dashes forward full force with her heart.

The men in their lives are awkward but charming brother-in-law (this is not the creepiest intra-family romance in the Austen universe, believe me) Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant), the dashing but licentious John Willoughby (Greg Wise), and the older but devoted Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), who Marianne turns her nose up at without a second thought.

I mean, wouldn't you ignore Alan Rickman for the raw sensual power of that hat?

As we learned from this year's Oscars, where Parasite won Best Picture, sometimes the Academy gets it right. And they certainly did when they awarded Emma Thompson for Best Adapted Screenplay. The whole point of this project is weighing the way different people adapt Austen's work, and as Thompson's mighty act of rendering the original 1811 novel as a feature film is beyond compare. 

To start off, she does what I have been begging these screen adaptations to do from the very beginning, retaining the acidic sarcasm of Austen's original texts. The Austen novels have always been funny in a hyper-modern snarky way; you just have to crack open the period dialogue to get to that candy center. And this is an extraordinarily funny film, especially given the standards of your average Hollywood period piece costume drama. MVP goes to Imelda Staunton as a chatty, ditzy woman with a husband who visibly despises spending time with her, but the entire cast is expert at delivering Thompson's wickedly sharp dialogue, which sometimes directly draws out the best passages from the novel, and largely synthesizes the source text's themes and moods into new delicious combinations.

The reason the humor works especially well is because Thompson has done the legwork of making the period and the characters within it come to life, humanizing conflicts and interactions that might normally seem distant and outdated to a modern audience member. One trick I especially appreciate her using is the way she overlaps dialogue. Even in scenes when our main characters aren't speaking, there is boisterous conversation floating in through windows or from other rooms, bringing the world to messy, vibrant life instead of embalming it in stuffy, fussy costumes and sets that seem hermetically sealed from the real world.

Also it helps that they cast at least one movie star-handsome romantic lead, something the previous BBC adaptations perpetually failed to do.

All you need to stand out among the crowd of these Austen adaptations is a sharp script and actors who know how to deliver the material, which Sense and Sensibility confidently provides (Thompson, especially when she gets her big Oscar-worthy monologue, is reliably terrific on top of everything else). Unfortunately, there is something that doesn't quite connect emotionally, at least for this reviewer.

It doesn't help that Sense and Sensibility is mostly about the relationship between two sisters, and their interactions as they long for men from afar. Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman are necessarily forced offscreen for longer than one might like if we're meant to feel heaving romantic paroxysms. And while both Thompson and Winslet are delivering the material well, it's challenging to buy their sisterly relationship when the former is visibly 16 years older than the latter. While this casting choice at least visually highlights the way that Elinor is more capable and mature than her younger sister, it leaves a gaping crack in the foundation of the relationship that is meant to propel the emotional core of the movie. 

And frankly, of Ang Lee's mainstream, well-regarded works, this is the entry in which I find the least to be impressed with. While Thompson does all the legwork in bringing the characters to life, I find that Lee and his creative vision gets lost in the period detail rather than bringing the camera to life for more than a couple sweeping vistas.

But all that said, Sense and Sensibility is a terrific accomplishment that stands head and shoulders above most of the material I've covered in this marathon, especially among the adaptations that are actually set in the period. It was rightfully nominated for Best Picture, and while it should have lost to Babe, it shouldn't have lost to Braveheart, and we would all do well to remember that.

TL;DR: Sense and Sensibility is an adaptation that does great wonders in bringing Austen's humor and characters to life, even if it doesn't do the same with her passion.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1005

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)

Reviewing Jane: It Was A Foolish Precipitation Last Christmas

In which we review every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen: Christmas edition!

Year: 2019

Director: David Winning

Cast: Erin Krakow, Luke Macfarlane, Kimberley Sustad 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

Merry Christmas, everyone! Its continues to be that very special time of year when Hallmark's endless shitty Jane Austen adaptations collide with Hallmark's even more endless shitty Christmas movies! And to cap off this special trilogy we have the pleasure of visiting a film directed by the man who previously brought us untold Austenian pleasures with Hallmark's dog show romance Unleashing Mr. Darcy. It's Sense, Sensibility, and Snowmen, the only one of the five Hallmark Austen movies not to be based on Pride and Prejudice! What a treat!

It's still brought to us by infinite white people, however.

OK, so it may not be based on Pride and Prejudice, but it's not based on any Sense and Sensibility I'VE ever read. Yes, we have the sisters Ella (Erin Krakow) and Marianne Dashwood (Kimberley Sustad) and their love interests Edward (Luke Macfarlane) and Brandon (Jason McKinnon). But in this one Ella is the flighty nymph ruled by her emotions, and Marianne is the one ruled by logic and sense, in an unmotivated switch that causes the novel's plot to crumble from underneath the film like the stone floor in an Indiana Jones adventure. Also Edward is not Ella's cousin (not complaining), but rather the cousin of Brandon, who is aged down by a good 15 years (maybe a little complaining on this one, because I'd love Hallmark to tackle a nontraditional couple and having gay people is obviously out of the question).

Also the story is now about party planning because of f**king course it is. Edward has taken over as CEO of his father's toy company, which is inexplicably called Ferris Wheel. He is being visited by French suppliers whose business will put the company in the black, but he needs to win them over with heart rather than statistics and numbers because apparently the French are terrible at business. Unfortunately, he is a cold corporate automaton, so he hires Ella (who is trying to prove to Marianne that she is capable of committing to their party planning business rather than run off to backpack across Europe or whatever for the millionth time) to plan a huge Christmas soiree for the company despite the fact that they've already had an awkward encounter where she mercilessly mocked him for having no Christmas spirit.

Will his business acumen allow her to grow into the sister Marianne needs to be? Will her free spirit allow him to loosen up, enjoy the holiday, and land the account? Will they fall in love along the way? Of course! This is a Hallmark movie!

And this is the moment where we must tragically recognize that this movie IS in fact also just a Pride and Prejudice riff, because the only thing these movies remember about that novel is that the couple doesn't get along at first, which is palpably NOT the case in Sense and Sensibility. And this movie doesn't even remember to have the sisters start off rich and then lose all their assets which is the one nugget that modern adaptations absolutely must remember to retain. P&P is the couple at odds, S&S is the poor sisters. You don't even need to read the books to get that! But Hallmark has clearly read neither, so perhaps we're better off not getting too upset here and avoiding having this caption become longer than the review.

Honestly, after watching three of these movies in a row, it's hard to even muster the strength to identify any unique attributes it has. It's simultaneously exactly like all the other Hallmark movies, and yet comes off more deeply generic and tedious than any of them. The brief thrill of recognizing Austenian names coming from the mouths of characters gives way instantly to a cookie cutter Christmas movie. And no, I don't mean the 2014 Hallmark movie literally called A Cookie Cutter Christmas that also stars Erin Krakow. They really just keep lobbing me these softballs, it's almost embarrassing.

Literally the one thing that's exciting in any way to someone who has seen more than their fair share of these (a number I have long since surpassed) is the fact that the narrative takes place entirely within The City. Specifically Chicago, as played by Vancouver. Rather than The City representing a skyscrapered purgatory of corporate greed and soulless automatons that must be overcome by the heart and humanity of Small Town Living, it's just the setting for the movie. 

How novel!

And I guess they try to get playful with the sheer lack of humanity that the character of Edward has (something that is constantly undercut by the goofy charisma of Luke Macfarlane, who is charming but wildly miscast). When he arrives at one of the many Christmas carnivals that are around every corner in the Hallmark Cinematic Universe, he can't understand why they're sipping hot chocolate and waiting for the Christmas Tree Lighting and asks "so, what's the objective?" He's not a fish out of water, he's a fish launched into the reaches of deep space. 

He understands absolutely nothing about human social behavior, and it's a shame because he doesn't seem to understand anything about running a business either, which is the one thing he's supposedly focused his life on, at the expense of learning literally anything about the world. Hallmark movies don't typically have a strong grasp on the details of office culture other than Business Meeting, Report On My Desk By Monday, Spreadsheet, etc. But the wild gaps in logic here (Ella's warm spirit inspires Edward to use children for the first time in the focus groups of his toy company) are gaping chasms that the characters can't possibly climb their way out of. Edward's a lost cause, obviously (he also announces the contract with the French company at the holiday party before they even have anything in writing), but even Ella is kind of a mess. Her plans for expanding the company include, and I quote, "more staff, expanded marketing, and loans." I'm no Business Boy myself, but you might think that the best business plans would avoid one having to owe money to people.

But beyond picking apart their business acumen, the characters have almost nothing to offer in terms of entertainment. Marianne exists only to provide easily clearable conflict hurdles, rather than participate in the romance other than a background flirtation with Brandon. And speaking of Brandon, he's stripped of absolutely every element of his character on the page. He's not even been given the gift of a different character from the novel's personality like Ella, so he phases through the movie like a ghost, making absolutely no mark.

It's not unpleasant to watch at any time, but Sense, Sensibility, and Snowmen is completely comatose. If you're home with the flu and don't have the capacity to focus while slipping in and out of a fever haze, then this might be the perfect fit for your needs, but beyond that I'd recommend literally any other Hallmark Austen movie, and that's not something I say lightly, because most of them are quite dreadful.

...Merry Christmas!

TL;DR: Sense, Sensibility, & Snowmen is as bland as Hallmark gets, throwing a hideously bad Austen adaptation on top of it.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1241
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, & Snowmen (Winning, 2019)

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)