Reviewing Jane: Nothing Ever Fatigues Me But Doing What I Do Not Like

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

Year: 2007

Director: Jeremy Lovering

Cast: Olivia Williams, Imogen Poots, Hugh Bonneville

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

It is no surprise that Jane Austen got the Shakespeare in Love treatment. Another British writer of popular romance works with an interesting historical life? Yeah, of course. There are only two things surprising about filmmakers cranking out a lightly fictionalized biopic of Austen: the first is that they waited almost a decade to make one, and the second is that they made two in the same goddamn year. The much more well-known Becoming Jane graced screens in 2007, shortly followed on British television by today's subject: Miss Austen Regrets.

Although, from the looks of this poster, maybe I made a mistake and I'm reviewing a 90's slasher movie instead.

Miss Austen Regrets, based on historical record, letters, and a lot of sweaty fantasizing, tells the story of the final months in the life of Jane Austen (Olivia Williams, who played Jane Fairfax in the BBC adaptation of Emma). Around the time that she is trying to get Emma published, she is visiting relatives, specifically her niece Fanny (Imogen Poots) who is deciding whether or not she should invite and accept the proposal of her suitor John Plumptre (Tom Hiddleston, with alarmingly curly hair). Watching this young woman experience love for the first time ignites reminiscences of her former suitors, broken engagements, and all the choices that led her to write and be the woman she is. Things are further complicated by the arrival of an old, now married flame Rev. Brook Bridges (Hugh Bonneville, AKA Paddington's dad).

And she never doesn't wear that bonnet that she has in that one drawing of her that everyone has seen.

Like all literary biopics, no matter how good, Miss Austen Regrets is a teensy bit dumb and doesn't give nearly enough credit to the author's powers of imagination. The characters in these movies always just write down exactly what happens to them and it magically turns into their well-known work (in this case she's directly inspired by the events of the movie to write Persuasion rather than Romeo & Juliet or Pride & Prejudice, so at least the filmmakers assume we're well-read this time). Also, I don't think Jane Austen just walked around saying random lines from her books in conversation as if she had just come up with them on the spot.

Now I don't have enough context for how well the film actually depicts Austen's life (though this watch has inspired me to crack open the giant compendium of her letters that has been collecting dust on my To Read shelf), but frankly that isn't a particularly interesting way to judge a movie regardless. However, that context might have allowed me to get more of a grip on the character study the filmmakers are attempting to play out here. 

Maybe what they're presenting here is entirely out of whatever historical record they could cobble together, but from my vantage point it seems incredibly messy. The script can't decide if Austen is a miserable spinster, a flirty sarcastic minx, a bitter drunk, or a playful feminist icon. And they're certainly not attempting to give her depth by showing she can be all of these things at once, because the tone keep erratically shifting around her (it also can't keep its eye on its secondary characters, shuttling Imogen Poots to the background too often for that storyline to really have the emotional meat on its bones it clearly desires). It's hard to get a bead on what this movie is trying to say about Austen, either psychologically or thematically, and once it ends it leaves you with a profound sense of "oh, that's it?"

Also the costumes are incredibly boring, I don't care if they're authentic. This is CINEMA, people!

Olivia Williams makes a game attempt at shoving all of these different characters into a single suitcase called Jane Austen. Her emotional scenes definitely sing, but they don't fit together in any sort of meaningful order or show any sort of actual progress to the character's arc. Her best moments are when she gets to just sit down with other characters and display her sparkling wit (entirely pilfered from any available Austenana). And at least there's a reliable stable of British acting personalities around to do the things that they do well and amuse eagle-eyed viewers (a special shout-out to Phyllida Law, who played Mrs. Bates in that other 1996 Emma, here playing Austen's mother).

And while Miss Austen Regrets never claimed to be mimicking the tone of one of Austen's novels, the endless references and homages to her work made me expect a film with a tone that was a little less, how you say... fucking depressing. It's a bitter, sad movie whose grueling grimness feels especially unearned by its failures as a character piece. It's certainly not a bad movie, even if it's an unfocused one, but I would certainly have enjoyed it for what it was if it didn't ultimately decide to be so punishing.

TL;DR: Miss Austen Regrets is an insubstantial character study but at least a fairly well-researched one.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 881

Other Films Based on Jane Austen in General

Becoming Jane (Jarrold, 2007)

Miss Austen Regrets (Lovering, 2007)

The Jane Austen Book Club (Swicord, 2007)

Austenland (Hess, 2013)

Clay Achin'

Year: 2015

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Guillermo del Toro is such a visionary that his name is spoken with hushed tones in optometry circles. His Spanish language films are characterized by a lush etherealism that starkly contrasts with the frequent brutality of the “real” world. The genre he creates in his films like the widely renowned Pan’s Labyrinth and the tremendously underrated The Devil’s Backbone is utterly distinct and can only be described as horror fantasy.

And then he made Pacific Rim. Now, I’m not saying that del Toro’s American films are bad, but they certainly lack that ineffable quality that defines his foreign works. However, this Halloween saw a near perfect marriage of the disparate halves of his career: the gothic ghost romance Crimson Peak combines the best of his Spanish aesthetic and the narrative paucity of his Hollywood flicks.

Generic ghost stories are real. This much I know.

In Crimson Peak, Edith “Not Peter” Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) is a young American writer. She’s penning a novel that’s not a ghost story, but a “story with ghosts,” a dangerous portent for the thrill-seeking teenyboppers in the audience. She falls madly in love with Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), a mysterious stranger who came to her father in search of funding for an invention of his, to be used to plumb the depths of the red clay mine beneath his English manor. 

After her father’s untimely death by murder, she marries Sharpe and is whisked off to live with him in England, along with his hawkish and brooding sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), much to the consternation of her suitor, Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam, again cruelly forced to adopt a stilted American accent despite the fact that three-quarters of the film tajes place in his native Britain).

The Sharpe manor, Allerdale Hall, is in a startling state of disrepair (much like the Sharpes’ finances). The entire property is sinking into the clay mine, and liquefied red clay bleeds from the walls as leaves and debris cascade continuously from the holes in the ceiling. Pretty much immediately, Edith begins seeing CGI ghosts who warn her of a terrible secret hidden within the house.

[SPOILERS] It doesn’t NOT have something to do with Tom Hiddleston’s bare ass.

If you tossed Jane Eyre, The Haunting, The Devil’s Backbone, Flowers in the Attic, and The Turn of the Screw into a blender, you’d come up with a story that is almost, but not quite, entirely like Crimson Peak. It’s fundamentally predictable, so much so that the dialogue could have been “lorem ipsum, etc…” and be just as effective. It’s just a heap of thinly veiled metaphors delivered in Masterpiece Theatre accents slathered liberally over a routine gothic mystery.

Crimson Peak is just a pile of gently steaming boilerplate. That is, if you’re watching it with your eyes closed. The narrative might be peaky odds and ends, but the storybook environment and pure stylistic enthusiasm blast through the picture like a mighty geyser. After less than a minute, you feel like you’re watching the film while strapped into one of those Clockwork Orange viewing devices, unable and unwilling to peel your eyes away from the screen for even a moment. Handfuls of popcorn are missing your mouth completely and about sixty percent of your fact is slick with misapplied Chapstick, but to look away for even a second would be tantamount to rank betrayal, like Eve biting into the apple.

Crimson Peak is much like 2013’s Stoker in that it takes a well-worn family drama and transforms it into a sumptuous visual feast. And Mia Wasikowska is there. It has its imperfections, like some CGI-laden ghosties that probably have beers after work with the pixelated monstrosity from Mama, wacky transitions that might have impressed at the Johnson Family Annual New Year’s Slideshow Barbecue 1998, and an obnoxious font that announces locations with the garish lettering of a local mini-mart, though thee are but the pettiest of complaints.

Except for that ghost thing. More on that later.

The audacious style of Allerdale Hall and its ensigns is like an architect enduring a bad comedown from his first acid trip. There is beauty and splendor in the manor’s decrepitude, pulling designs, colors, and shapes from a dark place far beyond the human imagination. The walls are slimy, shimmering visions of flowing red clay, a bloody brilliant element that gives the house sickly life and informs the color scheme of every set. Red never dominates a scene, but it punctuates every moment with vivid splashes of color. And the constantly fluttering stream of leaves and snow through the Hall’s blasted-out ceiling completes the property’s impression of constant, surreal, gorgeous motion.

Equally sumptuous is Crimson Peak’s sound design, which begs to be heard in theatrical surround sound. The sense of Allerdale Hall as a living, all-encompassing space owes a great deal to the efforts of its audio technicians, who create a richly textured portrayal of not only what’s in the house, but where it is at all times.

And let me tell you, if I come across this place in real life, I would not be included on that list of what’s inside. Woe to their local milkman.

Guillermo del Toro’s brutal realism also makes its way to Crimson Peak in some gruesome sequences that achieve the difficult ideal of hyperreal fantasy. There are no over-the-top head rippings or de-limbings at play here. Every gory moment is an intimate, personal horror that gets under your skin and flays you from the inside out.

It’s just pity the story containing all these stunning elements is so milquetoast. I wouldn’t say that what Crimson Peak needs is more ghostly action (del Toro has conclusively proven in Devil’s Backbone that he is capable of deftly handling a ghost story where the spooky supernatural presence is far fro villainous.), but there is a certain lack of luster to Edith’s visitations. This is frustrated even more by the fact that the phantasms could be lifted from the plot entirely without making the slightest mark on the film.

Plus, the ghosts themselves, while boasting stupefying designs, are rendered silly by too much FX processing. The buildup to any haunting (when actual physical objects are being manipulated) are far more intense than the cut-and-paste apparitions that follow. The ghosts are far from the only thing to be afraid of, so this isn’t a film-busting flaw, but it’s hard not to feel slightly disappointed by the ghosts’ lukewarm portrayal.

Boo Hoo Hoo…

Speaking of portrayals, Jessica Chastain swallows her role whole, swooping around the manor like a majestic heron. The rest of the cast is also suitable, though a wonky accent yet again unmoors Charlie Hunnam. Oh, when will producers stop being cruel to him?

At the end of the day, Crimson Peak is a film worth experiencing. Is it for teen Halloweeners looking to get their hearts thumped? Certainly not. Is it for haunted house fans looking for their next great classic? Unfortunately, no. but is fit for people who deeply, truly love the art of cinema? That answer would be an emphatic yes.

TL;DR: Crimson Peak is a gothic romance that values style over substance.

Rating: 8/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Don't go in expecting intense scares, but if you see it you absolutely must do so in the theater.
Word Count: 1245

The City Of Love

Year: 2011

Director: Woody Allen
Cast: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

Sergio and I have a sort of deal worked out. Whenever I force him to watch one of my idiosyncratic movies (most recently, the superbly deranged American Gothic) he gets to pick one of his. Call it cinematic karma. It's also a great way for me to catch up on films that I missed that I never might have seen otherwise. This Fourth of July's pick was Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.

Now I'll admit this film isn't catering to my tastes but Sergio, ironically being a better film student than Yours Truly despite studying Econ, does know how to pick 'em. Only the second Woody Allen film I've seen (See? I'm a terrible film student), Midnight in Paris does an excellent job of creating a mood of lush romanticism even if it isn't equally good at anything else it does.

It's hard not to make Paris look stunning. You could literally just point your camera at a trash can for 40 minutes.

Opening with a solid three minutes (About 3% of the total run time) of Parisian scenery, the film exposes its loyalties at the outset. Midnight in Paris is first and foremost a love letter to Paris, France, only reluctantly operating as a narrative out of a sense of duty, being a 90 minute feature film and all.

It tells the tale of one Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a successful Hollywood screenwriter who is visiting Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her bourgie parents. He falls in love with the city and wants to move to Paris while he works on his novel about a man who owns a nostalgia shop (a wafer-thin analogue for himself, a self-professed adorer of Paris in the 1920's).

Inez and her parents object, largely because they view Paris as a tourist destination where one can shop and lord their pseudo-intellectualism over one another, as embodied in the outrageously smarmy Paul (Michael Sheen), a friend who runs into them during their stay and acts as a sort of tour guide / permanent douche installation.

An unfulfilled Gil goes out walking one night and discovers an old fashioned car that comes by every night at midnight, transporting him to the city's heyday in the 1920's where he can cavort with such grand historical figures as F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston - a strange choice but he does a good job of it), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll -all glowering menace), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates - terrific, but hardly reaching), and a rhinocerous-obsessed Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody - who absolutely delivers in what hardly even amounts to a cameo).

I know it's authentic, but is that hair really necessary?

Every night, Gil returns to the Roaring Twenties as he grows increasingly detached from the shrewish Inez, who is such a one-note harpy that it's ridiculously difficult to believe that their relationship could have even sustained itself this long. Don't shoot the messenger, blame the screenwriter. He begins to fall in love with a girlfriend of Picasso's, Adriana (Marion Cotillard) whom he meets when delivering his book to Gertrude Stein to be proofread.

Thus begins a cross-dimensional love triangle with the singular theme that, no matter where or when you are, it's easy to become fixated on the past and romanticize bygone eras out of proportion of their actual merits. This is certainly a valid theme, especially when applied to this narrative structure, but the meandering plot supports no structure but the creation of mood.

Now, a solid mood is a great thing for a film to have, but without much more to back it up, Midnight in Paris won't be ending up on my DVD shelf anytime soon. It's a tremendous accomplishment, but one that doesn't resonate with me personally as much as it would with others. Myself, I prefer a film to provoke more precise responses in the audience rather than a general romantic blanket, as visually represented by the copious yellow filtering thrown over the entire project - a quick peek through my Instagram indicates that the cinematographer was most likely using "Kelvin."

This is the kind of in-depth cinematic insight that keeps you coming back for more.

A brief glimmer of conflict flashes across the screen at the one hour mark, but flits away as quickly as it appears. Because this film isn't about conflict. It's about love. Love for a person, love for a city, love for a bygone age. And in this respect it is tremendously successful.

It is my personal opinion that the screenplay is a tad self-indulgent and messy (Including an excerpt from Gil's book that is supposed to impress us - always a risky move for a screenwriter, trying to come up with something profound and literary. Because Woody Allen is Woody Allen he thinks he can do whatever he wants. It falls short. Turns out, writing books is hard.) and falls apart a little when you stop to think about why Gil's car takes him 90 years in the past, but Adriana's only takes her 30, or how Gil professes to come from the 2000th millenium.

But those are all cruel nitpicks of a film that, overall, isn't about any of those things. It's not about the mechanics of the time travel or the intricacies of the story. It just wants to present gorgeous Paris in all its splendor over as many eras as it can, and at that it is an unparalleled work in this decade.

TL;DR: Midnight in Paris is a solid mood piece and an endearing love letter to Paris.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 947

M Is For Music Of The Night

Today's Blogging From A to Z Challenge is another new release. You guys are so lucky I had enough money to actually review two new films this month! Maybe I should include a tip jar on the sidebar...

Year: 2014

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska

Run Time: 2 hours 3 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Horror in 2014 is certainly shaping up to be better than that bland, uneven slate of studio horror we were trapped with last year. I had to chew off my own leg just to make it through to Christmas. Luckily, Only Lovers Left Alive, the new film from the director of nothing you've ever heard of, Jim Jarmusch, is an intriguingly fresh take on the notoriously haphazard vampire genre.

It really changes your perspective on Tom Hiddleston. I mean... vampires. Or whatever.

The film follows Adam (Hiddleston), a mopey and reclusive rocker vampire in Detroit, and Eve (Tilda Swinton), his wife of many (many) years, who has taken up residence in Tangiers. You might expect this situation to be a result of marital strife, but you would be wrong. In fact, nearly all expectations one might typically have for a film like this turn out to be wrong.

There's no fighting wars with sunlight, crosses, and garlic. There's no evil tribe of vampires or mystical demon queen bent on world domination. There's hardly any conflict to speak of, actually. More Breathless than Dracula, the film depicts a few days in the life of a vampire couple, exploring the nature of a relationship that has weathered the tests of centuries.

Only Lovers Left Alive is also characterized by a quiet sense of humor that doesn't seek to announce itself. Bright and clever, with only one joke that is beaten into the ground too often to have much merit, the film is a curious genre-bending piece that never quite falls into a categorizable camp, which is much to its benefit.

The film simply exists, defying explanation. Much like Tilda Swinton's cheekbones.

The entire value of the thing relies intrinsically on the acting chops of its core couple and the Swinton-Hiddleston duo deliver like never before, turning in a pair of performances like nothing the world of vampires has ever seen before. Although Hiddleston displays some traces of Rice-ian vampire angst, there is never a second that these two aren't convincingly ancient and utterly in love with each other. 

Their effortless chemistry is something I would never have expected from these two actors but by the end of the first ten minutes, you can feel it in your bones and question why you ever doubted it.

Swinton steals the show with a marvelous performance as a woman who has rode out millennia, seeing the worst that humanity has to offer but still ceaselessly finding the joy in life. Her lusty appreciation for the world around her is what compels her to live and keeps Adam away from his darker tendencies.

At its heart, this isn't a story about vampires, but about two philosophies and worldviews duking it out on the battlefields of love. That sounds hokey as all get out, but the film is rather rich in thematic material on the nature of what it means to be alive and to be human. There's a reason Adam calls the un-vamped denizens of the city "zombies" and it's not entirely ironic.

Leave it to the undead to know more about life than we ever will.

The real strength of the film is in its world building, something which frequent followers of this blog will know I have a dangerously overwhelming passion for. But there's just something about investigating the nooks and crannies of an alternate universe that gets me all tingly inside.

This film is full of well-thought out explorations of what unending life would be like and how different personality types would handle it. Add in a dash of old souls needing to adapt to the changing times (and with the amount of contaminated blood on the rise thanks to our dumb human antics, it's a real necessity) and you get a deliciously rich cocktail of pure cinema.

Although occasionally the film bogs itself down in the mire of stuffy "art" filmmaking (it's these points that lost me) like the nauseating opening shot or some of the longer musical interludes, the favoring of intellectual meat over conflict or even literal meat is utterly unique in a film of this type.

All in all, it's perhaps more moody than I care for, but it's a terrific film that blows most of the crappy vamp films we've been dumping into theaters since the 90's out of the water.

TL;DR: Only Lovers Left Alive is a slow-moving, conflict less film that is a valuable exploration into human nature guided by a pair of terrific performances.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This Movie? I can't imagine a scenario in which I'd seek out to view this movie again, but I feel that I am a better horror fan for having watched it.

Word Count: 848

Gee, It's Good To Be Together Again

Year: 2014

Director: James Bobin

Cast: Rickey Gervais, Ty Burrell, Tina Fey

Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

A quick word about the Monsters University tie-in short that opens the film - it is hilarious. Presumably more so than the entire film that spawned it. But that's neither here nor there. The Muppets are back!

Ever since their smash comeback in 2011's The Muppets (to which I gave a rave review that appeared on my original blog which has unfortunately vanished into the ether), The Muppets have had clout in the 21st century like never before and it was only a matter of time before the sequel hit. And while it's certainly not quite the sparkling gemstone that made its predecessor an instant classic, it really is a tremendous followup.

And let's face it, it's physically impossible for a Muppets film to be actively bad.

Sure, it doesn't quite tie together under a coherent theme. Sure, many of the Muppets (both old and new, and especially Walter) are given short shrift in favor of a new character, Constantine, the evil Kermit lookalike with an accent straight from Tommy Wiseau's Twelve Step Program to Speaking American. Sure, some of the meta gags make inter-film continuity endlessly confusing.

But this is children's entertainment! It's got great songs, laugh a minute gags, and plenty of Muppet mayhem. Sometimes it's hard to be a Grumpy Gus in the face of such delightfully clever and effervescent family entertainment.

The story goes like this - to capitalize on their newfound success, Kermit and the Muppets book  Dominic "It's Pronounced Bajy" Badguy (Rickey Gervais) to manage their European comeback tour. Little do they know that Dominic works for the world's number one criminal, Constantine the Frog, who makes short work of framing Kermit for his crimes and sending him to the Siberian Gulag while he tours with the Muppets as a front for a series of heists leading up to the theft of London's Crown Jewels.

Also featuring Ty Burrell as an Interpol Officer about half a millimeter away from actually being Inspector Clouseau and Tina Fey as a Russian prison warden, Muppets Most Wanted has a lot of fun with its multinational setting, politely poking fun at things like European vacation days and funny names for German towns without resorting to crude stereotypes (coughcoughDespicableMe2cough).

Also Tina Fey gets to sing a song in a Russian accent and it is 100% flawless.

As always the Muppets aren't afraid to sacrifice wit just because they're for children. My inner film major was tickled by an out-of-nowhere reference to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and some of my favorite jokes veer dangerously close to existential horror, wringing peals of laughter from the incongruous presence of Kermit and pals in such situations. Trust me, it's hard to explain, but it totally works. 

Speaking of fun and incongruous, cameos include Tom Hiddleston, James McAvoy, and an anthropomorphic ARTPOP advertisement. The surprise celebrity appearances are always part of the fun of the Muppets films so I won't spoil anything more, but some of the best jokes come from them as they get to pop onscreen and play with Kermit and Co. for 20 seconds or so.

All in all, Muppets Most Wanted is an enchanting musical comedy that is enjoyable for every second of its run time. Even I, reigning champion of grousing about movie lengths, had no complaints about the nearly two hour run time because every moment maximizes its comedic potential. So maybe it's not The Muppets 2011. But it's Muppets Most Wanted and that's a fantastic thing to be.

TL;DR: Muppets Most Wanted is silly to the core and there's never a dull moment, although it's not quite up to snuff with the 2011 masterpiece.

Rating: 8/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Yes! It's March! What else is out? Treat yourself.

Word Count: 646

Reviews In This Series

The Muppet Movie (Frawley, 1979)

The Great Muppet Caper (Henson, 1981)

The Muppets Take Manhattan (Oz, 1984)

The Muppet Christmas Carol (Henson, 1992)

Muppet Treasure Island (Henson, 1996)

Muppets from Space (Hill, 1999)

The Muppets (Bobin, 2011)

Muppets Most Wanted (Bobin, 2014)