Pride and Prejudice (2005)

R-
I mostly enjoyed this. I wouldn't call it essential viewing, but it's a reasonably agreeable way to pass the time. "What's this?" you ask. "Don't you utterly despise Jane Austen?" I offer three reasons that I enjoyed the movie:

1. It is funny (intentionally). No, seriously, it is. And not just incidentally funny, but I might go so far as to say there's more of this than of the heavy breathing stuff, which is nice.

2. It is funny (unintentionally). It is rife with (presumably accidental) wildly inappropriate citations of other movies. In order: (1) the idyllic scenes of "rural life" are straight out of Hobbitton (even the mud is clean), (2) there is a scene on the cliffs somewhere that I think is the same landscape that was used in one of the LotR movies, the first or second one -- I expected a legion of Orukai mounted on giant wolf things to stampede over the horizon, and (3) when Mr. Darcy comes all slo-mo out of the fog, I fully expected a Matrix-style action scene. Of course, there wasn't one, but it would have been awesome.

3. I kind of get it. Mostly thanks to an NYRB article. I won't pretend to be really excited about Jane Austen now, but I can what might be interesting in it.

K--I also enjoyed this, mostly for the same reasons. It was unself-conciously funny. It managed to be relevant without losing the period feel (I could imagine someone's little sister acting just like Mr Darcy's. They even the managed to make the dancing seem really fun, rather than the stiff interpretation of the period that I've seen before.) And Donald Sutherland is the man. Seriously.

That said, I've never read the book, and I'm not an avid Jane Austin fan, so I can't really comment on whether it does the book justice. Some fans (I know you're out there) would disagree. Violently. Hopefully, some of them will comment.