costume adaptations of the 'er....'

[burntcopper]

Spent the last couple of hours watching Mansfield Park (Billie Piper, itv) and cleaning up a website I designed a year or so ago for a mate's work. Mansfield Park... er. Not entirely sure if I can decide whether it was a good or bad adaptation, because Mansfield Park is the book that goes 'boring boring boring sedate - whammo! Histrionics! - sedate sedate'. Billie was lovely as Fanny, if a little too pretty. Half the point of Fanny Price is that she's not as pretty or vivacious as her cousins, and you've got Billie practically shining forth and grinning a lot, which doesn't help. (The Doctor Who eps with her, Chris and John in, could be termed the battle of the sparkly wide grins.) She was considerably plainer in Ruby in the Smoke. Bad itv costume/makeup department. Bad.

Started jogging again, doing all of - I dunno, maybe eight minutes if that? in Regents' Park. Walked to and from there for warmup/cooldown. Not entirely sure how I'm going to continue this, since automatic reaction to getting out of work is 'collapse'.

Comments

[alysscarlet.livejournal.com]

I was very disappointed with last night's Mansfield Park. I think Billie was very miscast. As you say, Fanny is supposed to be plainer, but with that smile and the heaving bosum (why was she in corsets?) she dominated instead. The screenplay felt very rushed, and they seemed to have managed to tone down the few episodes of actual drama in the book to make the whole thing very bland. And there's the problem that Fanny never actually *does* anything, except be stoic and constant, and finally her man sees sense.

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

methinks the camerawork didn't help - it was all handheld and a lot of time, instead of cutting to different characters in the same scene, they just swung the camera. Read an interview in the Radio Times and it was all 'We want to update this! make it punchier for the modern audience!'

See me go :headdesk:. I'm sorry, did you lot at itv not watch the recent Pride and Prejudice film? The entire point of Austen is that the dialogue tends to speak for itself.

Northanger Abbey's trailer seems to be all about the gothic. Shall see how that goes.

[alysscarlet.livejournal.com]

I'm headdesking with you. There really didn't seem to be very much of the lovely Austen dialogue in Mansfield Park.

The Northanger Abbey screenplay is written by Andrew Davies so I have higher hopes for it. It's also a much more amusing novel.