JZ just made me so happy that I never saw that P&P.

We saw ''The Good Shepherd'' last night. I really hated it. It seemed so pointless, and it bored me. If I hadn't been with 4 other people, I would have left after the first hour, and I seriously considered going out into the lobby to wait for them a few times.

::goes away to take Pride and Prejudice out of NetFlix queue::

Don't do it! Some of us liked it quite a bit. Well, some of me, anyway. You should at least give it a whirl.

(Of course, I can barely abide Austen's writing style and generally don't feel any emotional interest in her characters, so perhaps my liking he movie should be read as a discouragement to Austen lovers.)

I want to go to a Zeppelin Party!

If it has Keira Knightley and (an uncredited) Alan Cumming in it it can't be all bad.

Even badly done Austin is worth watching. I had lots of gripes but I still watched the film three times (once with the commentary).

I love a lot of bad movies just for the pretty (see Bram Stoker's Dracula, for instance) so I probaby will watch P&P at some point. JZ was so persuasive, though! And one of my biggest peeves is changing plot points for no good reason whatsoever.

I watched part of Elizabeth on cable the other day, and it was just ... for one thing, she knew Dudley was married! She was probably at the wedding! There were so many stupid changes to Actual Historical Facts that it made me very cranky.

Of course, I can barely abide Austen's writing style and generally don't feel any emotional interest in her characters

Oh, ouch. Also, we should get Burrell in here to tell the story of how her DH fell in love with her because of the way she taught P&P.

Actually, AmyLiz, I'm not sorry I saw it. It wasn't entertaining, and much of it was inexpressibly irritating, but as a voracious reader and occasional writer (among other probably never-to-be-finished pieces, I have bits of an attempted adaptation of Daddy Long Legs languishing somewhere), I did find a lot to think about WRT what makes an adaptation work or not work.

Mansfield Park, after all, took incredible liberties with the original text, and even Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility was a fair departure, yet both felt (to me, anyhow) much more sympathetic and faithful. They both rewrote characters, invented dialogue, stripped down or jettisoned subplots and minor but vivid events, but they didn't irritate like this one did. I've been puzzling over all three since last night, worrying over the choices that helped or hindered the story, the characters and actors; and the sadly atrophied writer portion of my brain is very glad for the exercise.

Oh, ouch.

I wish I didn't feel that way, if nothing else because it wreaks havoc my "girly" literary rep. I appreciated both Emma and P&P from a purely intellectual perspective, but I didn't get into them at all. There's some distance disconnecting me from the characters, big time. I haven't bothered to try any of her others, assuming it will be more of the same.

Of course, I can barely abide Austen's writing style and generally don't feel any emotional interest in her characters

It's...almost like English...

We saw ''The Good Shepherd'' last night. I really hated it.

I wouldn't say I hated it, but yeah -- total waste of an interesting premise and my 2.5 hours. (Though I did have to laugh at the irony of the main characters going to see a Chekhov play right in the middle of this complete narrative train wreck.)

My chief memory of the recent P&P (which I did not see) is a review in the New Yorker that vivdly explained to me why Keira Knightley's jawline is so familiar: she looks like the queen from Aliens.

(That's got to be Anthony Lane. That whole review was hilarious.)