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EnglishBriarRose
Reviews
Ever After (1998)
Nice idea, too long by half!
Cinderella is the paradigm love fairy tale - girl meets boy, boy loses girl, boy finds girl, they live happily ever after. In this feminist retelling, girl meets boy, girl meets boy, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, girl loses boy etc etc... Even Romeo and Juliet weren't quite such star-crossed lovers!
Gorgeous costumes, okay but not scintillating dialogue. And a basic flaw - Danielle, the "Cinderella" character, frequently admits to being a "peasant" or a "servant", when she is nothing of the sort - if she were a peasant her father would hardly have married a Baroness (brilliant portrayal by Houston)!
Oh and at one point she claims that her father, an expert swordsman (therefore not a peasant) taught her well. He died when she was 8, so I'm puzzled as to how - or when! 😂
Nice idea, but interminablly long and badly structured.
Death Comes to Pemberley (2013)
Murdering Pemberley
The vibrant, funny, ironic and feisty Miss Elizabeth Bennett has been Mrs Fitzwilliam Darcy for six years, and, despite an army of servants, almost unlimited wealth and an adoring husband, has dwindled into a care-worn looking woman who appears to be permanently worrying about the gas bill! We discover the incredibly wealthy and well-connected Darcy had a disreputable (great?)grandfather who nearly ruined Pemberley then killed himself. Darcy's father was still having to sell land to save Pemberley - and this is the family the maniacally snobbish Lady Catherine de Burgh wished her daughter to marry into? Hardly, I would think!
Furthermore, I am no student of legal history, but when the local magistrate discovers the body of the murder victim has been washed, he talks of "tampering with evidence" - I really cannot believe that such a concept would have existed in the early 19th Century! Indeed, in an age of faith - or lip-service to faith - the proper and respectful treatment of the dead would almost certainly have taken precedence over any other consideration.
Wickham is taken into custody on suspicion of murder even before, in the language of the time, a Coroner's Jury has "sat on the body" - that is, before the relevant legal institution has determined that it was murder, and not accident or suicide. Again, I suggest, unlikely.
I find the plot unbelievable and the acting, with a few notable exceptions - principally Jenna Coleman as the wonderfully ghastly Lydia - frankly mediocre. Elizabeth Darcy confesses to her sister that she thinks Darcy regrets his marriage to her; as Anna Maxwell Martin plays her, he probably does, but then, I wouldn't marry Matthew Rhys' Darcy either!
Sorry, but this genre-bender doesn't work for me!
The Pirates of Penzance (1994)
G&S? I don't think so!
If this is what Australians do to Gilbert and Sullivan, I'm just grateful I don't live in Australia. And this is not "little Englander" chauvinism - I absolutely loved the US reworking in "Papp's Pirates", with the splendid Kevin Kline, Patricia Routledge and company. This is a perfectly awful burlesque of that fabulous production, and so derivative I'm surprised there weren't intellectual property law implications. "Moronic" one reviewer called it, and I can only agree.
I could pity Sir William and Sir Arthur spinning in their graves at this production - except that they would not recognise it. Whatever this appalling pantomime is - it ain't Gilbert and Sullivan!