The press for P&P3 is beginning to get a bit more cerebral; or perhaps our expectations are just lowered on the weekend.

Despite assurances to the contrary from Focus Features representatives received by AustenBlog, Reuters (via Yahoo!) has an article analyzing the manipulation and changes of the release date, comparing them to past Oscars campaigns conducted by FF, and concluding that they are definitely positioning the film for Oscar consideration. If we had lived a little less in the world, we might be feeling a trifle like Catherine Morland, wondering, “Could you have believed there had been such inconstancy and fickleness, and everything that is bad in the world?” Fortunately, though we share Miss Morland’s appreciation of Henry Tilney, we are rather cynical about such things, and find such proofs more amusing than distressing.

Michelle Griffin, writing for The Age, talks about “the power of plain” and how cinema seeks to make visual representations of Elizabeth Bennet appear more beautiful than Jane Austen described her in the novel.

She was certainly not a doe-eyed stunner like Knightley, even if the actress is a little undernourished to make a convincing Regency era beauty. No, Lizzie may have been cuter than some of Austen’s other heroines, but part of her allure comes from the power of the plain.

We disagree; Elizabeth was hardly meant to be considered plain. Along with Jane, she was also considered one of the prettiest girls in the neighbourhood. Jane is THE prettiest. Bingley and Sir William Lucas both describe her as pretty, and even Mr. Darcy muses upon “the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.”

Novelist David Baddiel, writing about P&P adaptations in general and P&P3 in particular in The Times, makes some excellent points and engages in some fine snark, as well.

IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY acknowledged that every few years someone puts out a new film or television version of a Jane Austen classic. Latest in the line is Keira Knightley, pouting her way through Elizabeth Bennet’s witticisms in the new Working Title version of Pride and Prejudice, out in cinemas next month. God knows how many screen versions of P&P have been made: sometimes it seems like those first ever filmgoers must just have finished rushing out of the cinema screaming “It’s a train! Coming straight through the wall into the room! Quick, flee for your lives!” before a producer said: “OK. What about Prince Albert as Mr Darcy?”

Ha!

But there is another, subtler, reason for her connection to the screen. Austen was, in my opinion, the first modern novelist in English. And her modernity lies principally — as perhaps modernity always does in art — in her understanding of perspective. She is the first novelist expertly to control the distance between narrator and character, and thus to be able to impart information to the reader about her characters without bald statement: her work, in other words, has the deadpan-ness, the transparency, of the camera.

Read the whole article, it’s great.