P&P3 part of Pittsburgh film festival
Ahoy Pittsburghers: PRIDE AND PREJUDICE will be part of the Three Rivers Film Festival, showing on November 4, 2005 at 8 p.m. at the Regent Square Theater.
The film has now premiered in Australia, and the reviews are mixed. Sandra Hall of the Sydney Morning-Herald is not buying the studio hype.
So why do we need a new Pride And Prejudice? The film’s producers explain themselves with the line that this is the first big-screen version in 65 years - which sounds like a good excuse, strictly speaking. But where Jane Austen is concerned, strictness has gone thoroughly out of fashion. The idea these days is to take liberties with her - recycling her work in unlikely, even exotic forms. We’ve had Bride And Prejudice, the Bollywood musical, as well as a contemporary spoof in Bridget Jones’s Diary. Both have helped to show yet again that a true classic is infinitely adaptable. Even classics, however, need time to recover between engagements. But here’s P and P yet again, filmed by Joe Wright, a young British television director determined to push Austen into the realms of dirty realism.
Peter Craven of The Age is polite but does not seem especially impressed.
So this Pride and Prejudice is a bit of a chamber music for kids’ orchestra, with chooks in the background and plenty of dirt and rain and tousled hair and some adult guest players deepening the sense of reality.
Des Partridge of the Courier-Mail prefers P&P2.
