Yes, Gentle Readers, we weary of the film and it’s not even in wide release yet. But there’s still lots of good stuff out there, so we shall continue to bring you everything worthy of notice, and then some.

First up is Fellow-ette’s hilarious parody of the film, Un-Becoming Jane.

Jane Austen:

Despite my prodigious talent, my budding genius, and my formidable wit, I am vastly intimidated by your literary critique because you are a most agreeable–a most happily-endowed–what I’m trying to say is, you’re hot. And it is a truth universally acknowledged that even the most brilliant woman is speechless in front of …

Tom:

Your stories need more boning, you dig? More horizontal rhumba. More fornication.

Jane:

My luscious cherry lips are agape.

Thanks to Alert Janeites Diana I-C and Kirsten for sending us the link.

Another review recommended by Alert Janeites Karyn G and Rebecca was Ranylt Richildis’ review at Pajiba.

I didn’t enter the film with sky-high expectations, due partly to my generalized Austen fatigue and partly to my more specific dissatisfaction with the way her work has been mishandled onscreen. Here comes the scholarship, folks (skip down two paragraphs if you don’t give two flyings about the academic crap, but only came to learn if Becoming Jane is suitable for a Sunday out with Grandma): Austen movies — especially those starring a Hollywood face for U.S. marketability — make her novels out to be romances, first and foremost, when in fact the romance is merely a device (expected of a female author by readers and publishers, in Austen’s lifetime) on which to hinge her deft commentary about social biases and hierarchies — hierarchies invisible to the majority of current-day North Americans, who don’t realize how stratified the English upper classes were in Austen’s era. The witty banter and the sitcom courtship plots are only the icing Austen concocted to frost her larger, more nuanced concerns — it’s those concerns that make Austen Austen, after all, and not just Emma’s wee matchmaking oopsies or Elizabeth’s charming mulishness. But social commentary isn’t terribly cinematic on its own — not next to witty banter and sitcom courtships — and so we’re glutted with Austen movies that are all icing and no cake.

Definitely recommended.

The Los Angeles Times knows that Janeites are a tough crowd, but found some who approached the film with open minds.

She did notice discrepancies between reality and the film. “I do know just enough facts to be dangerous,” she joked. For instance, in the movie, Austen uses a metal-tipped pen; in real life, she used a quill. “It just brought me up short,” said Huff, who then provided her own explanation for the time-period inconsistency. “I think it was because they wanted to show her writing very fast. There were beautiful scenes where the lighting is gorgeous and her face is so intent, and you couldn’t use a quill and write fast. It was a perfectly good cinematic choice.”

Austen scholar Emily Auerbach is not quite so complacent about it.

“She’s in popular culture. I have a Jane Austen action figure. There’s merchandise and zillions of movies. But they are a far cry from the real Jane Austen and her books. I’m afraid the movie will reinforce stereotypes about her that are not accurate.”

We liked this suggestion:

“I think if she could see the movie ‘Becoming Jane,’ she’d write a satire of it.”

Yeah!

Anthony Lane muses upon the film in The New Yorker.

What is that? A declaration of love, or an unpicking of love’s pretensions? When the two young people go their separate ways, as they do a short while later, does that mean the fadeout of a flirtation or a tragedy of unmendable loss? For the director of “Becoming Jane,” Julian Jarrold, and his screenwriters, Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams, there is no contest: the whole film, though dotted with passable jokes and packed—this being period drama—with long-gowned maidens hoofing about the dance floor, builds up to a climactic grief, with the middle-aged Lefroy encountering Austen and letting her know, through the moistness of his eyes and the graying of his whiskers, that he mourns What Might Have Been.

We like the drawing, too. (Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link.)

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Detroit Free Press, The Baltimore Sun, and The Seattle Times each have reviews.

And the film did fairly well last weekend in limited release, according to indieWIRE.