(We’re working on our review, we swear!)

Lots and lots of reviews rolling in for The Jane Austen Book Club; it’s at 61% at Rotten Tomatoes, and we especially liked this bit from Michelle Orange’s review at The Reeler.

Time was clearly taken here to do better than fine with material that had a sizeable no-brainer audience built right into the title.

Thank you. THANK YOU. With all the new adaptations and films we’ve snarked in the four three years of this blog, our main complaint has been the complete disregard for the sensibilities of the main audience for such adaptations–Janeites. And the thing is, are our sensibilities that much different from the rest of the world’s? We don’t really think so; and what’s wrong with challenging the public to stretch a little? Director Robin Swicord even noticed a renewed interest in Austen among her cast.

Still, when Swicord tried to get her cast into the spirit by hosting a book club meeting to discuss “Emma,” she was a little surprised at the response.

“Maggie Grace was the only one who’d done her homework,” Swicord said, citing the actress who plays book clubber Allegra. “Everyone else had pulled stuff off the Internet. But as we talked, people began to say, ‘I wish I’d read the book.’ It was so funny to watch their interest in Austen ignite.”

Uh huh. And even still,

But Swicord was clear on her desire not to take “a strong intellectual approach.”

And the film doesn’t, not really; the discussion by the book club is average, like any group of reasonably intelligent people reading good books might have, with differences of opinion and built-in prejudices (and, referring back to the first article we linked, “competitive hosting and eating.” Oh yes).

“There are some people who are very dedicated to the cult of Jane,” Swicord said. “I appreciate those people enormously, and I am a hair’s breadth away from that myself.” Swicord invited some of them — members of the Jane Austen Society of North America, a group Swicord has been tempted to join — to the “Book Club” set.

hee hee. Wait till Vancouver, Robin. We are JASNA. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. The Hollywood Reporter also has an article about Ms. Swicord’s journey in bringing the novel to the screen, which includes, among other things, the fascinating information that the editor’s name is Maryann Brandon. She makes it seem all “I picked her because of her great work on Alias” but we Janeites know the truth! She also talked to All Things Considered.

Roger Ebert liked it, unsurprisingly, as he is an F.O.J., despite his troubling affection for MP99.

You could say that Austen created Chick Lit and therefore Chick Flicks. You could, but I would not, because I despise those terms as sexist and ignorant. As a man, I would hate to have my tastes condescended to by the opposite of Chick Lit, which, according to Gloria Steinem, is Prick Lit. I read Jane Austen for a simple reason, not gender-related: I cannot put her down and often return to her in times of trouble.

The movie is a celebration of reading, and oddly enough that works, even though there is nothing cinematic about a shot of a woman (or the club’s one male member) reading a book. Such shots are used as punctuation in the film, where they work like Ozu’s “pillow shots,” quiet respites from the action. The only drawback to them from my point of view was that all the characters seem to be reading standard editions — not a Folio Society subscriber among them.

Whereas we think several of the club members are reading well-worn, long-loved copies of the novels, because they were already on their bookshelves. (But you can tell there’s no JASNA members in the bunch–don’t think we spotted any Chapman editions–perhaps one but we’re not sure.)

Some will quibble and cavil that the movie is too contrived: six books, six members, six sets of problems, six, six, six (and sex, of course). Contrivance is actually part of the appeal. One of the reasons we return to Austen, Dickens, Trollope and the estimable Mrs. Gaskell is that their novels are contrived. The structure and ultimate destination are easily foreseeable, but what’s fascinating are their characters, how they think and talk, how colorful and urgent they are, and how blind! blind! they are to what they should surely do if only we could advise them.

Ain’t that the truth!

Several of the actors are featured in new articles. Amy Brenneman, who plays Sylvia, has some interesting things to say about the conversion of the novel to film, for those who liked/didn’t like the novel and were wondering if they might like the film.

When it comes to The Jane Austen Book Club goes, Brenneman was very impressed with the work that Swicord did in adapting it for film. “It’s honestly six short stories. You have the six characters. It’s sort of like a character study using the novel they’ve chosen,” she says. “Robin had to figure out a beginning, middle, and end, the forward structure. She had to do a lot of work. The book was not set up to be a movie. She’s pretty geniusy.”

The men of TJABC get an article, too.

But don’t ask Dancy what it was like to do two “chick flicks” in a row. He loathes the term.

“I don’t think of the film that way,” he says. “I think about it as a script and a story. The exigencies of selling a movie today — people can make intelligent, thoughtful movies and then think about ‘how can we simplify this movie to the highest possible degree so we can sell it?’ — and they end up selling it short.”

A “chick flick,” he says, “implies a kind of frothiness, a surface quality and not really, in a way, related to life. These ['Book Club' characters] are people living real lives and facing real challenges.”

A longtime fan of Austen — he admits to reading “Pride and Prejudice” more than once — Dancy says that any man who thinks her novels are only for women simply hasn’t read them. “She blends incredibly well the feeling of what women and men are like and the feeling of what women and men would like each other to be,” he says.

….

Sorry, we just swooned. *blush*

In other reviews, The New York Times and Newsday are more reserved in their praise; the San Francisco Chronicle, too:

“The Jane Austen Book Club” makes the most audacious use ever of the author’s work. When a make-out session in a car is abruptly interrupted, a young man grabs his amour’s copy of “Persuasion” to cover up his erection.

Such a public display - can you imagine petting going that far in a horse and buggy?

You haven’t read Patrick O’Brian, have you? (Buggy?)

The Los Angeles Times liked it a little better; so did the Arizona Republic; and the USC Daily Trojan wants to join the club.

Thanks to Alert Janeites Lisa, Jenny, and Franka for sending us links (we don’t think we missed anyone–shout out in the comments if we did!)