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Reviews
Emma (1972)
excellent & clever adaptation, and who cares about the settings?
I have just finished watching this adaptation of Emma for the first time and I feel I must openly declare here that it seems to me quite shameful that the Paltrow and the Beckinsale versions should be more often remembered. How that is to be explained I am at a loss to tell. It is true that John Carson may not look to be the epitome of Knightleyness, but he does a most excellent job of acting like Mr Knightley, and that is what one should care about, I say. Indeed, I was gratified by the sheer intelligence and sensitivity of all the actors in it, the director, the screenwriter and even the dress-maker or whatever she is called. The clothes and dresses may not all have been true to the times but most certainly they were thoughtfully true to the characters.
Also, wonder of wonders, there is no musical soundtrack to pester one's feelings telling them what to feel at every turn. What that does is it helps to make dialogues sound truthful, natural and issuing from people who are thoroughly engaged both as actors and characters in listening to each other.
Another thing that has contributed to place this in my estimation as the best extant adaptation of Emma is that there is no symbolic meddling with the story (excepting perhaps on the last tableau). One thing I love in Jane Austen which is of course not what there is to be loved in other authors is that nothing she writes has any symbols: every little thing is whatever it is, no less, no more. And I unconditionally praise the director John Glenister, the screenwriter Denis Constanduros and the producer Martin Lisemore for having seen that simple fact about Jane Austen and for having brought the book to life so clearly and so lovingly.
So three cheers for them, and five to Doran Godwin.
Grizzly Man (2005)
a disservice to environmentalists
Grizzly Man is largely a disservice to the environmentalist cause, and i suspect Herzog had a mixed agenda in doing it. Out of probably hundreds of hours of original footage to work from, he deliberately chose scenes where Treadwell sounds, looks and acts like a childish, closeted gay nitwit with no real knowledge of how nature works and a dreamy yearning to bring all those dangerous beasts into his own teddy-bear collection. There's even a scene in which the word PANSY is clearly to be seen on the side of a truck. That, of course, is EXACTLY the way environmentalists are often unflatteringly imagined to be and actually depicted and talked about by their right-wing, big-business, let's-muck-the-world detractors. So what's Herzog trying to achieve here?
Prior to this movie, i'd never heard of Treadwell, so i had no preconceptions or sympathies to be confirmed or refuted by it. I say what i saw. He may well have been what Herzog edited him out to be. I mean, what could have driven Treadwell if not some sort of half-witted, troubled stubbornness that had in fact VERY LITTLE to do with real environmentalism? But the dynamics of film-making (the choice between what will constitute entertainment and what will not) makes Herzog's final cut seem like it owed more to a barely disguised anti-environmentalist agenda than to the actual heart-rending, bilge-ridden story he's telling.