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Anne with an E
Apr. 6th, 2019 08:07 amWell now, a day and a night lost to that almost headache thing. Can't be having that. Used to get cluster migraines that cost me a term at Uni. When they started, they would just keep rolling in for weeks, severely incapacitating. This however, was not a proper full on migraine, just the flashing lights/weakness/blurred vision followed by an ordinary though bad headache. Better now, if a little fragile.
I have been watching Anne with an E on Netflix. I always liked the Anne of Green Gables stories, because I felt that we were alike, with the huge freckles and the imagination and the constant getting into trouble, and hers was the rescue I wanted, to live in a beautiful place surrounded by people who, if they didn't understand, at least were kind. Pippi Longstocking was a knock off, Pollyanna a cloying pastiche. I understood Anne and thought she understood me. Then she grew up and became a wife and mother, and the stories were just awfully dull, Anne faded into ordinariness. But then the author, Lucy Maud Montgomery was a complex woman. She had recognition and fame and a thwarted private life; if she couldn't have that wonderful world and true love she craved, she ensured her heroine had all these things. I understood it, but it didn't make the stories any better.
Anne with an E is not so much an adaptation as a rif on a theme. It moves quite far beyond the original story, and is clearly written by someone terribly woke. Homophobia, bullying, child abuse, female emancipation, racism, same sex marriage, it's all there where the original stories were not and the language suffers from being too modern; in fact it's all too modern. This Anne is rather less empathic and more tiresome than earlier versions, the stories seem to have someone triggered and suffering a flashback in every single episode. I get very impatient with it, and yet this is more like the Anne I would have been rather than the Anne I wanted to be, so with all its faults I would give it an overall 6 out of 10.
More to write but the screen begins to puzzle my eyes so it will all have to wait.
I have been watching Anne with an E on Netflix. I always liked the Anne of Green Gables stories, because I felt that we were alike, with the huge freckles and the imagination and the constant getting into trouble, and hers was the rescue I wanted, to live in a beautiful place surrounded by people who, if they didn't understand, at least were kind. Pippi Longstocking was a knock off, Pollyanna a cloying pastiche. I understood Anne and thought she understood me. Then she grew up and became a wife and mother, and the stories were just awfully dull, Anne faded into ordinariness. But then the author, Lucy Maud Montgomery was a complex woman. She had recognition and fame and a thwarted private life; if she couldn't have that wonderful world and true love she craved, she ensured her heroine had all these things. I understood it, but it didn't make the stories any better.
Anne with an E is not so much an adaptation as a rif on a theme. It moves quite far beyond the original story, and is clearly written by someone terribly woke. Homophobia, bullying, child abuse, female emancipation, racism, same sex marriage, it's all there where the original stories were not and the language suffers from being too modern; in fact it's all too modern. This Anne is rather less empathic and more tiresome than earlier versions, the stories seem to have someone triggered and suffering a flashback in every single episode. I get very impatient with it, and yet this is more like the Anne I would have been rather than the Anne I wanted to be, so with all its faults I would give it an overall 6 out of 10.
More to write but the screen begins to puzzle my eyes so it will all have to wait.
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