Memories of dodgy films

[smokingboot]

I used to love Legend, a fantasy film before fantasy films made money, with Tom Cruise pretty much fitting the same description. The incomprehensible diddleedees didn't worry me; Tim Curry covered in red slap, and improbably horned was marvellous. To this day I enjoy the dance of the princess with her dark twin under the devil's dining table. Of course the story's neither here nor there but it's all easy to like.

The same can't be said for Emma, which is a clever story of a clever heroine rather difficult to like. This is the Gwyneth Paltrow version, which also stars Alan Cumming, and I feel sorry for them both; no oscars to be found in that script. I could tell it was rubbish from the opening credits, which displayed some tatty globe Emma is supposed to have painted and then covered with sketches of the inhabitants of her home town. These works of art are gravely complimented at the start, though if quality is anything to go by she must have finished them when she was eight. I watched it only to find myself fading into my own version of Emma, in which anything she does at any time is unctuously praised by people across time and space until she is teleported away by Nightcrawler to defeat the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants with her power of supermeddling. Thanks to her abilities, Tom Cruise turns up and makes Magneto his willing slave, she herself falls in love with Tim Curry's Prince of Darkness, and Highbury is turned into a swampen citadel of darkness much like the rest of Surrey.

Time, methinks, to switch to Midsomer Murders.

Comments

[november-girl.livejournal.com]

I quite enjoy Jane Austen usually, but just couldn't get into Emma. I just found it too dull, and of course she was too irritating.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Oh, I can while away a rainy afternoon reading Emma...but it is not the easiest Austen to turn into a film. Paltrow does a good job of making her comedic and winsome, divesting her of that whole smug Surrey Goddess thing. But it's hard to sympathise with Emma without seeing how weird her life and her dear papa actually are. I often think that in a 21st century context, we'd be worried about darling Emma's mental health long before alarm bells would ring about the wayward Bennet girls!