#I also love that this fuckin landed gentry guy

[drumlincountry]

I recently found out one of my ancestors was an evil landlord & there's a load of stories on duchas.ie about ppl stealing from him & insulting him & generally making him look like an eejit it's AMAZING

[mortimermcmirestinks]

as a long time enjoyer of 2005 p&p you utterly fascinate me and I would sincerely love to hear your Ted talk on why it's bad if you wanted to share it

ok disclaimer: you can enjoy the movie. it's fine. if you enjoy it, that's great, hold on to that. I don't want to take anything away from you. enjoying Pride & Prejudice (2005) is completely valid. I am going to say things in this post that are unkind to P&P05, and some of those things are opinions and some of those things are facts, and you should take all of them with a grain of salt and continue loving P&P05 if that is where your heart takes you. love that which you love.

that said,

friend I have had this deep-seated hatred and loathing in my heart simmering for like a decade and a half, and to fully explain it, I would need to fully prepare, and in order to prepare, I'd need to review at least two novels, three films, a miniseries, and the entire content history of three or four different youtube channels.

the tl;dr is that it takes a really good classic satire-romance book, a book that is very much a book that was written in 1813 and is deeply surrounded by, critical of, and infused with the culture of the time, and makes a modern Period™ Romance™ Melodrama™, the resulting movie being both a complete violation of the tone of the book and also a complete mockery of period accuracy in. like. every way. Like, I haven't watched the film in years, but the Bennet family wouldn't have goddamn pigs in their dining room, y'know? "landed gentry" and "farmer" are not synonyms.

and Keira Knightley is beautiful and a brilliant actress but by god there is something skeevy about how all of the women in the movie -- a movie set in an era where being curvier was considered attractive -- are all super thin. like 2005 was like the peak of "Being Skinny Is Beautiful, If You're More Than 90lbs, You're Worthless, Please Develop An Eating Disorder" culture, and the casting decisions for that movie... ooooof.

also the Mr Darcy in this movie looks like a fuckin dweeb-ass loser.

and the point I made about Mr Wickham in the original post is good too.

anyway, anyway, anyway, these points are surface-level (except the Wickham one, maybe), and I'm not going to go in-depth here (like I said, if I wanted to go any further, I'd need to, like, rewatch and reread stuff). instead of going further in-depth, I'm gonna recommend two really good adaptations, each coming out about a decade apart from the 2005 version in different directions:

the 1995 BBC miniseries starring Jennifer Ehle is kinda the definitive traditional adaptation of the book, taking exactly the right balance between book accuracy and film adaptation. there's a reason that the Mr Darcy actor in this movie was kinda permanently infused with the character, to the point that when I was writing this sentence I initially accidentally wrote "the Colin Firth actor in this movie" instead of "the Mr Darcy actor in this movie".

the 2013 series "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries" is one of the best reinterpretations of any piece of fiction I have ever seen. it's- it's so good. like goddamn. it's so good. love it. cherish it. it's- it's so good. yes.

if you're interested, there's also

the 1940 film version, which is bad in a so-bad-it's-good way. it was made during WWII when the prevailing theory on Movies About the British was "hey guys, remember the Revolutionary War? forget about that, the Brits are our friends now, look at how wacky and fun they are in this movie! now let's beat the Nazis together! cheerio and what ho!" etc etc. it's mostly harmless but it is very silly and comically inaccurate to the book. but it's fine. have fun

the 1980 BBC miniseries, which is much more accurate textually to the book than even the 1995 miniseries but is so. goddamn. dry that it can get hard to watch. like it's almost word-for-word accurate. like I'm pretty sure you could read the book and watch it at the same time and it would just. like. line up perfectly. The 1980 P&P is why you don't make your film adaptation 100% accurate to the book, ever

the 2003 Mormon version, which is really good, but it was made by Mormons, so it's just a liiiittle bit weird tonally. there's always fingerprints when something was made by a cult, like Mr. Collins calling Lizzie "Sister Bennet" and stuff. just a little bit, though. if you watch the modified version (yes, it exists, the "Sister" is dubbed over with "Miss") you could get away with not even knowing it was a cult movie, like I didn't when I watched it for the first time as a kid -- although the subtitle "A Latter-Day Comedy" might tip you off. some of the soundtrack to this one gets stuck in my head regularly also.

Bride & Prejudice, which is the Bollywood version. I don't know anything about Bollywood but I vaguely remember it being a really good modern take on the movie (and it's a musical!). it did a really good job of interpreting the different characters into its setting -- like the Mr. Collins character is a businessman who came back to India from America to look for a traditional Indian wife, or, like, instead of playing the piano the Mary character does a dance thing that I am not going to describe because I'd get it wrong oh god I'm so fucking white I'm sorry

and of course Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, which I haven't read or seen but I have been told is surprisingly good for what it is

uh. this was originally going to be one paragraph. it got a bit away from me.

yeah. uh. pride and prejudice woo