Also, long weekend with my wife working, I decided to make a sort of OG RomCom double bill of Much Ado About Nothing and Pride and Prejudice. The MAAN was Youtube available version with David Tennant and Catherine Tate - not in my sphere of direct knowledge but apparently a Dr. Who reunion - that I had seen before. It was serviceable though it leaned too hard into, not just comedy but farce. The paired scenes where Beatrice and Benedick and Beatrice are played for gulls both had badly distracting business, and Tate in particular was prone to hamming. Well, it was filmed on stage, so some of that, at least, was for the cheap seats. I do appreciate that they tried to give Hero some agency, but there being no lines befitting, they tried to do it through facial expressions. Still not bad, and it is one of my two favorite Shakespeare comedies, and it was enjoyable.
It was the 2005 version of PaP, with Kiera Knightly as Lizzie, Matthew Macfayden as Darcy, Rosalind Pike as Jane, Tom Hollander as the absurd Mr. Collind and... hey! Carey Mulligan! Anyway, I guess they did about as well as they could in keeping the novel together in 2 hours, primarily by rushing through everything except Elizabeth and Darcy. And while it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a well loved novel eing turned into a 2 hour movie must be in want of some pruning, you would expect the novel's most famous line ro make an appearance, somehow somewhere. Anyway, it was fine, though I had always thought poor Lizzie was subject to the two worst proposals in English literary history, the movie made Darcy too empassioned and ardent and not a big enough dick.
And one last, just a first impression, but Women Talking goes on a list with Snakes on a Plane as a.contender for the most succinctly accurate movie title of all time.
Least accurate: The Neverending Story, and I am still pissed they made me leave the theater (not to mention The Neverending Story II, which should not have been possible) and Snatch,.which was surely false advertising.
