whoseblues

The 2 female leads actually give good performances, given they had nothing but disconnected, insubstantial drivel to work with. Jerry Lewis is, well, Jerry Lewis (but not at his silliest) -- I should have realized it was a French co-production when I saw he was in it! I'm in the middle of a personal Johnny Depp festival, and this really isn't very good for him. There's nothing for him to sink his teeth into, and it looks like he knows it and isn't really trying. The only thing I agree with the previous reviewer on is the music; it's very cool. The rest is self-indulgent (and boring) (and long, which makes boring even worse) pseudo-surrealism. There's too many good movies out there to waste time on this one.

Oh, my. Poor Jane must have done the old rolling-over-in-the-grave thing. Even allowing for poor production values for the time (1971) and the format (some kind of mini-series), this is baaaaaad. Whatever else you do with Austen, the dialog should sparkle (even in this, perhaps her most serious work), and melodrama should be strictly out of bounds. Alas, not the case with this production. By the time you get to Anne's "Frederick, Frederick, Frederick," you'll either be laughing or crying. Unless you're just out to visually "collect" all extant films of Austen's work, you can skip this one. If you do watch it, however, there are small consolations: The actresses playing Anne's sisters each do a wonderful job with their roles.

The movie as a whole is okay (and I don't mean okay as a negative). Agreed, it isn't the Second Coming, or anything like that, but it's a harmless way to spend the time it takes to watch it, and there are enough amusing scenes and ideas to justify doing so. I agree fully with iKramerica-1, except for his/her numeric rating. So just ratchet your major expectations (and film maven indignation) down to the ordinary range, and stop making such a big issue about the fact that the movie isn't a marvel -- come on, you watch a whole lot of movies that aren't, doncha? That said, this movie contains one of the funniest scenes I have seen recently on film, one that I would like to cut out and include in my personal all-time funniest sequences video, to watch on those days when things really aren't going right. It is the language lesson scene, where Martin manages to come up with so many pseudo-frenchie corruptions in pronunciations -- not just of the word hamburger, but of the entire sentence at issue -- that after I caught my breath and wiped my eyes, I realized I was totally amazed at the creativity behind the scene as well as at its execution -- it's brilliant.