Cuparius.com

There is little to report this week. I spent most of the week at the bookshop in receiving, which is my natural habitat. Many of the procedures are different from those of my former workplaces, which is inconvenient, but not surprising. I yearn for a store in which I could implement a system of my own devising. Yes, I still wish to be my own boss.

In the area of sculpture and puppetry, I'm eager to try the new polymer clays that are on the market (or soon will be), namely Super Sculpey Firm and Sculpey UltraLight, the benefits of which are described in the current issue of Polymer Café magazine.

I saw the film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice after work on Wednesday. Keira Knightley was, as I expected, perfect. Rosamund Pike, who played her elder sister Jane, likewise gave a flawless performance. The cinematography was acceptable. Everything else fell far short of the mark. Many of the actors are more than adequate in most of their previous roles, but I fear there was some reckless miscasting in this picture (and a bit of laziness on the part of some of the actors). Although I admire the work of both Judi Dench and Donald Sutherland, they proved woefully unaware of their characters (Sutherland admitted on a talk show that he had never read the book and relied on the director's vision of Mr. Bennet to guide him), but no other shortcoming compares with the blaring, glaring lack of comprehension demonstrated by Tom Hollander, who played Mr. Collins. I suspect he thought he was playing a different character in a different movie, and had been mistaken for the actor who was supposed to play Mr. Collins. "Oh, dear," he probably said when he received the script. "They changed the name of the movie. Oh, well. At least I still know how to play a diminutive, soft-spoken, nervous neurotic. It seems odd that they should suddenly make him a clergyman, though. Still, I can make it work." Mrs. Bennet was poorly cast, too, though not as badly as Mr. Collins. One wonders whether a majority of the cast gained their only familiarity with their characters by means of a glance at Cliff's Notes or an equivalent summary.

The screenwriting and directing are deserving of at least half of the blame for the movie's mediocrity. The script obscures some of the most important plot ploints of the book (probably rendering it confusing to those who have never read it) and attempts to compensate for its inadequacies with shots of Knightley gazing with a haunted expression from time to time, as if to assure us that there is psychological depth to the movie after all. Not that I mind shots of Keira Knightley (on the contrary!), but even she cannot lift this movie above a rating of 5 on a scale from 1 to 10. Without her, I would give it a rating of 3.

If only she could appear in good movies again. That's my New Year resolution for her.