Chico
News & Review gives 4 out of 5 stars to
Jane Eyre 2011:
Buffini’s script also foregrounds the proto-feminist elements of Jane’s character, and brings a sobering note of social realism to a small multitude of pungent secondary characters. Fukunaga and his cast remain true to Buffini’s rigorously unsentimental take on Brontë throughout. And it all pays off in a quietly magical way—we get a lot more psychological realism than is usually the case with gothic romance, classical or not, and the passions involved seem more genuine as a result. (Juan-Carlos Selznick)
Indeed
Conducive Chronicle also thinks the film is 'good for the feminist soul'. So much for
the Bechdel test.
Not only are we treated to two strong representations of girls, but both films [Hanna and Jane Eyre] pass the Bechdel Test for measuring the gender bias of films. Do the films contain more than one female character with a name? Yes, and yes. Do these characters talk to each other? Yes, in both. Do they talk to each other about something other than a man? Yes, and yes again! Each gives us a respectable female hero, yet also female villains, and importantly, female friends. Thank you, Focus Features, for these breaths of fresh air. (Nicki Lisa Cole)
The Bit Maelstrom,
Erik and His Pointless Blog,
Filmusis (in Portuguese - with special attention to Dario Marianelli's soundtrack),
The Reeltime Report,
Rosy Kiera and
Culture Watch all write about the film as well.
PopMatters takes a look at another Brontë film:
Devotion (now
available in the US on demand).
It’s shot in a studio-bound English moors where the sisters and their drunken ne’er-do-well brother Branwell (Arthur Kennedy) enact their doomed lives. Emily and Charlotte independently court Paul Henried as the local curate or vicar or whatever he is. He’s neither like Heathcliff nor Rochester but the movie works on the theory that both sisters love the same man. The movie ends “happily” on Charlotte’s marital success without mentioning that she’d be dead in a few years, while Emily is presented as the more brilliant and serious one who loses the man and kicks the bucket. In an engaging interlude, Charlotte and Emily briefly are teachers in a French school that provided grist for Charlotte’s Villette as Charlotte flirts with the headmaster (Victor Francen).
It’s the kind of literary biopic that’s not above having Emily point out a lonely house on a bluff and declare “I call it Wuthering Heights” as she strides away with purpose. While dying, she has a special-effects dream of a dark horseman riding toward her, cape billowing. Sydney Greenstreet, billed fourth, steals the movie by showing up in the last third as William Makepeace Thackeray, inimitably pinching snuff and making supercilious remarks about Dickens as he escorts the now bestselling Charlotte about the London of Vanity Fair. If only she’d moved there from those darned moors, she might have survived a bit longer.
Again, this movie can’t be called a success, but it’s too odd and well-made not to be fascinatingly watchable, with Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s music churning us up in high romantic mode. (Michael Barrett)
In all likelihood - because he did so with with so much else - the movie director would have ignored this reminder from
The Telegraph and Argus about a picture taken in the 1920s:
From a postcard entitled simply “Sheep-Shearing, Haworth Moor”, this rustic scene from the 1920s captures the flavour of small-scale farming in an area which has since depopulated.
The moors over which the Brontës are popularly imagined as “running free” were not in reality the wide-open, empty spaces they now appear.
A directory of 1884 lists more than 50 farmers at Haworth. (Ian Dewhirst)
The Telegraph includes Emily Brontë on a list of 'Literary one-hit wonders'.
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
Brontë published her one and only novel in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. She died the following year of tuberculosis. In 1850, a new edition of Wuthering Heights was published with a preface written by her sister, Charlotte.
Another list is the one made by
The Times on the subject of practice and success.
A similar story emerges whether you look at the Williams sisters, David Beckham, Lionel Messi, Mozart or the Brontë sisters. Far from being miracle performers whose genes enabled them to avoid practice, they embody its power. (Matthew Syed)
The Telegraph & Argus has a reminder of the Conrad Aktinson's
Dreams of Permanence, Hopes of Transience exhibition in Thornton.
Variety also finds echoes of
Jane Eyre in
South Riding.
The Arizona Republic reviews a local production of
The Mystery of Irma Vep and alludes to its Brontë influences.
Eatocracy mentions a wedding where passages from
Jane Eyre were read.
The Brontë Sisters tries to imagine as closely as possible Charlotte's first stay alone in London.
Katie's Blog posts briefly about attending a performance of
Bernard Herrmann's Wuthering Heights at the Minnesota Opera.
Peachy Reviews gives an 8/10 to
Agnes Grey.
Varmt Igen posts in Catalan about
Shirley and
Book Junkie reviews
Jane Eyre briefly.
Lost in the Library takes a look at Fritz Eichenberg's illustrations for
Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights.
Categories: Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights
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