"We need all the good, and great, writing in movies that we can get"

Jane Eyre 2011 is again in the news for, basically, two things. The upcoming DVD release (August 16th):

It’s in many ways, a faithful movie, one that at least respects its source. But how can you really sympathize in the ways Charlotte wanted us to sympathize with Jane — to admire not her looks, but her brains, her pluck, her persistence, her bravery — when she’s played by a stunner like Wasikowksa, however disguised, however made “mousey?” Poetic license, I guess.
The whole film in fact has that Gothic, stylish beauty that many British versions of the 19th century classics strive for. Irony of ironies, the story of Jane is there, in all its almost Dickensian travail. (Charlotte though was an admirer more of ironic William Thackeray.) And the whole mood and style of Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre reminds you of the feverish romantic furies of Emily’s Wuthering Heights, of love in a windstorm, love beyond death, love that hurls you into a torrent.
It’s a good movie though. Sometimes it almost hypnotizes you with all that windy romance. And, of course, another adaptation of any Brontë sister at all, even of the usually ignored Anne (“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall“) is always welcome by me. We need all the good, and great, writing in movies that we can get. (Mike Wilmington on Movie City News)

And the Australian release of the film (next August 11th). Dirk den Hartog publishes in The Australian an interesting, complete and rigorous analysis mostly of the novel itself but also of the Fukunaga version, comparing it to Zeffirelli's and Stevenson's:

On a simple level Jane's "indomitable reply" - leaving Rochester on finding him already married, with the utterance "I care for myself" - rings out inspiringly in a post-feminist age.
Yet the novel also shows how complex a mix there is in the demure governess-cum-volcano of longing, of independence and dependence, of autonomy and driven-ness. Jane's inner conflict expresses Brontë's own, derived from her upbringing. This was a battleground of Romantic freedom and Puritan discipline, in which the heroically rebellious poetry of Lord Byron sat alongside hellfire evangelical children's tracts.
Can film and television versions do justice to this more complex sense of Jane? (Beginning in 1910, there have been 18 films of the novel and nine TV series.) Ought they try? The most promising candidates might seem to be the lengthy miniseries, generally by the BBC.
But these have mostly devoted their time to a meticulous but pedestrian reproduction of the text's details, without much of its inner fire. Doing this can even foreground at embarrassing length the novel's worst aspect, Rochester's stagey speechifying, as in Timothy Dalton's awful 1983 performance.
The best film versions, by contrast, use the restriction of time to creative ends. Robert Stevenson's wonderful 1943 black-and-white Jane Eyre (with Joan Fontaine as Jane and Orson Welles as Rochester), in discarding, like most subsequent adaptations, all but the ending from the novel's second half, was able to sustain the gothic gloom of its settings by not having to include the intractably cheerful household of St John Rivers and his sisters.
Fukunaga compresses the plot by beginning dramatically with Jane's flight from Thornfield, then telling her life until the meeting with Rochester in flashbacks, coming back to its beginning after the disrupted wedding. The new opening, beginning with a rear view and darkly shadowed shot of Jane in the doorway, facing the bleak prospect ahead, is a real dramatic success. (Read more)

The Sydney Morning Herald gives it 4 out of 5 stars:

One of the best (the only?) reasons to remake Jane Eyre is when an actress comes along who's perfect for the part. Wasikowska is exactly that. Her Jane is beautifully poised, noble in bearing, humble, devout, kind, very still. She dares not to expect much from a woman's lot, until Rochester's light shines upon her.
Keeping that sense of passion and suppression in balance, while suggesting a wilful streak, is a difficult task but Wasikowska knows this is her great chance. She has been good in other films but she's great in this one. (Paul Byrnes)

Perth Sunday News has a giveaway:

Five major prize winners will win a copy of the book and a double pass to the movie and 15 lucky runners up will each receive a double pass to see the movie.

A Brontëite in the American Senate according to US News:

[Susan] Collins [The Republican junior senator from Maine] also read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. "I loved the story of this 'plain' young woman who triumphs despite cruelty, poverty, and other hardships," she says. (Jason Koebler)

Anna Clark talks in The Guardian about Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden:

Mary Lennox is not a good-hearted, put-upon creature, cut from the cloth of Oliver Twist or Cinderella (or Anne Shirley, Pip, Jane Eyre or Heidi). Rather she is spoiled, homely, mean and sometimes violent.

The Stuff (New Zealand) remembers a very bad boss:

Some little while later while we were all sitting cross-legged on the floor Bev burst in. In my mind she threw back the door like Heathcliff arriving off the moors with wild wind and thunder accompanying her but I suspect that may be my memory playing tricks, since internal doorways don't usually admit wind and thunder. (Moata)

Blogcritics interviews the author Debra Brenegan:

Who are some of your favorite authors/books?
I list about 50 of my favorite authors on my website and I'd say that list is on the short side. Off the top of my head, some of my favorite books are Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, Toni Morrison's Beloved and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. (April Pohren)

The Wall Street Journal reviews Swept from the Sea (1997), now on DVD:

Amy exults in pelting rain (her lipstick survives some of the worst weather since "Wuthering Heights"), and hides humble treasures from the sea in her own secret grotto. (Joe Morgenstern)

Finally, an alert from the Australian Brontë Association:

2011 ABA Conference: The Misses Brontë's Establishment
Dates 5th - 7th August 2011.
Venue The Conference will be held at Fountaindale Grand Manor (previously Ranelagh House) at Robertson in the Southern Highlands of NSW (approximately 2 hours drive from Sydney).
Conference theme
The theme will be the Brontës and Education. It will include talks on education at the time of the Brontës, their own education at Cowan Bridge, Roehead and the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels. There will also be some mini-lessons in the style of a Victorian classroom. Learn how to draw perfect ellipses, following Emily's diagrams, learn about the geography of Africa that inspired the Brontë Juvenilia, improve your copperplate writing with a steel nib pen. You might learn a little French from one of Charlotte's French "devoirs". We will even have a drawing master who can teach you the art of drawing from life like Branwell.

Typing on pink and Espace en Claire-Obscure (in French) post about Jane Eyre; Los calcetines no tienen glamour reviews (with snark) Wuthering Heights 2003 (in Spanish); Les Plumes Asthmatiques has visited the Out of this World exhibition at the British Libray (in French); Librecinéfilo reviews in Spanish Jane Eyre 2011.

Categories: Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights