"It’s a movie, not the book, it’s its own animal" ~ BrontëBlog

Lou Gaul (Gankins Media Critic) classifies Jane Eyre 2011 as a Best Rental:

Grade: B+; with Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender in Charlotte Brontë’s romantic drama about a governess and her relationship with a man hiding a secret.

Kyiv Post (Ukraine) doesn't like this version:

It seems that major film studiosare running short of ideas and are reluctant of trying something new and risky.Instead, they hire young directors and unknown actors and bless them with a chance to retell evergreen stories once again. (...)
Watch this movie if you are fond of Brontë’s novels or simply love melodramas.
Everyone else can give it a miss and rent a classic Franco Zeffirelli’s 1996 film of the same name on DVD instead. (Alexey Bondarev)

Bang Showbiz quotes Dame Judi Dench (apparently speaking to Good Housekeeping magazine):

Judi, 76, also spoke of her delight at not being asked to play a "stuffy old bird" in her new movie 'Jane Eyre', which is based on the book by Charlotte Brontë.
She added to the October issue of Good Housekeeping magazine: "It's not a role I ever thought I would play but I love the book. It's darkly romantic. I've always thought Mrs. Fairfax was rather a wicked old bird but she's not, as it turned out. She was actually all right and befriended Jane."

The Derby Telegraph is delighted with Judi Dench's visit to the area:

Mrs [Jenni] Mackenzie [hotel The Peacock, in Rowsley] said many members of the cast and crew making Jane Eyre – based on the book by Charlotte Bronte – stayed at the hotel for about five weeks during filming.
She said: "It's not the first time we have had stars stay; Derbyshire is a popular destination to shoot films. But each time it is exciting."
Before leaving, the guests signed the hotel's comments book. Dame Judi wrote: "What a lovely time we've had – thank you all so much."
And the film's director, Cary Fukunaga, suggested he had a spooky stay, writing: "Love this place even though you say it's not haunted – tis defo – much. Thank you! C."

The Sheffield Telegraph is more concerned about the tourism the film could bring to the zone:

THE Peak District is bracing itself for a tourism windfall following next week’s release of Jane Eyre.
The box office heavyweight – starring Michael Fassbender, Mia Wasikowska, Jamie Bell and Dame Judi Dench – has been filmed on location around Haddon Hall and is expected to bring sightseers flocking to the area. (...)
Medieval Haddon was the obvious choice when director Cary Fukunaga was looking for a suitable Thornfield Hall.
Charlotte Brontë visited Hathersage in 1845 and is thought to have based much of her novel on landmarks she encountered in the area.
Haddon is no stranger to the role – it was cast as Thornfield by Franco Zeffirelli in 1996 and ten years later in the BBC version.
This time more than 100 cast and crew transformed the building, with scenes being filmed in the minstrels’ gallery, the state bedroom, the kitchen and even the private apartments. (...)
Jo also found herself cast as impromptu props assistant: “I made some tatty curtains to go on the windows of the Long Gallery, which was being made to look like an attic.
“They filled it with junk and cobwebs and screen dust – we were sweeping it up for months – but I’m told the scene ended up on the cutting room floor!”
And she was party to some of the film’s secrets, such as the hundreds of tiny fabric blossoms that were fastened to bare trees in the garden to make it look like spring.
“It was very convincing. In fact when we opened the hall for the new season they were still in place, so we used it as an April fool’s joke.”
The cast and crew were billeted at various locations during the four weeks of filming, with many of the stars staying at the nearby Peacock at Rowsley.
“They’re all lovely but we especially loved having Dame Judi; she’s a national treasure,” says Jo. [Ops... see earlier in the post]
“She’s a tiny little lady but with such a sense of humour: very focused on what she’s doing but with a twinkle in her eye. She put everyone else at ease.”
Haddon is only one of the Peak District locations to be featured.
Director Fukunaga has been quoted as saying: “I’m a stickler for raw authenticity, so I’ve spent a lot of time rereading the book and trying to feel out what Charlotte Brontë was feeling when she was writing it.”
The result is said to be darker than previous interpretations. But The Times reports that it is ‘a handsome and satisfying version that makes the landscape as much a star as the excellent leads’.
Other locations include the ruins of Wingfield Manor near Alfreton, which double as Thornfield after it is ravaged by fire, and White Edge Lodge – a former gamekeeper’s cottage, now a National Trust holiday home on the Longshaw Estate – which serves as The Moor House.
And the wild romantic landscape that first inspired Charlotte Brontë is allowed to speak for itself.
Stanage Edge, one of the area’s most dramatic natural landmarks, has been chosen to capture Jane Eyre’s profound sense of isolation. The area around her school is filmed near Edale and the softer countryside where Rochester rides around Thornfield is represented by the lush water meadows below Haddon Hall.
All these sites are likely to sought out by visitors and so-called ‘film tourists’ who are expected to flock to the area over the coming months.

HeyYouGuys interviews Cary Fukunaga. Besides the usual questions, this is an interview with interesting bits that should not be missed:

Quite often when I’ve gone back to review previous adaptations, even in the 2006 version, when the gothic scenes come up they feel out of place. I saw the first episode of the 2006 version where they have Jane in the Red Room, and it’s just like shakey handheld camera then back to normal. And for me I think there has to be continuity when you’re dealing with that. It’s different because when you’re reading you’re allowed to change tones and you can spend hours and hours reading something and digesting it and experiencing it in your own way, but when you’re watching someone else’s film, someone else’s depiction of something then you change tones and you can lose the audiences, and that’s something you don’t want to do. (...)
Q: Obviously the book is linear and in chronological order, what prompted your decision to film it non-linear?
A: The first reason would be storytelling, but there are two benefits to it. Firstly you get to start off in a much more mysterious way. There has been a recent trend in the past ten or twenty years of starting a film in a moment, and then building up to how that moment happened, so it’s a very contemporary method of storytelling because you know that something is going to happen so it creates this sense of impending doom. But also what it does is, the chronology of the book is such that the Rivers part of the story falls in the last third and although it’s an extremely important for Jane to have those relationships, to find a family and to find a potential partner, it’s a narrative speed bump, if you think that the real attraction of the story is Jane and Rochester’s relationship. So what ends up happening in feature versions of the films is that the Rivers section gets compressed so that it’s ineffective. I think even in the 1943 version where Aldous Huxley was a screenwriter he condensed John Rivers’ character with a preacher from the school so we get the information about the inheritance but not the possibility of Jane and John Rivers’ potential partner, and that’s an important part of Jane’s character to be able to make those decisions. If you don’t give her a sense of control over her fate then you take away a part of her strength. So by starting off at that part of the story we could take the important parts of the Rivers’ story and spread them across two hours. Where as if they’d been all together they wouldn’t make sense, but because we spread them out we create the sense that time has passed with them and you can therefore understand why she would give her money away to them or why that she would even consider John as a potential husband. (...)
Q: You mentioned earlier about condensing and spreading out certain scenes, was it difficult to decide what made the cut and what didn’t?
Yes, even some of the deleted scenes which we took out of the film were really fiercely debated as we were trying to figure out the best version of the film. Those kinds of things – condensing language, condensing everything else. Each of us had our favourite moment or scene and debated back and forth, we tried to include as much as possible as long as it didn’t ruin the scene. There are also these iconic moments where you debate do you put that in or do you take it out? In the end you make the decision what’s best for the film. There are things we took out which might upset fans, but it’s a movie, not the book, it’s its own animal. (...)

Q: I think the “do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little I don’t have as much heart and soul?’ is definitely one of the most powerful scenes, both in the book and the film.
I think that that’s what gets people upset sometimes, that in the film versions they feels it’s unfair that Jane is shown to be attractive because they think that women who identify with that idea are not attractive, they like the idea that there’s a heroine who isn’t attractive. But I also think it’s one of those things about Jane and that her perception of self was so much lower than who she really was. Because Diana Rivers even says that Jane’s pretty – I have proof in the book that she says it! It’s more her own perception than being less of who she is. I also think it’s the same with Rochester. I mean, Rochester must have been attractive. (Vicki Isitt)

The Independent explores the many adaptations of Jane Eyre with special attention to the age gap between Jane and Rochester:

"His figure was enveloped in a riding cloak, fur collared and steel clasped," Brontë has her heroine observe. "I traced the general points of middle height and considerable breadth of chest. He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow... he was past youth, but had not reached middle-age; perhaps he might be 35."
Not exactly love's young dream, then. In fact, his age apart, Brontë might be describing Gordon Brown. Jane is 18, and the age difference with Rochester has rarely been adhered to in the screen adaptations of Brontë's smouldering Gothic melodrama. Perhaps such an age gap has been considered indecent, although it was deemed unremarkable in Hollywood movies for leading men, from Cary Grant to Harrison Ford, to squire screen actresses at least half their age.
The 1970 TV-movie version, with a 31-year-old Susannah York and a 43-year-old George C Scott, is one of the few of the 25-plus film and television versions of Jane Eyre to have a plainly – almost shockingly – visible age gap. And although there is an identical age difference between the leads in the new Jane Eyre movie, Mia Wasikowska (23) and Michael Fassbender (35), it is somehow less noticeable. Thirty five is obviously the new 25. (...)
Orson Welles, cinema's most famous Mr Rochester, was only two years older than his co-star Joan Fontaine in the 1943 Hollywood adaptation. If he seems considerably older, it's because he gives a performance of cocksure experience, while Fontaine had honed her maidenly timidity four years earlier as the heroine-victim in Alfred Hitchcock's film of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. (...)
Dalton had the dark Byronic looks, Hinds the masterful mien, Hurt seemed wistful, haunted and miscast. Toby Stephens seemed merely miscast in the most recent TV version, from 2006.
If Rochester should be dark and brooding, verging on cruel, what of Jane? Is she a plain Jane, or is she more jolie laide – unconventionally beautiful actresses certainly being favoured by the directors who cast Ruth Wilson and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Mia Wasikowska, ethereal in her own skin (as she proved in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland), has been scrubbed back as the latest Jane on the block, making her fit Rochester's description of his governess: "you are not pretty any more than I am handsome." (...)
Cary Fukunaga, director of the new adaptation, sees Jane in a traditional light, as balm for Rochester's tortured soul. "(He is) a Byronic hero, somebody who is carrying the past with him," he says. "I had this feeling that he had been to some very decadent places in his life, and his guilt and bitterness and his lost youth is there in flashes. It's through Jane that he becomes healed."
One day Wasikowska and Fassbender's post-feminist Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester will seem as dated as Welles and Fontaine's pre-feminist versions, but that is surely the attraction to successive generations of artists, delighted to revisit these archetypal lovers afresh. Just as long as Cliff Richard, having made a musical out of Wuthering Heights' Heathcliff, doesn't turn his attention to another Brontë-sister Gothic hero. After all, Jane Eyre has already inspired three musicals to date, not to mention two operas, two ballets and an orchestral symphony. We are unlikely to have seen the last of these lovers just yet. (Gerard Gilbert)

The Derbyshire Times also has tickets for the special Haddon Hall screening of the film. ABC's The Book Show (Australia) talks about the film.

The Toronto Star asks critics, programmers and regular film buffs about the best films to be exhbitied at the TIFF. It's Chasing the Buzz poll time:

Wuthering Heights: “Director Andrea Arnold’s grasp of women mired in bleak environments seems the perfect choice to update Emily Bronte’s novel.” (Thom Ernst, host/producer, Saturday Night at the Movies) (Compiled by Peter Howell)

Glenn Sumi on Now Toronto does something similar:

On the big and small screen, there have been many, many adaptations of Emily Brontë’s novel about the doomed relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff. But this one promises to be different. Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank) is gradually emerging as the most interesting and assured female director since Jane Campion. And her take on sexuality is startling and fresh. Love that she’s working with a cast of unknowns, too.

The Daily Mail asks author Matt Haig about his reading preferences:

Jane Austen also does little for me. Give me a stormy Brontë sister any day of the week.

We reported a few days ago that the Charlotte Brontë villa was apparently safe in the aftermath of the Hurricane Irene, but it seems that it was a bit premature to say that. Wall Street Journal reports:

Residents at the Villa Charlotte Brontë, perched on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, are still unable to return home following a mudslide caused by rains from Hurricane Irene.
The mudslide occurred Sunday below a walkway that runs along the western side of the 17-unit co-op complex, leaving the structure standing but crippling a portion of the Metro North track that runs below the hillside. (...)
Metro-North spokeswoman Marjorie Anders added there was no cracking in the foundation or the walls of the co-op, a fact that makes residents like Brass wonder why they can’t return home.
“It’s built on solid rock,” Brass said. “I’m not worried about the structure at all in the very least. Not even one percent. I’m worried about the various agencies involved because they can string this out much longer than necessary.”
The Villa Charlotte Brontë was built on Fordham Gneiss bedrock, according to professor and Bronx borough historian Lloyd Ultan. The co-op, named for the English author of “Jane Eyre”, was built in the style of an Italian villa and divided into two buildings separated by a central courtyard. (Maya Pope-Chappell)

The Independent talks about the singer Laura Marling, known Brontëite:

Like Dylan, Marling has the magpie tendency to incorporate whatever she's reading or hearing into her songs. Her re-reading of Jane Eyre three times in the months leading up to the recording of her debut not only resulted in the Gothic influence behind songs such as "Night Terror", but surely also contributed to the intense examination of personal relationships, which drew comparisons to Joni Mitchell's Blue. (Andy Gill)

The Victoria Times Colonist reviews the theatre piece The Hysteric:

New Yorker Carol Lee Sirugo is the creator of The Hysteric, an energetic satire of 19th-century gothic literature à la the Brontës and Edgar Allan Poe. (Adrian Chamberlain)

The Sydney Morning Herald reviews Chalet girl and seems to remember that Ed Westwick was one of the names considered for playing Heathcliff before Andrea Arnold took the reins in Wuthering Heights 2011:

Westwick's Gossip Girl character, the bad but tormented Chuck Bass, is Hamlet, Heathcliff and Mr Darcy rolled into one, compared to the lifeless, sketchily drawn character he plays here. (Philippa Hawker)

The Times wonders if Artic Monkeys are middle-class rock. It seems that Kate Bush is middle-class pop:

One of the most respected pop artists of the last few decades is Kate Bush. When she stunned British audiences with her performance of Wuthering Heights on Top of the Pops in 1978, a nation witnessed the fruits of a childhood spent attending extracurricular music lessons reading romantic literature, and going to interpretive dance sessions on Saturday mornings. (Will Hodgkinson)