The Budget Cuts Charade

A Brontë mention in the Downton Abbey Christmas special, the book title they have to guess in the Christmas charade is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. You can see a complete photoset on Sunny Dreams.

The new black in economy and politics is, of course, budget cuts. They know no limits and we wonder if when they are planned someone looks beyond the sheer figures and thinks of the consequences (social and economical) of many of these (improvised) decisions. The latest in this series comes from Kirkless Council:

Museums could close for a quarter of the year to cut costs.
Kirklees Council officials have drawn up plans to shut cultural centres across the district in December, January and February.
The move would affect sites including: (...)

Red House Museum in Gomersal, an 1830s home which featured in the Charlotte Brontë novel Shirley.
Oakwell Hall in Birstall, a 17th Century stately home with extensive grounds which also featured in Shirley. (...)
The proposal is set to be formally unveiled next month, with the museums due to close in December 2012.
Unison’s chief steward for wellbeing and communities Kath McHendry told the Examiner yesterday: “We haven’t got firm details but the thing they are looking at is closing them in December, January and February.
“The museums would be closed for three months, unless there was a special event. That seems to be the proposal they want to run with.” (...)
Huddersfield Civic Society chairman Chris Marsden also attacked the plan yesterday.
“I think it’s a miserable idea to close the council’s cultural offering for a quarter of the year,” he said.
“The education of schoolchildren should be higher up the council’s agenda. This plan would spread ignorance.”

Mr Marsden believes the closures would harm Huddersfield’s tourism industry.
“It’s discouraging people from visiting the town,” he said.
“If you bring someone to Huddersfield, you would expect to be able to offer people some insight into the town through art and museums.”
Mr Marsden added that Kirklees should consider less radical ways to save money.

“I would like to know the rationale behind this,” he said.
“Closing museums for one day a week, or shutting earlier in the evening would be kinder.
“Closing for three months would be hard. The winter is a good time to visit museums, in the summer people want to do outdoor things, like go to Yorkshire Sculpture Park.”  (Barry Gibson in The Huddersfield Daily Examiner)

Uptown Magazine selects the best films of the year:

Jane Eyre 2011: This spellbinder plays so vividly in its atmospheric period-costumed context — yet its modern concerns with the demons of the subconscious, not to mention performances that made the characters’ needs seem vivid and urgent, pushes the lurid story to transcend its time. And as played by Mia Wasikowska, Charlotte Brontë’s titular heroine retains all her magnificence, refusing to indulge self-pity: "I have no tale of woe." No wonder the character is one of fiction’s most celebrated. (Kenton Smith)

As well as the Bay Area Reporter:

The 18th film of Charlotte Brontë's chilly castle tale is a transcendently romantic, tragic, gothic ghost story from Cary Joji Fukunaga, with a captivating quartet of Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell and Dame Judi Dench: forever my Jane Eyre. (David Lamble)

And Hollywood Chicago:

Ever since she materialized on the first season of HBO’s masterful series, “In Treatment,” Mia Wasikowska has quickly emerged as one of the most magnetic actresses of her generation. She’s blessed with the sort of face that’s impossible to look away from. And in Cary Fukunaga's sublime adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s gothic melodrama, Wasikowska proves to be a hypnotic beauty. Fans of Fukunaga’s galvanizing debut film, “Sin Nombre” may initially regard “Eyre” as a giant departure, yet both films are not without their similarities: ravishing photography, impeccable production design and a story anchored in the arduous coming-of-age journey of a strong female protagonist. Amelia Clarkson is also a standout as the young Jane who grows up to be a governess for the formidable Mr. Rochester, played by the tirelessly versatile Michael Fassbender Rochester’s hopeless infatuation with Jane leads to a series of complications, and the 12-year age difference between Fassbender and Wasikowska make their romantic entanglements more than a little unsettling. Yet it’s a testament to both actors’ skills that their romance registers as touching rather than creepy. Brontë’s novel has received an endless array of screen adaptations, but few have felt as authentic and heartfelt as Fukunaga’s overlooked gem. (mattmovieman)

Or East Bay Express:

Jane Eyre, on the other hand, marched into art houses last March with full fanfare, as the latest adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's classic gothic novel and also as director Cary Fukunaga's follow-up to his sensational first feature, Sin Nombre. The project had a couple of secret weapons — busy actors Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, two of 2011's most-utilized players — as well as a thoughtful screenplay adaptation by Moira Buffini. Australian product Wasikowska continues to enthrall. You could put her, Fassbender, Jamie Bell, Sally Hawkins, Simon McBurney, Judi Dench, and Craig Roberts in Bermuda shorts on a golf course and they could makes us believe in the inexorable workings of the English governess' fate — if Fukunaga were at the helm. One of the year's most conspicuous inconspicuous releases. (Kelly Vance)

MovieLine:

Cary Joji Fukunaga understands both the novel's quintessential Englishness and the raw animal nature that drives it. Michael Fassbender, as Mr. Rochester, finds the character’s inherent, awkward warmth without mistaking it for anything so bland as mere niceness. And Mia Wasikowska's Jane, physically just a slip of a thing, has carnal boldness to burn. Sex is threatening, as Charlotte Brontë knew, and Wasikowska and Fassbender make this particular dance look exceedingly dangerous. (Stephanie Zacharek)

Anne Thompson on IndieWire:

Cary Fukunaga's subtly elegant period drama is the best of a long line of adaptations of Charlotte Brontë's romantic classic (adapted here by Moira Buffini). Mia Wasikowska is pitch-perfect as the clear-eyed, lonely, self-reliant orphan governess who falls in love with mercurial employer Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender in yet another masterful 2011 performance). She saves him, is the point.

And indieWire's The Playlist:

"Wuthering Heights"
I was convinced, on walking out of the Venice press screening of Andrea Arnold's adaptation of the classic, much-filmed "Wuthering Heights," that I was looking at film that while it had little chance of catching on with the general public, it was sure to be a critical favorite. In fact, it didn't even manage that; sharply dividing reviewers on the Lido, in Toronto, and on its U.K. release in November, it came and went with only a few, like myself, shouting from the rooftops about it. But in a way, that just makes me cherish it more. Making this year's other Brontë adaptation, "Jane Eyre," look like a conservative Masterpiece Theater adaptation, Arnold rips her source material apart and starts again, creating a savage, brutal landscape (shot in glorious Academy ratio), that neatly mirrors the characters' cruelties against one another. Unlike the bulk of period dramas, there's little room for repression and subtext. Heathcliff, Cathy & co are as blunt towards each other as characters of their fledgling age probably would be (this is a world where virtually no one makes it past the age of 25, seemingly), and Arnold's approach of casting relative newcomers pays, for the most part, great dividends, even if it makes the film a little rough around the edges in places. Those who prefer the picturesque when it comes to their costume dramas are likely to be horrified, but "Wuthering Heights" was never a pristine period piece, and even if Emily Brontë never wrote a scene in which Cathy licks blood from the back of a badly beaten Heathcliff (it's sexier than it sounds, trust me), I have no doubt that she'd approve of Arnold's invention, and all those like it.
M.V.P.: Mr. Robbie Ryan. The DoP has continually impressed across his previous work with Arnold, as well as in the likes of "The Scouting Book For Boys" and "Brick Lane," but he outdoes himself here, with glorious compositions both sweeping and intimate. One can only assume he spent six months wandering the Yorkshire Moors on his own in order to get the kind of footage he achieves here.  (Oliver Lyttelton)

Kevin Martin reports the best books read this year in Gulf News:

[A]nd finally Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow, a literary masterpiece written in elegant prose about the lives and tragic times of the famous Brontë family.

Movie City News reviews Albert Nobbs:

The Victorian period, to me, is about the contrast between what we see on the surface and what lies beneath, and as such there was much to explore symbolically through a realistically unsanitary Victorian environment that would have better represented the inner turmoil of Albert Nobbs, who himself is hiding beneath the surface something very different from what he reveals to the world. Garcia’s Victorian Ireland is scrubbed just a little too clean. (...)
Actually, having seen Andrea Arnold’s take on Wuthering Heights at Toronto this year, I’d have liked to have seen what she would have done with this world and this material. (Kim Voynar)

Frocktalk posts a very interesting interview with Michael O'Connor, costume designer of Jane Eyre 2011 in which he says thinks like this:

Tell me about how you arrived at the color palette.  It was exquisite.  Was it a result of conversations with the Production Designer and DP, or was it something the director had in mind?
The colour palette really is about the balance between Jane and other characters. The book often describes Jane as wearing plain black. I thought this would be too severe so chose shades of grey, dark blue and slate colours with subtle patterns to reflect the mood of the scene. Once these colours were established, other characters fit in around her. So, for example Rochester has a brown frock coat and not the more usual black; likewise Mrs. Fairfax is mostly in brown. Blanche Ingram, where the temptation is to be brash and colourful, could be designed more subtly.

Check it out and look at some of the original sketches like the one on the right.

The Belfast Telegraph also talks about the need of repairs of the Haworth Parish Church; rawr-caps posts a lot of caps of Wuthering Heights 2009;  The Rainbow Notebook and Critical MeMe review Jane Eyre 2011; A Room of my Own posts in Swedish about the Brontës.