s

340 meters per second

Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.

&mdash Alfred Adler (1870-1937)

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Sing a little song.


Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is rightly considered a classic of English Literature, combining a brilliant critique of 19th-century gender roles with a realistic, lucid examination of the multiple purposes of (and entry point into) marriage.

Bride & Prejudice is a Hollywood-ized version of a Bollywood version of Austen's novel (got it?).

In true bolly-style, the costuming is lavish, there's a musical number every fifteen minutes and traditional gender tropes are firmly reasserted in the closing scene. That having been said, director Gurinder Chadha took some interesting chances with the adaptation and managed to remain faithful to the spirit of the original while still highlighting some important truisms about contemporary India (and America). Much of the original text's humour is situational, with fish-out-of-water scenarios playing themselves out in rural England; in Chadha's remake, the spaces are small-town India, urban India and southern California. The class and cultural divides are vividly illustrated and discussed by the characters, with the axes wealth, race, ethnicity and gender brought into sharp relief.

I had a great time watching it, and I fuckin' hate musicals.

* * *

Steenblogen and Pacanukeha both showed me that when it comes to publicizing the horrific effects of war on the lives of children, UNICEF doesn't fuck around.

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