Douglas McGrath
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Connections, in both directions
About ten to fifteen years ago, there was a spurt of teen films based on classics from Jane Austen's "Emma" in "Clueless" to Shakespeare in "10 Things I Hate About You" and "O." "Easy A" updates the convention with referential homage to the films of John Hughes and John Cusack's iconic "Say Anything" boom box scene, both of which are merged in the film's climax.
We all recall the wit and charm of Amy Heckerling 's 1995 " Clueless ," which seamlessly and gracefully grafted the plot of Jane Austen's "Emma" to a contemporary Valley Girl comedy of manners and mores.
But, while "Clueless" follows the plot of Jane Austen's "Emma" point for point, "Easy A's" connection to Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" is mostly in Stone's head, as she relates to the ostracized Hester Prynne.
The great Emma Stone (Superbad, Zombieland) stars as Olive, who narrates almost all of Easy A as a confessional webcast about a tumultuous time in her high school career.
Remember Clueless, which updated Jane Austen's Emma and made Alicia Silverstone the girl of the month?
Like Clueless, which mined Jane Austen’s “Emma” for material, Easy A is a play off of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel “The Scarlet Letter,” about a woman who is publicly shamed into wearing a mark to denote her sexual transgressions.
Before becoming the famous author of "Pride and Prejudice" and "Emma," Jane Austen (Anne Hathaway, "The Devil Wears Prada") was torn between her passion for rebellious metropolitan law student Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy, "The Last King of Scotland") and her family's preferred suitor, the wealthy Mr. Wisley (Laurence Fox, "Gosford Park").
Visually, "Becoming Jane" falls somewhere between "Emma" and "Persuasion" in terms of its faithfulness to Regency-era hygiene and lifestyle, though it edges nearer to "Clueless" when it comes to sex.
Yet, ultimately, the unique magic of Austen so beautifully caught in 1996's "Emma" is missing.
Throughout "Becoming Jane," in fact, director Julian Jarrold and screenwriters Sarah Williams and Kevin Hood draw thematic parallels with not only "Pride and Prejudice" but "Emma," "Sense and Sensibility," and "Northanger Abbey."
Our schemer might also be in the vein and a subversion of the title character from Austen's Emma, as she's a matchmaker here—albeit with mean-spirited intentions.
Robin Swicord’s The Jane Austen Book Club, from her own screenplay, based on the eponymous novel by Karen Joy Fowler, succeeds only partially and only intermittently in establishing connections between six contemporary central Californian members of a Jane Austen book club and the Regency England characters in Austen’s six novels, which, in case you’ve forgotten, are Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion.
The setting is Sacramento, where five women and one man meet to discuss Jane Austen's novels while their lives come together and pull apart in ways that seem lifted from the pages of "Emma" and "Pride and Prejudice," et al.
It stands in relation to the original the way Amy Heckerling's Beverly Hills comedy Clueless does to Jane Austen's Emma.
Maggie's romantic machinations are reminiscent of the protagonist in a Shakespeare comedy, and she's a sensible heroine in the vein of Jane Austen's "Emma," keeping her head while everyone around her loses theirs.
The film gets better as it goes along; in terms of pure giggle-inducing brio, it recalls Amy Heckerling’s Valley Girl comedy Clueless, an update of a classic (Jane Austen’s Emma) that is now a classic in its own right.
Some channel her with success (“Clueless,” an “Emma” update, and “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” a “Pride and Prejudice” homage, as well as the “Sense and Sensibility”-lite novel, “The Three Weissmans of Westport”), but attempts to recapture her wit, insight into behavior and gentle romance face an uphill battle.
There, she and the other guests, all women, will don sumptuous gowns, gather for tea, jaunt about the gardens, and volley epithets with hunky actors playing chivalrous gents right out of Emma.
Booster plays Noah, sort of Jane Austen’s “Emma” transplanted to “Pride & Prejudice.”
On a purely structural basis, its story is a little too reverential to the original novel in a way that, for example, Clueless ’s spin on Emma wasn’t.
Her novels, literary studies in parody, burlesque and irony mixed with social commentary, have enjoyed second lives in everything from “Clueless,” an update of “Emma” set in Beverly Hills, and the self-explanatory “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”
The adaptation of Jack London's 1903 novel is part of a mini-boom of Lit 101 adaptations, coming after the $200 million success of Little Women and before upcoming versions of Jane Austen's Emma and Charles Dickens' David Copperfield.
With Armando Ianucci‘s anarchic take on David Copperfield and Autumn de Wilde‘s new version of Emma to follow in the new year, there seems to be a developing trend that is surprisingly welcome.
Heckerling’s film, an arch update of Jane Austen’s Emma , benefited from the director’s weeks of anthropological observation of SoCal teens; Gerwig mined her own adolescence for hers.
She is a beauty and a gifted comedian, who played Kate in " Nicholas Nickleby " and was the younger sister, Cassandra, in the wonderful 2003 film " I Capture the Castle ."
Yet Luna (Y Tu Mama Tambien) and Garai (Nicholas Nickleby) make an appealing couple, while fans of the original Dirty Dancing will be rewarded with an extended cameo by Swayze as a dance instructor.
This time around, class brain and social klutz Katey (Romola Garai, the innocent little sister of "Nicholas Nickleby" with a flavorless mid-Atlantic accent passing for American) is dropped into Batista's Cuba, circa 1958.
Bad Moms (2016)
Directed by Scott Moore
influenced by I Don't Know How She Does It (2011)
Plot Themes
Kunis’ low-key charm makes her a perfect fit for the part, which Sarah Jessica Parker essentially tried and failed to bring off in the very similar but disastrous 2011 movie “I Don’t Know How She Does It.” Millions of moms will identify with the scrambled chaos of her work-home life, and if Lucas and Moore rely too heavily on clichés and cheap gags in the early going, the movie gains a little substance and understanding as it goes along.
Amy is a working mom who makes all of her kids’ breakfast and lunches, takes them to school, works her sales job at a hipster coffee roaster, then is late picking up her kids or going to a PTA meeting, cooks a meal for her family, and… starting to sound like that Sarah Jessica Parker rom-com I Don’t Know How She Does It?
Like 2011’s insipid adaptation of I Don’t Know How She Does It, we’re trading in a wholly manufactured tension between stay-at-home moms and working moms.
Cruel Intentions offers a modern-day, American adolescent version of a classic tale -- following the lead of Clueless (which adapted Jane Austen's Emma) and Baz Luhrmann's hip, modern take on Romeo and Juliet.
Clueless was a new take on Jane Austen's "Emma."
First there was Clueless (Jane Austen's "Emma"), then She's All That ("Pygmalion"), and now Cruel Intentions.
When Michael Kovak (Colin O'Donoghue) decides he doesn't have the faith to enter the priesthood, a horrible accident and the urging of his superior, Father Matthew (Toby Jones, "Infamous," "W."), persuade him to travel to the Vatican, which has decreed that each diocese in the United States will be appointed with an exorcist.
Tautou uses her limpid gaze to maximum effect in this endearing and inventive romantic comedy, in which she portrays a waitress who, making like a Gallic version of Jane Austen's Emma, fixes the lives of her neighbors and coworkers in Paris.
The results are thoroughly entertaining and often surprisingly funny, although Charlie Hunnam ("Abandon") is bland as the totally good Nicholas and his romance with Madeline Bray (Anne Hathaway, "The Princess Diaries") is too abruptly handled to inspire a rooting interest.
First, "Clueless" took on Jane Austen's timeless story "Emma" and updated it for the present day.
"Emma," starring Kate Beckinsale ("Cold Comfort Farm") as the meddlesome heroine of Austen's 1816 social comedy, is scheduled for 5 p.m. and again at 9 p.m. Sunday on A&E.
She came to the role well prepared, after playing another socially self-assured comic figure in the recent film ''Cold Comfort Farm.''
But this new "Emma," guided by Kate Beckinsale ("Cold Comfort Farm") as a more willful, more snippy and therefore more believably callow Emma, is truer to the detective spirit of the novel and satisfying in more significant ways.