When the author depicts Elizabeth Bennett as willing to kill a man over an overheard slight? Hell yes, it is.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
- Thread starter Goliath
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I read Android Karenina, and liked it. I was amazed that the author could maintain the gag for the entire book.
I have read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies plus its prequel Dawn of the Dreadfuls.
I found them both to be refreshing and fun.
I could never get through Pride and Prejudice before this version.
I didn't know there was going to be a film adaptation. Interesting is all I can say. Not sure about that...could manage to be difficult--I don't want to see it become a slasher film.
I will keep my eyes and ears posted though for more info.
I found them both to be refreshing and fun.
I could never get through Pride and Prejudice before this version.I didn't know there was going to be a film adaptation. Interesting is all I can say. Not sure about that...could manage to be difficult--I don't want to see it become a slasher film.
I will keep my eyes and ears posted though for more info.
The word of the day is: parody. Elizabeth Bennett and indeed many of Mz. Austen's characters have an irritating tendency to get their many layers of undergarments in a bunch over the stupidest, smallest of social faux-pas. This is the logical exagerration of that bathetic, mountains-out-of-molehill attitude.
I had no choice in the matter, but yes, Pride and Prejudice--and Mz. Austen's work more generally--is the best insomnia cure I've ever encountered. I did like this version of it--in addition to improving Mz. Austen's proto-Harlequin trash by orders of magnitude, I was impressed by the author's mimicry. It's hard to tell where the original text ends and his begins, and vice versa.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Word to the wise: people who cite New Yorker articles generally know what parodies are. But if, as you imply, parodies and juvenile tripe are mutually exclusive, I suppose Vampires Suck isn't juvenile tripe because it's a parody?
You might be a tad less snarky if your entire future hinged on what kind of man you could get to propose to you before the age of twenty-five. Austen's characters are damned realistic in that regard.
Bull. The paradox of Austen heroines' lives is that they had to aggressively compete for potential husbands, but never present themselves as anything but the mildest and most demure of ladies, because that's what the most desirable prospects wanted. The essence of their lives, in short, was subtlety and subterfuge.
Yeah, willingness to publicly murder guys who they overhear speaking negatively of that is a "totally logical exaggeration" of those sorts of personality games.
If you "can't tell where the original text ends and his begins."
For the record, I'd actually be interested in an intelligent version of this story that starts in Austen's world, introduces the zombies, and provides credible, non-anachronistic character reactions to such an event. But that would require a lot more effort, and the results far less appealing to those who can't get through one of the most accessible works of the English literary canon.
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It does seem appropriate, in this case.
I agree. Frankly, I thought Attack of the Clones had better written and more realistic characters than Ms. Austen's work; and that movie had a jumping frog with a lightsaber!
The problem with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies isn't that it defaces a classic work of literature (which is a perfectly acceptable mode of responding to literature), but that it takes a joke with a life of however long it takes someone to say, "hey did you know there's a book called Pride and Prejudice and ZOMBIES!?" and stretches out to the length of, well, Pride and Prejudice. It's a twelve-second gag, and suffers as a 320-page one.
That's exactly how I felt about Android Karenina at page 30, but by page 100 I couldn't get enough of it.
But if, as you imply, parodies and juvenile tripe are mutually exclusive, I suppose Vampires Suck isn't juvenile tripe because it's a parody?
Obviously--just like at any of the ___ Movie series. P&P&Z, however, is clever parody that sends up the manifold faults of the original. (I'm not familiar with the other book you cite so can't comment)
The mating habits of petty bourgeois, suffocatingly provincial landed gentry is a subject of resounding irrelevance. If you're going to feel sorry for anybody in this scenario, feel sorry for the servants and tenants who had to wait hand and foot on these nattering girl-women and dissolute boy-men, and whose futures rested on the whims on those selfsame idle, infantile, sorry excuses for human beings.
This is just one point where P&P&Z improves on the original: it doesn't shy away from showcasing the callousness of this contemptible cadre towards their servants (treated as disposable zombie-fodder), and the zombies themselves often function as a motif of the repressed underclass (I love that the author has the characters call them 'Unmentionables', hitting both the nigh-invisibility of servants in the original text in additional to the sexual implications therein).
Why not? In the original, Darcy is apparently the least assholish of this cast of undesirables because he tolerates and perhaps even admires Elizabeth's supposed willfulness. In this rewriting, fighting abilities are grafted onto willfulness as something proper ladies should lack, even as they are necessary for survival (in a world overrun with zombies); here, Darcy is the least assholish character because he eventually comes to admire Elizabeth's lethality.
No kidding. I always do a double-take whenever I hear someone cite Austen for realistic characters. The hero and heroine are the only characters who exhibit any dimensionality (and even then, not much). Most everybody else can be defined by a single term, an adjective attached to a name--'bookish', 'flighty', 'air-headed', 'pedantic'--and who never stray in thought, speech or behaviour from the one feature that, one realizes, defines the totality of their being. Her books are populated not by characters, but caricatures.
I figure that's why it introduces ninjas halfway through.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Which in no way explains how PPZ Elizabeth's intent to murder a living human being over a mere overheard remark in any way parodies the...
Ah, screw it. Keep drinking the Flanneled One-flavored Kool-Aid if it makes you happy...
Elizabeth massively overreacts in all cases; the revised version changes the stakes involved to highlight the absurdity of the overreaction. What's not to understand?
Ah, screw it. Keep drinking the Flanneled One-flavored Kool-Aid if it makes you happy...
Flanneled One-flavored?
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Right, I recall seeing that before. Well, I'll caveat that by pointing out that I, as is obvious from these posts, think Mz. Austen sets the bar of quality pretty dang low, so stating that I think someone is better than Austen isn't to necessarily imply that I think they're any good overall, merely in comparison.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
.... Aaaaand, director #2 woke up one recent morning, with one hell of a headache but sober nonetheless, and realized that actually making this movie would be only slightly less artistically vapid and personally degrading than doing an interpretive dance performance of Thomas Kincade's A Christmas Cottage while wearing a tutu made entirely of duct tape... as a fundraiser for a Scientology charity initiative to bring E-meters to rural pockets of Tasmania.
Seriously, fuck this project.
Seriously, fuck this project.
That sums up the series of books well. It was impossible to get through more than five pages. I did find it better than the Kiera Knightly version of P&P though.