Why Sandition Was Not as Good as LBD

I loved the Lizzie Bennet Diaries.  Like many of you, I sat in eager anticipation for each new episode and then watched the episode multiple times, squeeing and over-analyzing each move the characters made.  I supported the crew in the Kickstarter and was super excited when they announced they would run a miniseries of Austen's Sanditon this summer.  I hadn't read Sanditon, but I trusted the team to do as good a job with it as they did with LBD.

And then they didn't.

Don't get me wrong, I still love Pemberly Digital, I am watching Emma Approved, and Sanditon wasn't awful.  It just wasn't as good as LBD was.  And here are the two main ways where Sanditon went wrong.

1.  They chose an unknown, unfinished Austen novel as their source material.

I know that a lot of people who hadn't read Pride and Prejudice or seen the movies watched and loved LBD.  However, there is a wide cultural understanding of the general plot of Pride and Prejudice.  Even if you have never read the book or seen the movies, you know it's about guy and girl who hate each other and then fall in love.

Sanditon does not have that same cultural presence.  Because Austen died before she completed the novel, most people have not read it.  Even after seeing Welcome to Sanditon and reading the summary of the novel on Wikipedia, I still don't know what the story is about.  With LBD you knew Lizzie and Darcy would get together in the end; the question was how.  With Sanditon, I couldn't figure out what was supposed to be happening, and I'm still not entirely sure.  What was our end-goal supposed to be beyond Clara and Edward getting together?  Were we ever supposed to resolve Tom's hijacking and re-branding of the town's businesses in a false sense of progress?  Was Clara supposed to have a story arc?  She didn't change like Elizabeth, Anne, Emma, and Elinor did throughout their novels.

And what was with the the spin gym side story?  It was introduced during the last third of the series and then didn't go anywhere.  You don't introduce things that late in the game.  Or if you do, it better be important.  But it wasn't.  It created a negligible amount of romantic tension and then...nothing. 

2.  They sacrificed core content for filler content, specifically the fan videos.

Don't get me wrong, I love the community that sprung up around LBD.  I love that we swapped theories in the comments and created gifs and wrote reaction posts and experienced LBD together.  However, these fan reactions should never take prescient over the professionally written content.  I don't subscribe to see four minutes of fan videos every week.  These videos didn't move the plot along at all.  At least in LBD when we had filler episodes, we got to know the characters better.  The Sanditon fan videos, not so much.  

A better way to do "filler" episodes was Clara's ice cream videos.  Even though they didn't move the plot forward much, we got to know Clara.  

I don't know if Pemberly Digital was just trying to stretch out the series to make it last longer because Emma Approved got delayed or what, but I would have preferred a shorter, fan-video-less series.  I think the community is great and the fans are great, but we are not the central content.  The story is.

I did like Tom and Ed and Clara.  I loved the late night conversation between Clara and Ed.  I loved seeing more of Gigi and her growth as a character beyond her brother's expectations.  Pemberly Digital made some big mistakes with Sanditon, but I think they learned from those mistakes and will avoid them with Emma Approved.  I'm excited to see where this new series will go.

Vlog Adaptations of Classics

As you can probably tell from some of my posts this spring (1, 2, 3), I love the Lizzie Bennet Diaries.  I'm a huge Austen-ite.  I've read her books and seen the movie adaptations more times than is probably healthy.  I thought I knew the story of Pride and Prejudice, but The Lizzie Bennet Diaries took the story in a whole-new-while-still-true-to-the-book direction.  The writers brought a depth to Lydia's character that I didn't know was there.  It is a fantastic adaptation that totally deserves the Emmy it won, and I'm sad that it's over.  However, while LBD may have reached an end, it has inspired a bunch of new vlog adaptations of other classic novels.  I prove my English nerdiness by freaking out every time a new episode comes up in my subscription feed, which is pretty much every day considering how many adaptations I'm following.  Today I am sharing these adaptations with you.  

The Autobiography of Jane Eyre--episodes on Wednesdays and Saturdays

This is probably my favorite adaption.  The actress is Jane.  She totally channels Jane's contemplative seriousness without being gloomy about it.  This Wednesday's episode was the best so far.  Meanwhile, Rochester is a rude, inconsiderate, jerk.  This is more a problem with the source material than the adaptation.  Rochester is supposed to be that way, but it's more problematic in a modern setting than it was in the 1800s.  So far the writers have kept him true to character without making him too easy to hate.  However, I don't see how they're going to deal with some of the issues later in the book.  

For example:  Bertha.  Today's mental health care is words better than what was available in the 1800s.  Back then, it was merciful for Rochester to keep Bertha in his attic where she would be well cared for and comfortable rather than banishing her to an asylum where she would be, at best, horribly neglected.  But modern Rochester could easily find quality care for a crazy wife.  This makes me think that Bertha's not going to be crazy, but then what will the insurmountable Bertha problem be? 

An even bigger adaptation challenge is Jane's flight from Thornfeild.  People can't disappear anymore, not in our internet-saturated world.  But she has to do so without losing viewers.  Jane can't go internet silent, because viewers would get bored and we'd miss all the St. John story and we can't miss that.  If she changed to a new channel, she'd lose the viewers who would miss the memo and Rochester could still track her down.  I can't figure out how they're going to make this work, but I can't wait to see how they do it.

Nick Carroway Chronicles--episodes on Mondays 

I think The Great Gatsby is one of the classic novels that most naturally translates to vlog form since the book is basically Nick telling us what happens to other people.  He's a built in narrator.  Since there is only one episode per week, we're still at the very beginning of the story and have hardly seen Gatsby, but I'm liking it so far.  Also,I love Jordan.  She's hilarious.  I don't even know how to describe her.  She's not goofy, just funny.  This series deserves way more attention than it's gotten.  

Emma Approved--episodes on Mondays and Thursdays

This series comes from the same team that made The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Sanditon (Sanditon has its own post here).  Emma Approved just premiered on Monday, so it's way too early to judge whether this will be as good an adaptation as LBD, but so far it looks promising.  Emma's characterization is perfect.  She's confident to a fault.  She thinks she reads people better than she does.  She's self centered and falsely concerned about other people.  She's so Emma Woodhousey.  I was unduly excited about this when it premiered on Monday.  

Also, does anyone else think Alex Knightly is very Edward Denhem-like?  His voice and personality seem very similar.

The Emma Project--episodes on Tuesdays and Saturdays

I discovered this one just the other day.  It will be interesting to watch this series and Emma Approved at the same time.  They've done a good job of setting up the class distinction with the college seniority and Emma would totally be a psychology major.  I love that Robbie Martin is a farmer going to to community college; we totally get why Emma would think Harriet is above marrying someone like that as well as why Emma a jerk for thinking that.  And we've started seeing more of Emma influencing Harriet in her decisions.

However, The Emma Project doesn't have the same professional feeling that the other adaptations have.  I'm not talking about lighting and sound.  I can ignore that.  I mean that instead of coming across as Emma the character telling us about her life, it feels like an actress reciting memorized lines, so it doesn't feel as real.  They also seem to be rushing through the story rather than taking time to establish the characters.  I'm still interested in it, but it's not the best adaptation I've found.

Notes by Christine--episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays

I found Notes by Christine just today.  I like it so far, but I haven't had time to see how well I like it.  They're taking a risk by having episodes that are just Christine singing opera music.  It's true to character and the story of Phantom of the Opera (book not musical), but it doesn't move the plot forward at all.  So it'll be interesting to see whether or not Youtube audiences latch onto it.  Also, the opera ghost has his own channel where he, without showing his face, offers Christine private lessons.  So that's creepy.  It'll be interesting to see where they take this story.  They could really play up the creepy stalker aspect by making him an internet predator.  We'll see. 

Anyways, go check out these series for yourself and let me know what you think.    Also, are there more vlog adaptations of classic novels out there that I missed?  I must find them all!  

Book Pet Peeves

We all have things that get on our nerves in books and movies and things.  Here are my peeves.  What are yours?  

This really was the best thumbnail Youtube could come up with.  Lame.

Books and Movies and Things Mentioned:

Wings--Aprilynne Pike

The Hunger Games--Suzanne Collins

Eyes Like Stars--Lisa Mantchev

Clockwork Angel--Cassandra Clare

Entwined--Heather Dixon

Hush, Hush--Becca Fitzpatrick

Twilight--Stephanie Meyer

Strands of Bronze and Gold--Jane Nickerson

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

Carousel 

Brave

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym--Edgar Allan Poe

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea--Jules Verne

Cinder--Marissa Meyer

Seraphina--Rachel Hartman

Harry Potter--J.K. Rowling

The Last Think I Remember--Andrew Klaven

Goose Girl--Shannon Hale

The False Prince--Jennifer A. Nielsen

Anything written by Brandon Sanderson

Frankenweenie Thoughts

We recently watched Tim Burton's Frankenweenie in my Frankenstein and Film class, and it was super cute in a creepy sort of way.  It's sweet; it's funny; it's clever.  There are so many references to other Frankenstein films, the original novel, and monster movies in general.  Shelly the pet turtle, Edgar E. Gore, Percephone's Bride of Frankenstein hairdo, Godzilla rampaging and crushing a car.  And of course, there's the usual Tim Burton visual vibe of tall, gaunt, pale, spindly legged people.  Everyone in town is distinctive, but the best representation of this is a character whose name on the script is just "Weird Girl."

Weird Girl

My favorite character is Mr. Rzykruski (no I can't pronounce his name), the science teacher styled after Vincent Price.  There is a (mild spoiler) great scene in which the towns people/mob are gathered at a parent meeting to question whether this science stuff is healthy for their children.  They accuse him of being a monster (figurative, not literal, need to clarify for this movie), but they give him a chance to defend himself, and he basically calls them ignorant, small-minded, fools and proceeds to use cracking-head-open imagery to describe his teaching.  So he basically plays right into the town's preconceived prejudices about him, and I can't decide if he did that intentionally or not. Since I can't find the clip of the parent meeting, here's a clip of one of Mr. Rzykruski's science lessons, just so you can get a feel for his character. 

Frankenweenie is a great adapation of the Frankenstein story.  So go forth and watch it on Netflix or Amazon Prime or Redbox or wherever you watch things.

The Hobbit Thoughts

Okay, so another set of rantings about a movie that has been out for ages.

Me on the way to the movie

I was torn for a long time on whether or not I wanted to see the movie.  I love Lord of the Rings, but I am against single books being turned into multiple movies.  Harry Potter, you gave everyone else permission and now other movies are abusing that power to make more money.  The Hobbit the book is short enough that it could be done well in one movie.  Then they split it into two.  Fine, I'll grumble about paying for two tickets, but I'll go.  Then it was split into three!  That's just a money grab.  

But, despite my qualms, I really liked the movie.

The Hobbit is a movie for already enthused LOTR fans.  It makes a lot of references to events and people that casual fans might not get.  At the same time, I haven't read The Simarillian and I haven't read any of Tolkein's books in years and I was able to keep up just fine.  So maybe the references are a treat if you get them, but not a stumbling block if you don't.  

There are a lot of fun but unnecessary digressions.  Let's tell a story about Thorin's childhood.  Again.  This movie was nearly three hours long.  Could they not find anything at all to cut out?  I like the extended editions, but I don't necessarily need them in theaters.  Despite these digressions, the movie was paced well.  I never got board, and I left the theater feeling like it was a 2-hour, not a 3-hour movie.  This may be a symptom of being a major LOTR fan and soaking up any bit of interesting story that exists.

The Gollum scene was great! I wish we could see more of him.  And this song still gives me the chills.  I love rumbling base.

What did you think of the moive?

Les Mis Rantings

So the movie's been out for over a month, but I have to share my thoughts about Les Mis.

Reviewish Thoughts:

So much shaky cam and super super closeups.  It takes a little while to get used to the constant singing, but once you get into the swing of things.  Don't go in expecting Broadway, it's a much more intimate portrayal of the story.

Wow!  Just wow.  Anne Hathaway, you sang an emotional roller coaster of "I Dreamed a Dream" in one long complete continuous shot!  Fantine's story is not pleasant, but man is it powerful.  You are also the first actress I've seen that cried unprettily.  Usually it's just a few tears trickling down an actress's face.  No, you had the real scrunched up face, red nosed, heartbroken sobs.  You lost 25 pounds that you did not have for this roll.  I can't say that I agree with that decision, since it is probably bad for your health, but you were definitely committed to your roll.  A stunning and compelling performance.

Musings:

I wish Javert's story was explored in more depth.  Sure, Russel Crow has a hard time acting and singing at the same time, but Javert is still one of my favorite characters.  He's a wonderful foil to Valjean, and their names are too similar for that to be an accident. He is unwaveringly committed to the letter of the law.  In a very unfair world  he clings to the law as the only fair and impartial judge.  But then Valjean shows him mercy.  And he sees Gavroche's body, and his heart comes out, just a little bit.  I love the part where he puts his own medal on Gavroche, acknowledging the boy and thinking for the first time, that maybe this boy was innocent.  And if Gavroche is innocent, maybe the others were as well.  And as soon if he question his worldview, he has to take the responsibility for all his actions, and he can't face that prospect.  And then he takes up the "What have I done?" self-crisis song that Valjean sang earlier (I love when musicals recycle themes from earlier in the play and give them to different characters).  Was Russel Crow as good as Philip Quast?  No, but he brought a new dynamic to the role and the two actors are not mutually exclusive.

I love this musical.  I love the story; I love the music; I love the lyrics; I love the characters (now I feel a bit like this girl).  I want to go see it again and again and again.  I cried multiple times and am not ashamed of that. 

Who else saw the movie and what did you think?