IN MY VIEW
IT seems all of the big new series are currently running and will be for a while, so in lieu of anything new to feature this week I went hunting for something fairly recent to write about and possibly make fun of — and, hoo boy, did I ever hit pay dirt. If your weekend nights are as exciting as mine, then you might have nothing better to do at 22:25 this Friday than watch Pride and Prejudice and
Zombies on M-Net Movies Premiere (104). I knew the novel existed. I saw it in a bookshop once and didn’t pay it much mind, but little did I know it was a bestseller for some reason. And here I thought fiction had to have a degree of taste and ambition to find a publisher — I guess I’ve been going about it all wrong. I’m not a creaking old-timey person who is irrationally opposed to new spins on classic tales — I love Treasure Planet, for instance, one of Disney’s most underrated animated features — but Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? Zombies? Come on.
Anyway, a movie adaptation was inevitable, the result of which is this cheaply made box-office flop. Maybe the film would have grossed more if it had been released closer to the novel’s 2009 release, when people might have still been inclined to elbow each other in the ribs and say, “Hey, look, Pride and Prejudice . . . with Zombies. Pfffeheheh!”
It’s a concept that was good for a wry snicker at best, maybe a pulp-style short story in an edgy anthology for upcoming hipster millennial authors.
But here we are, with the result of a joke that went on too long and wasn’t even that funny to begin with. The cast is surprising, and includes Game of Thrones heavies Lena Headey and Charles Dance as Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mr Bennet; and Lily James, Bella Heathcote, Suki Waterhouse, Ellie Bamber and Millie Brady as the Bennet daughters.
The tone of the movie sits in a weird place, being less quirky and more dour than you’d expect from the title and completely lacking in the flowery dialogue intrinsic to most Austen adaptations, but still giving us the bizarre spectacle of kungfu-master debutantes killing legions of shambling undead with blades pulled from sexy garters — all while trying to follow the general story of the original by seeing the Bennet girls betrothed to suitable men. I somehow doubt this one will be mentioned in cult movie listicles 10 years from now.
While scrounging for things to list, I noticed e.tv (channel 194) has an Arnold Schwarzenegger two-fer for us this week. It’s not exactly a double-feature, because the movies are on different days, but it starts with True Lies (Thursday, 20:30), an entertaining spy-thriller-comedy in which Arnie co-stars alongside Jamie Lee Curtis. The scene I’ll always remember is one in which a captured Arnie pumped full of truth serum tells his interrogator how he plans to kill him, truthfully revealing that he has picked his handcuffs moments before springing into action.
On Friday at 22:30, if you’d rather avoid the Jane Austen schlock and watch something with cultural significance, you could do worse than Conan the
Barbarian on e.tv — the classic 1982 Arnie film in which he stars as a Barbarian tribesman out for revenge against the warlord who destroyed his village (played by James Earl Jones).
Ah, it’s not a total loss. I did find something new, for us at least, a 2013 TV comedy series adaptation of the PG Wodehouse Blandings stories. Simply entitled Blandings, it focuses primarily on the trials and tribulations of Clarence Threepwood, ninth Earl of Emsworth (Timothy Spall), at his home in Blandings Castle. He’d rather be left alone to aimlessly potter about the place or dote on his prizewinning pig, but he is constantly drawn into affairs of the local gentry, often by his domineering and ambitious sister Lady Constance Keeble (Jennifer Saunders). I should tell my old man about this show, because he’s the one who made me a Wodehouse fan by playing Jeeves audiobooks on our long drives to Durban and Cape Town. Find it on itv, channel 123, Mondays at 20:00.