Watched: Bright Star

I'm sure there is plenty in Bright Star to recommend itself to lovers of Romantic poetry, lovers of costume dramas (particularly of the Regency era), and lovers of tragic, well, love. And I don't have anything against any of those areas, in fact, I love Regency dramas and am sort of okay with tragic love when it's interesting. Which this is at times, although mostly it's just kind of that unspoken/unseen sort of story. Lots of letter writing and reading, you know?

What was most notable to me, besides Jane Campion's glacial pacing and alternately stark/lush composition was the wide variety of dresses Abbie Cornish is dressed in. This chick is supposed to be poor enough that she can't marry sadsack, destitue Keats and yes, she is a seamstress, but still, she has enough outfits to clothe every Jane Austen character in the repetoire and probably still have leftovers. I tried to catch some of them, although I kind of lost interest towards the end since (SPOILER ALERT! THAT IS, IF YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT POETRY OR HISTORY) things turn out to be kind of a bummer and Fanny Brawne gets decreasingly frilly. Apparently Janet Patterson (who seems to like this kind of thing, having done Oscar and Lucinda, The Piano, and Peter Pan) did both costume and production design, to which I say... kudos for giving us something to look at, since this story is tonally very similar to The Piano, which is to say... it's romantic, yes, and beautiful, but also sort of boring.

Re: frills:



Sort of frilly, but believably practical...

...Getting frillier...

WHOA.

WHAT.

Aggressively frilly.