Weird show. I read the novel, so I knew it would be weird, but the scriptwriters for the series have doubled down on the crazy.

Wide Sargasso Sea

1993, 720p

Not really breaking news, of course, but an update of one of my old reviews, coupled with somebody else's new HD captures.

Karina Lombard and Rowena King

Lombard



King

In our various discussions over the years, we have established an objective chick-flick measurement from the demographic breakdowns at IMDb. We subtract the male score from the female score, and a chick-flick is one in which the average score awarded by females is significantly higher than the score awarded by males. The all-time estrogen champion is probably Dirty Dancing, with 1.3, and that movie has such mystical power that many women will perform oral sex for hours on a man merely because he is willing to acknowledge (insincerely of course, but don't tell any women) that Dirty Dancing doesn't totally suck. So 1.3 is a massive difference, and even .5 is highly significant. One half of a point may not sound like much, but even at that modest level of female skew, films exhibit some serious estrogen levels, as evidenced by the fact that Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants scores only .7, and you probably can't imagine any guy liking that.

Wide Sargasso Sea scores .6, almost at the Traveling Pants level.

How could it be otherwise? It is a prequel to Jane Eyre, which is the Dirty Dancing of novels. Wide Sargasso Sea reveals the story formerly left unrevealed by Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre: the details of the first marriage of the dark, mysterious Mr. Rochester to a woman in the Caribbean who eventually became the madwoman in his attic in England. Jean Rhys wrote this prequel, and she was supremely qualified, not only because of her literary ability, but also because she grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica, knew the setting, and understood the relationships between the races on those islands, having often been the only white child in a playground filled with dark faces. Fulfilling the expectations of a good ersatz 19th century romantic novel set in the Caribbean (Caribbean Gothic?), it includes plenty of obeah magic and colorful patois, as well as a variety of characters who are mad, drunk, horny, racist, corrupt, or any combination thereof.

Ms Rhys is a bit of a romantic mystery herself. She published a few respected but obscure novels and short stories in the late 1920s and 1930's, when she was already in her forties, then disappeared from view for twenty years, until the BBC dramatized one of her works as a radio play in 1958. The popularity of the show sparked a renewed interest in her writing, so she sat down and worked for eight years on a new novel, which was Wide Sargasso Sea. This story was finally published in 1966, at which point she hadn't published anything meaningful in a quarter of a century and was almost as old as the universe itself. (She was 76, to be slightly more precise.)

I haven't read the book, but found the whole movie pointless and predictable and as boring as all get-out. Beautiful Karina Lombard couldn't act her way out of a Keanu Reeves lunchbox. She would be sorely tested to play the part of Karina Lombard in her own biopic, but her limited abilities were tested far beyond the edge of the envelope when she was cast as a Welsh/Irish/French woman, despite the fact that her ancestors seem to have been Native Americans, Southeast Asians, or Pacific Islanders, and she speaks with an indeterminate accent. I kept expecting the scriptwriter to work that into the plot somewhere, perhaps in the revelation of some family secret. At the very least, I expected somebody else in the cast to ask why that pretty Cambodian or Sioux woman was claiming to be Welsh. Nothing like that ever happened. They just ignored it. An odd touch.

It's a business-as-usual movie about dudes with loose blouses, but there is some good news for us guys:

* You don't have to go back and read or re-read Jane Eyre. This story stands alone. That's a big plus. Scientific studies have shown that most men would willingly give up a wild threesome with Kelly LeBrock and Jessica Alba if they can just avoid reading Jane Eyre.

* There's sex, nudity, and then more sex and nudity, all directed by John Duigan, a celebrity nudity hall-of-famer. Duigan is the same guy who directed Sirens, the Citizen Kane of celebrity nudity. His Sirens cinematographer, Geoff Burton, also collaborated on Wide Sargasso Sea.