Becoming Jane - Review

It’s a shame that Jane Austen wasn’t around to write the not-quite-autobiographical movie Becoming Jane, or it might have been filled with the charming insights she injected into her novels. What made the sharp-witted author so brilliant and timeless is strangely absent here; instead, we’re served up another bland, passionless costume drama as stuffy and oxygen-depriving as its corsets.

Pride and Prejudice, one of Austen’s most beloved novels, was adapted for the big screen (again) in 2005 to surprising success, earning over $100 million worldwide and landing acting nods for skinny star Keira Knightley. It was an unexpected, much-adored hit that, naturally, encouraged studio heads to cook up a second helping. The big idea? To make a film about the author while she was writing Pride and Prejudice, so they could essentially make the same movie twice under the guise of creativity. High five.

But Shakespeare In Love this isn’t. Becoming Jane, which is based on Jon Spence’s biography, takes numerous liberties with her life since not much is known about her love affairs. By watching this movie, you’d think that Jane could barely string together an interesting sentence until she fell for a cocky young lawyer from Limerick who, in turn, is to thank for inspiring Pride and Prejudice.

Hear that, ladies? Get into a fleeting, go-nowhere relationship and you just might write the next great novel. Who needs journalism school or, better yet, an ability to write of things you haven’t personally experienced?

Idiotic launching pads aside, the PG-rated Becoming Jane is not terribly interesting to watch. Anne Hathaway stars as Jane and James McAvoy is Tom Lefroy, the guy who steals her heart. It has the typical back-and-forth-banter-as-foreplay exchanges found in all of these movies, but in this case it quickly evaporates. What was harmless, regurgitated fun soon becomes a tiresome, sullen trip with money woes, dead youngsters and enough sulking to make even Paris Hilton roll her eyes.

Director Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots) is partially to blame for valuing style over substance (attractive actors, beautiful scenery) and TV writers Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams present Jane and Tom as mostly vapid stick figures. The basis of their “romance” is watching him try out his smarmy moves on her (“your horizons must be widened,” he says with predator sleaze) and watching her find it ever so irresistible--anything to avoid marrying the sweet but dull heir (Laurence Fox) that her parents (James Cromwell and Julie Walters) have in mind.

Hey, even the late 18th century yielded its fair share of offspring rebellion. But even if the folks’ dating advice could be fine-tuned, they remain the most engaging, semi-developed characters in Becoming Jane, along with an amusing turn by Maggie Smith as the snooty Lady Gresham.

Just don’t expect to find any of them onscreen much. Chalk it up to another misstep in a marathon of many.

Your Mommy Kills Animals - Review

Quick trivia question: in 2005, who did the FBI deem to be the number one domestic terrorist threat in the United States? If you answered al-Qaeda, you're wrong. According to the FBI, our biggest danger in 2005 came not from Islamic fundamentalists, but from homegrown animal rights activists. That astonishing (especially if you consider that the KKK, anti-abortion movement, and other violent groups have never even made the list) fact is the starting point for Curt Johnson's riveting film Your Mommy Kills Animals, an incendiary but balanced account of the battle over animal rights. It's the best kind of documentary, in that if you're a thinking person it is nearly impossible to watch the movie without having your point of view challenged and questioned—no matter what side of the issue you're on, this film will give you evidence that both supports and contradicts your beliefs. It will also scare the hell out of you if you have any kind of passion for the first amendment, as it shows how the boogeyman of "terrorism" can be used to suppress any speech that the government doesn't like.

The documentary begins with two equally shocking scenes designed to put the audience on edge: in one, an animal rights activist grabs a fur-wearing woman and beats her in the street, and in the other a series of pets are brutalized in a "shelter." It's unclear whether the first incident is staged (the second clearly isn't), but the point is obvious: whichever side of the animal rights movement you're on, Johnson is going to rub your face in the cruel extremes of your point of view. Yet the movie as a whole is less binary than this introduction implies; as the film unfolds, Johnson showcases a wide variety of perspectives on the issue, showing how even within the animal rights movement there is great disagreement and how there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around on all sides.

The most extreme and outspoken activists—and the ones who most justify the FBI's designation as terrorists—are the members of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a group so devoted to their cause that some of them publicly endorse the murders of researchers engaged in animal testing. Johnson interviews several spokespeople for the group and provides footage from their speeches and attacks (including bombings and assaults on doctors), and he juxtaposes this material with contrary points of view regarding the importance of animal testing in curing human diseases and the parallels between ALF and the wackiest fringes of the pro-life movement. Yet before the viewer can get too comfortable, Johnson challenges these arguments with footage that indicates nothing short of extremism will stop the undeniable savagery that corporations practice, and he demonstrates that militant tactics work—a number of financial institutions stop doing business with Huntingdon Life Sciences, a company engaged in massive animal abuse, after being harassed by activists.

Johnson also implies that extremism on the activist side is a natural response to governmental abuse; why wouldn't activists move to more outrageous behavior when conventional free speech is prosecuted, as it is in the case of six animal rights proponents who are imprisoned simply for campaigning to shut down Huntingdon's animal testing facilities? What ultimately emerges from the documentary is the terror inflicted by absolutists on both sides—people who, as journalist Christopher Hitchens notes, are terrorists because of their absolute conviction that they are right, a conviction that leaves no room for tolerance or debate. This means that the villains of the piece range from the most aggressive members of the ALF on one side to the President of the United States on the other. Indeed, one of the most chilling aspects of the film is its depiction of how George W. Bush and the Department of Homeland Security deflect attention from their own failures in the "war on terror" by redefining what terror is—only an administration this out of touch with reality could make a convincing case that college kids protesting animal cruelty are a threat on a par with Osama bin Laden. In the end, this is the greatness of Your Mommy Kills Animals: that it moves beyond animal rights to consider the larger issue of how political speech of a certain persuasion is persecuted more vigorously than murder, rape, or other violent crimes. Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that Johnson himself has claimed to be harassed by federal agents just for making this film, something that proves the movie's point. If a director of a relatively even-handed documentary who is far from a radical leftist (his last film as a producer, in fact, was entitled Michael Moore Hates America) is considered a threat, who's next?