Pride and Prejudice, the miniseries

Continuing my foray into Jane Austen, I recently watched the 1995 BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice. It’s in six parts, and runs for around five and a half hours altogether. I have it on good authority that it was a huge success in the UK, and it’s not too hard to see why.

The miniseries is fairly faithful to the novel, the difference being mostly that the miniseries adds a few scenes. I did notice that the film rearranged Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth so as to place his explanation regarding Wickham before his explanation regarding Bingley and Jane. A curious choice, intended, I suppose, to soften us up a bit for his unflattering (though true) description of Elizabeth’s family. There were a few other changes which I suspect were intended to make it appeal a bit more to a modern audience, which I imagine is also the reason that several scenes were added featuring Darcy.

I do feel like its length is a bit excessive; watching it in one sitting is quite an endeavour. I suspect it might have been shortened somewhat without harming it significantly; the added scenes not present in the novel would be a good first approximation of unnecessary footage, although deciding what precisely ought to be cut would take much more careful study of the film than I have patience for, and in any case would matter little. I would rather watch a long, but faithful, film adaptation than a shorter one which cuts out scenes from the novel.

It is difficult to give more than my general impressions of the miniseries. Suffice it to say that I felt it was about as enjoyable as the novel, which is high praise coming from me; I generally hold that the book is always better.

I have a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary, the 2001 film based on the novel of the same name. Given that I didn’t like the novel very well, I think that I shall attempt to judge the film on its own merits, with little consideration for fidelity. Perhaps it will fare better than the novel.

Review: MacGyver Episode 2 – “The Golden Triangle”

So, some thoughts on the second episode. I didn’t enjoy this as much as the first. It didn’t really have any cool science tricks, just some clever arrangements of objects (e.g. using an inflatable boat as a time-delay mechanism, arranging some guns to automatically fire).

The kinds of things MacGyver did in this episode reminded me very much of The Incredible Machine, a puzzle game in which the player achieves the goals (usually something like ‘get the ball into the box’ or ‘light the candle’) by creating a sort of Rube Goldberg machine from available parts. Now, I did enjoy The Incredible Machine a great deal, so that isn’t a bad thing, but it’s just not quite as much fun to watch as to create for yourself.

Additionally, the episode just didn’t feel as nice as the first. It had a very obvious message (“Slavery is bad, kids.”), which, while not bad in and of itself, was a little annoying (I know slavery is bad; thanks for checking). The little kid hugging MacGyver at every opportunity and the whole ‘MacGyver is back, he’ll save us’ thing were irritating, too. I’m not expecting a literary masterpiece, but I do like a little quality in my entertainment.

I wouldn’t want to watch this one again, but it wasn’t so bad that I regret seeing it once. I hope that future episodes are better.

Review: MacGyver Episode 1 – "Pilot"

I’ve picked up a copy of the first season of MacGyver, and I thought I might post a review with my thoughts. I had been meaning to watch some of this for a while, since it has been said to have increased interest in engineering, which, as I mentioned earlier, is something I’d dearly like to see happen again.

I enjoyed the episode quite a bit, although I wonder if MacGyver’s solutions are quite realistic: he sets up a gun to fire on a delay using a pack of matches and some string; destroys a laser with a pair of binoculars; moves a steel girder using water pressure from a fire hose; stops a sulfuric acid leak with chocolate; and fashions a bomb from sodium metal and a cold capsule.

His solutions are fairly flashy and amusing, which is nice. I can see how someone might take an interest in engineering based on this sort of thing. Here we have a bit of optics, and bit of physics, and bit of chemistry, and a bit of ingenuity. I regret that I can think of no way of making mathematics alone quite so flashy.

“Here I have the number of paritions of a number into odd parts! I tap it with the magic wand and presto! It’s now the number of partitions of a number into distinct parts! Isn’t it incredible?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Yes, isn’t it amazing?”

“You suck.”

Well, I’ll watch some more and see how it goes. At least I should enjoy the experience, even if it doesn’t turn out to be the excellent promotion of the sciences that I am hoping for.