Awww bless: forthcoming positive representation of singleness

[oursin]

Dame Judi Dench is going to be sweet silly saintly Miss Matty Jenkyns in Cranford, 'shy spinster'.

Nice contrast and stretch from Evil Psycho Spinster in Notes on a Scandal.

Comments

[gillo]

She'll be wonderful - she always is. I bet they ramp up the love story to a ridiculous degree, though. Cranford is really about nothing much happening in genteel near-poverty. Not the stuff to attract film-makers. I'll go to see it anyway - I love Mrs Gaskell.

[hafren]

Bugger! Miss Matty is one of my favourite fictional characters and Dench is one of my least favourite actresses (and totally miscast here, IMO).

[sartorias]

A Cranford movie! Oh, i hope they do it with a delicate touch.

[oursin]

I hope they keep whatisname - ?Andrew Davies? - off it, as he tends to sex things up well beyond what the text will bear (which meant almost occluding Lydgate's disastrous pity for Rosamond in Middlemarch)

[sartorias]

Yes, that's exactly what I fear. Miss Mattie's romance all sexed up, or worse, Captain Brown's, just makes me shudder. One of the most delicate touches in the entire book is Miss Mattie's daring to wear an almost widow's cap, and no one saying a word: it would be so easy to trample that with heaving bosoms and passionate writhings. Blech.

[wild_irises]

She's up to the stretch--she has astonishing range! I'll see that.

[oursin]

She was wonderful in Notes: both terrifyingly creepy and utterly pathetic. I was less convinced by Cate Blanchett - a stunner by the standards of a grotty North London school doesn't need to be in Blanchett's class of looks, for starters.