At the movies (and on TV) Sat Feb 19, 2005

20 years ago, Annette Bening fans everywhere were trying to come to terms with yet another loss to Hilary Swank. Now let's go to the movies and watch some TV.

At the Movies: Bride & Prejudice

Sharon Osbourne thought that New Zealand-born actor Martin Henderson was so boring that when she had him on her short-lived talk show, she couldn't think of anything to say, so she asked him if he and his fellow Kiwis shagged sheep. I watch Bride and Prejudice, in which Henderson plays a modern Mr. Darcy, and I can empathize. I've seen a lot of Mr. Darcys in my time: in movies, on TV, and even in YouTube webseries. Martin Henderson is the most boring of them all.

This should be fatal to the movie he stars in. It takes a special sort of movie to survive such a boring performance. But Bride & Prejudice is a special movie. Director Gurinder Chadha was born in Kenya to Punjabi Sikh parents and moved to England as a child. For her follow-up to smash hit Bend it like Beckham, she decided to make a truly multicultural movie that reflected her own international background: a faithful Jane Austen adaptation that was also a full-throated Bollywood musical. And she succeeded. Bride & Prejudice might be the most faithful modern update of Jane Austen I've ever encountered (and I've encountered many). The whole gang is here, even characters people usually cut out: Caroline Bingley, Mr. Collins, Georgiana Darcy, Charlotte Lucas, and more. And this isn't a half-hearted Bollywood musical: there several giant dance numbers, lyrics in English and Hindi, and there is no kissing. So its ending stays true to Bollywood, and more true to Jane Austen than the other Pride and Prejudice movie from 2005.

And the movie has big things on its mind too. In this movie, when our heroine dresses down Darcy, she's chastising him for his plans to build a hotel and profit off of India while treating it like a theme park. She literally calls him an imperialist! Meanwhile, Wickham is a cool backpacker who says all the right things but whose prejudices run much deeper. And Chadha and co-writer Paul Medaya Berges reserve some of their most biting critique for the Indian diaspora itself. Mr. Collins is a green-card holding accountant who is content to trash his homeland until he wants a wife, then he's all about "tradition." The girls in America are too obstinate, some of them are even lesbians! Our Caroline Bingley equivalent puts on sunscreen lest she become too "dark."

Best of all, the movie is fun, it's funny, and it looks great. This movie cost $7 million and it looks just as expensive as last week's Hitch, which cost 10 times that. The dance numbers are filled with extras and complex choreography, the songs all slap, and as the film travels across the globe, every beach and mansion and stret in India, California, and England looks spectacular.

It doesn't matter that Henderson is a wet blanket when the girl-group bop segues into and epic fantasy sequence set in a girl's imaginary version of the British countryside. Or when this movie's falling love montage is an epic tour of Southern California, complete with beaches, boardwalks, surfers, desert scenery, a Mariachi band, and a Gospel choir, giving us a truly Global and multicultural take on a love story that's been told a thousand times.

Also at the movies

• Constantine debuted at #2 behind Hitch with $29 million, but it was already establishing its place in the cult movie canon.
• Because of Winn-Dixie, based on a middle-grade novel I loved, debuted at #3.
• The Mask without Jim Carrey seems like a bad idea. But they made it anyway and New Line Cinema promoted the hell out of it (so many tv spots, so many talk show appearances!). It flopped hard, premiering at #4 with paltry $7 million.

11:30 Saturday Night Live! on NBC

with host Hilary Swank and musical guest 50 Cent

I don't know when SNL became a standard stop on the Oscar campaign trail, but it was before 2005. Because Hilary Swank was definitely was a woman on a mission here. Hilary Swank is not a comedic actress, but her monologue turns that into a strength. She admits to her inexperience and walks around the studio to study the cast member's intense, method-acting style preparations. And so the monologue turns into a sort of parody of Oscar campaign tropes and narratives. Kenan sleeps with his eyes open, in costume as Star Jones, ready to get into character at a moment's notice. Seth and Amy are very committed to an onscreen romance. Rachel Dratch is an old-school diva, throwing a champagne bottle at a giant photo of Tina Fey. Meanwhile, Horatio Saenz drinks egg whites and Chris Parnell does jump rope. This especially was germane to Swank's campaign, which focused a lot on her boxing training (we saw this in action two nights ago on Conan). And we see that Hilary is better at jump roping than Chris and that the egg whites are actually mayonnaise and she won't drink them, so her narrative is reinforced. And it worked; she won.

Record 2 episodes of Mircale's Boys, the ABC Family TV movie School of Life starring Ryan Reynolds and David Paymer, and the USA TV movie Ladies Night starring Paul Michael Glaser.

TiVo Status

The Masterpiece Theater miniseries The Lost Prince, the Frontline documentary House of Saud, the TV movies Sucker Free City, Lackawanna Blues, School of Life, and Ladies Night, two episodes of Miracle's Boys, and one episode each of Monk and Without a Trace. 17 hours total.

Music, 20 years ago

The songs from Bride and Prejudice are distressingly hard to find, but here is certified bop "No Life Without Wife"