'Pride & Prejudice,' minus zombies, plus dirty words (Clandestine Classics)

Thank you, statute of limitations on copyrighted material! Clandestine Classics, a subsidiary of Total-E-Bound publishing, has rewritten five of those stuffy British novelsyou were forced to read in English class and turned them into poorly-spelled BDSM sex stories. Unfortunately, these e-rotica e-books won't be available till July 30th (let the 12 day countdown begin!), but on the bright side, Clandestine has given readers a sneak peak to its 19th century knickers.

Let's read some excerpts (which are NSFW...as much as words can be NSFW), shall we?

Charlotte Bronte knows that it's not rape if she's sort of into it in this re-imagining of Jane Eyre:

I tried to pull away. Mr Rochester subdued me instantly. He forced me more firmly against his body. I felt the uncompromising strength of his chest against mine. To admit the truth to myself as well as others, I confess I didn’t put up much of a fight. I wanted to be mastered. My struggles were more internal than external. I should not want this, but I did...
Put your hand between your legs, rub yourself if you must, but show me the moisture gathered on your fingertips.” He kept his eyes on my face rather than looking down. In moments such as these—indeed in all moments—each act, each word, was deliberate.
It took some moments to fulfil his desire. Touching myself was still foreign to me. And touching myself while he watched was decadent; secretly, though I delighted in the act...

We know we'll all be imagining Jude Law reminiscing this randy rendition of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Scarlet:

What I saw literally stole my breath for a few moments. Although I had to squint to bring the scene into focus, I was able to discern clearly, by the light of the moon, two naked bodies. At first I thought one of the men had enticed a female to the camp somehow, a female paid to engage in the act happening before me. But the sight of two cocks dashed my initial perception.

Pride & Prejudice is a no-brainer. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of WiFi, must be in want of Mr. Darcy erotica. (The only problem being that Mr. Darcy sex stories are maybe too prevalent?) Clandestine tries its hand at Jane Austen prose:

“Tell me you want me,” he demanded. His voice was a deep rumble, husky and full of the promise of what was to come. “Tell me what you want from me.”

Elizabeth brushed aside all lingering reticence and held his gaze as she replied. “I’ve never desired anything in my entire life as I desire you now. I want you inside me. I need it more than I need air.”

A lesser known Jane Austin novel, Northanger Abbey, is best out of context:

Tilney’s expression heated as he watched her. Do you fancy the taste, then?”

Catherine nodded mutely.

Finally, Jules Vernes gets a turn at the wheel in a depraved Twenty Thousand Leagues (that is already a great title for a sex story, really):

Conseil was ever my advisor and my confidante. He was one of those rare men who seem to be completely without attraction or desire, for women or for men. Although he certainly didn’t share my proclivities, he had never condemned me for them either. “Speak, Conseil,” I said at last.

“Master, the men on board pursue their pleasures, and we’ve all seen that buggery among sailors is common. But my Master would be wise to remember that he’s not one of them. Men like Master have a larger place in society. They must be careful of their reputation.”

I nodded, although in the darkness of our cabin, it was likely he couldn’t see it. What he said was true. A common sailor had more liberties than a man of my stature. It would not do to have stories spread. “I’ll be careful.”

So wait, now any kind of erotic fan fiction can be sold as a book and possibly make millions? We have some old Angel/Spike slash-fic we need to dig up from our Buffy years...we could be sitting on a goldmine!

Austen.

Was there really something outdated about "You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope"? According to HarperCollins, yes. The Guardian reports that the publisher "will team modern authors with Austen's six novels, asking them to reimagine the books in a contemporary setting."

We will withhold judgement (*sob*). Clueless (which put Emma in a contemporary setting without explicitly saying so) was a good movie, after all, although a movie adaptation of a book is different from a book adaptation of a book. Bridget Jones's Diary, in which Helen Fielding brilliantly riffed on Pride and Prejudice, is a great and funny comic novel, but not a direct adaptation.

Joanna Trollope will write the first book in the series, an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.

On March 25, Variety's Michael Schneider reported that Ian Somerhalder, who played the overly-tweased stipple-bearded Boone on Lost, had been tapped to co-star in an ABC pilot called The Vampire Diaries. According to Variety, the show "centers on a woman who falls for two vampire brothers—one good and one evil."

Add this to the list that includes the just purchased script by Marc Haimes for Elevator Men, which The Hollywood Reporter's Jay A. Fernandez described as "a less romanticized look at the human-vampire interactions"; last week's U.K. release of the delicately named Lesbian Vampire Killers; and the soon-to-be released adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' The Informers.

But wait, there's more. A lot more. How about Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's planned adaptation of Dark Shadows, which ran on TV from 1966 to 1971; the second season of HBO's True Blood (itself based on a series of novels by Charlaine Harris); and of course, New Moon, the highly anticipated (by your 15-year-old cousin) sequel to Twilight, which grossed  $191,397,304 at the box office last year.

Since those films are drawn from kids' books (if you're really prepared to argue that these books aren't just for kids, you might want to take a cold, hard look at yourself in the mirror at Forever 21 or Abercrombie & Fitch and admit you're taking this Rejuvenile, Up With Grups extended adolescence thing a little too far—being a grownup is scary, but not so much that it's acceptable to read and act and dress and text and twitter like a teenager), we can expect several more movies in this cycle with Eclipse, Breaking Dawn, Midmorning, Noon, Just After Noon, Tea Time, A Little Before Supper, 10:23 p.m. and Geez, It's Almost Midnight on the horizon.

As we speak, some enterprising hack is probably pitching a vampire sitcom called My Wife Suck, about an uptight regular guy who marries a hot—but bloodthirsty—lady vampire. ("It's Dharma & Greg meets The Munsters!")

Enough. Time to drive a stake in the heart of this trend. From now on, there can be no more vampires in pop culture. If we're honest, there hasn't been anything truly scary about vampires since 1987 when Bill Paxton ate the scenery (and several of his costars) in Near Dark, and the outré psychosexual subtext of drinking blood (you know, "blood lust" and all) has been overextended since before Anne Rice interviewed her first vampire in 1977.

It's time to develop a replacement for this surfeit of bloodsuckers who have lately come to seem so sallow, so drained of their precious life force. (Have you seen Twilight's Robert Pattinson on the cover of GQ this month? He looks as burned out as Jeff Spicoli hitting his own head with a shoe in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.)

Vampires are selling so high right now that we're at serious risk of the bubble bursting: Who can forget the great Faeries boom and bust of the late '90s? It's bloody well time for a new quasi-supernatural being to come to the forefront of the culture.

And no, that being is not a zombie, no matter how many books Mel Brooks' son puts out, how cleverly someone appropriates a Jane Austen classic, or how many big budget Will Smith movies the culture industry foists on us. (Not to mention all those "zombie banks" in the news.)

Honestly, does anyone really like zombies? Is there anyone out there who doesn't want to punch a zombie in its rotten mouth? Zombies are so stupid, so devoid of any identifiable traits, so boring in their monomaniacal pursuit of braaaaaiiiins! (fine, you want brains—shut up, already), that the thought of reading about those idiots or watching them drag their gimpy legs across a movie screen (much less tuning in to a sitcom featuring an uptight regular guy who marries a hot—but necrotic—lady zombie) makes me want to put a bullet in my own head.

Here are some suggestions to replace vampires (and those goddamn zombies) in the pop consciousness of young people and older people who should really stop considering themselves part of the pop consciousness of young people. (Seriously: Pull up your pants.)

Freaks

Sure, HBO failed to make Carnivàle into a hit on the level of The Sopranos (or even K Street), and Comedy Central's Freak Show failed to have as many seasons as Drawn Together, but there's a lot to be mined in the old midway. What better way to dramatize the awkwardness of adolescence (our bodies going all screwy, hair sprouting all over, those damn lobster-claws and tails) than through the distorted funhouse mirror of the carnival freak?

Start with Katherine Dunn's 1989 novel Geek Love, which Warner Brothers has the rights to and which has drawn interest from Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton and others. Since Hollywood is remake crazy, how about a new version of Tod Browning's Freaks? That thing is still creepy 77 years after its release. ("One of us, one of us!")

Of course, you'd have to remove the whiff of Victoriana and the tacit judgment or condemnation of the deformed or differently abled ("freak" is a pretty harsh term), but maybe freaks can be recast as X-Men and writers and filmmakers can play up the triumphant exceptionalism implied in the title of Daniel P. Mannix's book We Who Are Not As Others. Freaks shouldn't be seen as objects of our derision: They should be objects of our awe. As Olympia Binewski, the narrator of Ms. Dunn's book, declares, "A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born." (You hear that, stupid zombie-bite victims who turn into even stupider zombies?)

Vikings

Here's a chance for culture creators to really get in on the ground floor of the next-next. What better way to make sense of the just-ended era of rapacity and literal plunder than by dramatizing these bands of berserker brothers? Think of it as a chance for American Psychoesque satires (Scandinavian Psycho?) and big budget Braveheart type epics. If only Orson Welles were alive to do the voice-over. (Really, who remembers Erik, The Viking? Tim Robbins probably hopes you don't.)

This month's L'it Boy Wells Tower kicks it off with a story about Vikings in his new collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. According to Slate's Juliet Lapidos, the story centers around "marauding Vikings who attack a neighboring island without provocation. Although Harald, the narrator, feels he has outgrown the whole rape-and-pillage game."

Mr. Towers' publisher has even commissioned an animated short by Chris Roth based on the story to entice readers. (Mr. Tower also has a story that involves a carnival.)

Then there are the rumblings about Kenneth Branagh's adaption of the comic book Thor, which may star True Blood's towheaded vampire prince Alexander Skarsgård. (What, Thor wasn't a Viking, you say? Are you proud of yourself for knowing that?) One downside of Viking-related projects is a lack of diversity in casting, but, hey, what about a hilarious Moor-Viking buddy film?

Bigfoots (Bigfeet?)

Sasquatches have been percolating up through the culture since Tenacious D sang an ode to the big fella in 1999, McSweeney's published a journal by the name of Yeti Researcher in 2005, and a year later The New Yorker ran Tony Earley's short story "The Cryptozoologist".

As 30 Rock's recent Harry and the Henderson's riff showed, everyone has an inner bigfoot. And what are bigfeet if not cousins of the wild things from Where the Wild Things Are? (C'mon, work with me here!) With the right positioning, these guys could be big ... ger.

Consider this just a partial list. The world is full of amazing, improbable creatures (Krampuses! Golems! Log Cabin Republicans!) just waiting for their turn to replace vampires at bookstores, multiplexes, and on TV.

It's daybreak for you and your sons. Time to get your pale, bony asses back to Transylvania—and take your moronic zombie buddies with you. Be careful not trip over any stakes, suckers.

The sad part about all of this—you know, besides desecrating a classic work of literature by turning it into a creature feature—is that Mr. Furnish isn't actually creating something original, or "fresh and funny" as he described it. Just last week, it was announced that Hollywood studios were in a feeding frenzy over the upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a novel by Seth Grahame-Smith due in April that takes Pride and Prejudice and—yes, you guessed it—imbues it with the undead. Mr. Grahame-Smith promises that 85 percent of the source novel will remain intact and, more importantly, he seems to have a great working knowledge of the story—meaning he's actually read Ms. Austen's book. Says Mr. Grahame-Smith: "Why else in the original should a regiment arrive on Lizzie Bennet's doorstep when they should have been off fighting Napoleon? It was to protect the family from an invasion of brain-eaters, obviously."

Since we ourselves aren't charter members of the Jane Austen Book Club, we're not too offended by these ideas, per se. But we are at a loss for why both of them came out within a week of each other—does every moderately original idea to come from Hollywood have to be paired with a kissing cousin of sorts? However, that quibble aside, we're at least interested enough in these projects to offer up some admittedly obvious casting suggestions: Get Nick Frost and Simon Pegg for the zombie version (Shaun of the Dead prequel time!) and, having seen Wanted, we're more than certain that James McAvoy could kick a little alien butt as Mr. Darcy. And as for the ladies, you don't have to be Ellen Lewis to realize that no one rocks the words of Ms. Austen like Keira Knightly and Anne Hathaway.

The story is structured as a literary fugue, whose voices comprise a trio of childless Brown University graduates in New York City, all on the cusp of turning 30, and an outsider—a 19-year-old dropout from SUNY Oswego, whose life secret (he gets admitted to Harvard and can’t afford to attend) puts him on the road to journalistic terrorism, social oblivion and an unknowable future on the run in the dark.

Ornamenting and offsetting this quartet are parents of various abilities to parent; a passel of lovers, most of them not very lovable; a Billy Budd–like, newly orphaned black teenager; a languishing Abyssinian cat, called The Pope, who can barely drag himself from one room to the next without heaving onto an Oriental carpet; and—my own favorite character—a maid named Aurora, who has the clearest vision in the book and who confides only in herself (we get to eavesdrop).

Set in the spring, summer and fall of 2001, The Emperor’s Children can also be considered a work of historical fiction: The reader is expected to open the book knowing that these late-twentysomethings, who yearn to be stars in East Coast media and intellectual circles, developed their expectations of entitlement when they reached their majority in the early 1990’s, a recycled Jazz Age of lavish magazine start-ups and “renovations” of older publications costing a king’s ransom. Those were the days of earnest professorial disquisitions on every detail of mass culture except for the staggering greed of the music and entertainment companies that controlled it; of the dot-com rollercoaster and the platinum parachute; of cross- and trans- everything; of the end of history and the death of art and the extinction of merit as a major consideration for any sort of evaluation.

And why shouldn’t they be stars? They have Ivy League credentials, glamorous contacts, natural good looks, and elegance acquired at power tables in the best restaurants and in bathrooms in the hottest new clubs. Joyously for the reader, their expectations from life provide a gigantic target for the novelist, who, with grace and a formidable expertise at plot-making, one by one dismantles them.

Ms. Messud’s novel offers the notion that, with the destruction of the World Trade Center, this entire milieu underwent a new “feeling,” and suddenly the comfort and security of family and close friends became felt priorities. The author, however, is also a realist about human nature—in places, scathingly so. And she’s a master at demonstrating how one can’t win for losing when a jerk is pulling the strings. By the novel’s end, Murray Thwaite, the self-made “emperor” of the title, has blithely seduced and abandoned a woman half his age (after an extended affair) even though Annabel, his wife of 33 years, already offers him tender lovemaking at his whim as well as wholehearted emotional support; works full-time to help sustain the family’s lifestyle (which includes a rambling Upper West Side apartment, a summer compound in Stockbridge and live-in help); cooks gourmet meals on demand; and otherwise manages the household to provide the most comfortable environment for her husband, the country’s most lauded moderately liberal pundit, to fulfill his writer’s destiny.

Meanwhile, another young woman—who’s married her eligible, youngish, handsome, dashing, spectacularly cynical and deeply sensual employer in a late-summer wedding that, in the age of Jane Austen, might have ended such a novel as pure comedy—discovers before the cake is cut that she plays second fiddle to her husband’s ambitions and sense of self-preservation. Austen may have set up this union, but George Eliot and Oscar Wilde have officiated at it.

For all their flaws and bad behavior, one cares about these characters; and one reason may be that, well before the wake-up call of national disaster, most of them experience inklings of how vulnerable they make themselves in their willful efforts to nudge the world into conformity with their self-absorbed fantasies.

Of the three college chums, the impecunious yet defiantly freelance (“regularity was bourgeois”) book reviewer Julius Clarke—Eurasian, promiscuous and gay—is most fully enthralled by celebrity for its own sake. In this, he far surpasses his pals: the lonely and unhappy yet professionally disciplined television producer Danielle Minkoff, and the beauteous, violet-eyed and somewhat clueless Marina Thwaite, an aspiring intellectual and cultural critic (and daughter of Annabel and the famous, fatuous Murray). And yet even Julius, “an inchoate ball of ambition,” is aware that he himself—unwilling to search for a full-time job, picky about the writing assignments he’ll consider, temping only when the bank account hits bottom, reluctant to give up his Champagne tastes—won’t thrive on what is, to all intents and purposes, nothing. (“He had soon, soon, to find something to be ambitious for; otherwise he risked terminal resentment, from which there was no return.”)

In dramatic contrast, we find Frederick (Bootie) Tubb, the Oswego dropout 10 years younger than Julius and his friends. For much of the novel, they treat Bootie as if he’s of another, lower species, the way the South Park kids treat the hapless Kenny. And Bootie treats himself just about the same way, despite his truly remarkable intellectual gift: At 19, with only a diploma from high school (where he was valedictorian), he’s a peer of his uncle Murray in intellectual chutzpah, as the uncle is the first to realize. Son of a widow who doesn’t understand him, overweight and clumsy, lacking both sophistication born of experience and the most fundamental intuition regarding the ambitions and agendas of those around him, he might be thought of as belonging to Gen DMZ.

But it’s the nerd-loser Bootie who slogs through Emerson’s essays, Robert Musil and other world literature as if reading were a life-and-death matter—and who, unlike Marina or Danielle or Julius, remembers what he reads; who has the idealism as well as the nerve to pick a few bones with Tolstoy over War and Peace; who sincerely, if with destructive naïveté, tries to apply what he learns from his reading to his life; and who makes an effort to develop the highest literary and moral standards in the vacuum of a social isolation so intense that he might as well be living on Crusoe’s island as in the 212 area code.

Not so long ago, commentators like Murray Thwaite were ruminating on the question of whether it would be possible for novelists to write persuasive fiction in the wake of 9/11. The Emperor’s Children is outstanding proof that they can.

Mindy Aloff’s Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (Oxford) was published in May.

The story is structured as a literary fugue, whose voices comprise a trio of childless Brown University graduates in New York City, all on the cusp of turning 30, and an outsider—a 19-year-old dropout from SUNY Oswego, whose life secret (he gets admitted to Harvard and can’t afford to attend) puts him on the road to journalistic terrorism, social oblivion and an unknowable future on the run in the dark.

Ornamenting and offsetting this quartet are parents of various abilities to parent; a passel of lovers, most of them not very lovable; a Billy Budd–like, newly orphaned black teenager; a languishing Abyssinian cat, called The Pope, who can barely drag himself from one room to the next without heaving onto an Oriental carpet; and—my own favorite character—a maid named Aurora, who has the clearest vision in the book and who confides only in herself (we get to eavesdrop).

Set in the spring, summer and fall of 2001, The Emperor’s Children can also be considered a work of historical fiction: The reader is expected to open the book knowing that these late-twentysomethings, who yearn to be stars in East Coast media and intellectual circles, developed their expectations of entitlement when they reached their majority in the early 1990’s, a recycled Jazz Age of lavish magazine start-ups and “renovations” of older publications costing a king’s ransom. Those were the days of earnest professorial disquisitions on every detail of mass culture except for the staggering greed of the music and entertainment companies that controlled it; of the dot-com rollercoaster and the platinum parachute; of cross- and trans- everything; of the end of history and the death of art and the extinction of merit as a major consideration for any sort of evaluation.

And why shouldn’t they be stars? They have Ivy League credentials, glamorous contacts, natural good looks, and elegance acquired at power tables in the best restaurants and in bathrooms in the hottest new clubs. Joyously for the reader, their expectations from life provide a gigantic target for the novelist, who, with grace and a formidable expertise at plot-making, one by one dismantles them.

Ms. Messud’s novel offers the notion that, with the destruction of the World Trade Center, this entire milieu underwent a new “feeling,” and suddenly the comfort and security of family and close friends became felt priorities. The author, however, is also a realist about human nature—in places, scathingly so. And she’s a master at demonstrating how one can’t win for losing when a jerk is pulling the strings. By the novel’s end, Murray Thwaite, the self-made “emperor” of the title, has blithely seduced and abandoned a woman half his age (after an extended affair) even though Annabel, his wife of 33 years, already offers him tender lovemaking at his whim as well as wholehearted emotional support; works full-time to help sustain the family’s lifestyle (which includes a rambling Upper West Side apartment, a summer compound in Stockbridge and live-in help); cooks gourmet meals on demand; and otherwise manages the household to provide the most comfortable environment for her husband, the country’s most lauded moderately liberal pundit, to fulfill his writer’s destiny.

Meanwhile, another young woman—who’s married her eligible, youngish, handsome, dashing, spectacularly cynical and deeply sensual employer in a late-summer wedding that, in the age of Jane Austen, might have ended such a novel as pure comedy—discovers before the cake is cut that she plays second fiddle to her husband’s ambitions and sense of self-preservation. Austen may have set up this union, but George Eliot and Oscar Wilde have officiated at it.

For all their flaws and bad behavior, one cares about these characters; and one reason may be that, well before the wake-up call of national disaster, most of them experience inklings of how vulnerable they make themselves in their willful efforts to nudge the world into conformity with their self-absorbed fantasies.

Of the three college chums, the impecunious yet defiantly freelance (“regularity was bourgeois”) book reviewer Julius Clarke—Eurasian, promiscuous and gay—is most fully enthralled by celebrity for its own sake. In this, he far surpasses his pals: the lonely and unhappy yet professionally disciplined television producer Danielle Minkoff, and the beauteous, violet-eyed and somewhat clueless Marina Thwaite, an aspiring intellectual and cultural critic (and daughter of Annabel and the famous, fatuous Murray). And yet even Julius, “an inchoate ball of ambition,” is aware that he himself—unwilling to search for a full-time job, picky about the writing assignments he’ll consider, temping only when the bank account hits bottom, reluctant to give up his Champagne tastes—won’t thrive on what is, to all intents and purposes, nothing. (“He had soon, soon, to find something to be ambitious for; otherwise he risked terminal resentment, from which there was no return.”)

In dramatic contrast, we find Frederick (Bootie) Tubb, the Oswego dropout 10 years younger than Julius and his friends. For much of the novel, they treat Bootie as if he’s of another, lower species, the way the South Park kids treat the hapless Kenny. And Bootie treats himself just about the same way, despite his truly remarkable intellectual gift: At 19, with only a diploma from high school (where he was valedictorian), he’s a peer of his uncle Murray in intellectual chutzpah, as the uncle is the first to realize. Son of a widow who doesn’t understand him, overweight and clumsy, lacking both sophistication born of experience and the most fundamental intuition regarding the ambitions and agendas of those around him, he might be thought of as belonging to Gen DMZ.

But it’s the nerd-loser Bootie who slogs through Emerson’s essays, Robert Musil and other world literature as if reading were a life-and-death matter—and who, unlike Marina or Danielle or Julius, remembers what he reads; who has the idealism as well as the nerve to pick a few bones with Tolstoy over War and Peace; who sincerely, if with destructive naïveté, tries to apply what he learns from his reading to his life; and who makes an effort to develop the highest literary and moral standards in the vacuum of a social isolation so intense that he might as well be living on Crusoe’s island as in the 212 area code.

Not so long ago, commentators like Murray Thwaite were ruminating on the question of whether it would be possible for novelists to write persuasive fiction in the wake of 9/11. The Emperor’s Children is outstanding proof that they can.

Mindy Aloff’s Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (Oxford) was published in May.

Guess Harvard kids aren't the only ones who like the packaged lit story. The Times is now Frey-ing Viswanathan. The paper of record hops on Jon Liu's piece this morning. But doesn't do nearly as good a job as Liu.

The great thing Liu did, or tried to do, was a literary postmortem on Kaavya Visnawathan (I hate this story—you try spelling her name some time). He went back over a bunch of her interviews and showed how her literary influences were just what you'd think a Harvard undergrad's would be: Kazuo Ishiguro (somebody help me!), Zadie Smith (whew), Jane Austen. Hey Harvard kids don't brag on reading Megan McCafferty, young adult novelist. Liu was taking this story to the next, meta- level. What made this Opal book?

I think Harvard kids have succeeded in Frey-ing Visnawathan. They've opened it up and made it delicious. This one won't end—if I know Harvard—till Visnawathan has given back her advance and dropped out. To understand what I'm saying, just read The Lord of the Flies, or A High Wind in Jamaica. Two (true) classics of young adult lit, in which young adults eviscerate one another and cook the liver over the camp fire.

Sixteen years have passed since writer-director Whit Stillman dazzled Sundance audiences with this highbrow (yet awfully low-budget) comedy about a handful of wealthy college students partying over Christmas recess. Unlike Buñuel, Mr. Stillman offers a far more sympathetic take on the young, doomed and bourgeois: They’re not really so bad, once you get to know them.

While not a trilogy in the strictest sense, the director’s two later films, Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998), feature several members of Metropolitan’s ensemble cast. Thematically, there is some overlap as well: A handful of twentysomething conversationalists weigh in on morality, relationships and social class while still going to plenty of parties and clubs. But Metropolitan isn’t as polished as the later films; in fact, considering the superb acting and shoestring production costs, it could almost pass as a documentary.

Together, this abbreviation-prone crew—they dub themselves either the SFRP (Sally Fowler Rat Pack) or U.H.B. (Urban Haute Bourgeoisie)—pass the early-morning hours in an Upper East Side co-op apartment following the evening’s debutante ball. And it’s the ensuing dialogue that people either love or hate about the film. Having just spent their first semester in college, the group takes any opportunity to spout big ideas about Fourier’s theory of agrarian socialism, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and whether or not a “popular imagination” exists. At the same time, they’re still 18-to-19-year-olds and not all that stodgy: They play bridge out of obligation, but strip poker for fun.

Set “not so long ago,” Metropolitan most likely occurs somewhere in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s. There are no references to current events—assassinations, protests or the Beatles—but subtleties lead to this interpretation (which may take more than one viewing). Even in this closed-off world, times are changing. Parents are scarcely around, and traditions are being tossed aside. While walking down Park Avenue in the predawn hours, Tom (Edward Clements) and Nick (Christopher Eigeman) discuss detachable collars, out of fashion but “symbolically important.” Nick believes that certain traditions, though they may not make sense, should be upheld nevertheless, especially now that “barbarism is cloaked with all sorts of self-righteousness and moral superiority.” “You’re obviously talking about a lot more than detachable collars,” says Tom. “Yeah, I am,” Nick responds gravely.

Although Mr. Stillman has only two films to his credit since Metropolitan, he’s developed a cult following that has been patiently waiting for something new. (In 2000, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published his first novel, The Last Days of Disco: With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards, and Mr. Stillman had a brief stint writing for Page Six the following year.) Over the past few years, it’s been reported that he was working on a film about China’s Cultural Revolution (which seemed baffling), and later that he was combining two unfinished Jane Austen novels into a screenplay (which seemed highly plausible).

Until one of these projects comes together, fans will have to rely on the excellent Criterion release, which for real nerds offers both a director’s commentary and a booklet with a critical essay by Luc Sante on the film’s importance in the indie canon. You could probably drop references to the latter at your next deb party.

Sixteen years have passed since writer-director Whit Stillman dazzled Sundance audiences with this highbrow (yet awfully low-budget) comedy about a handful of wealthy college students partying over Christmas recess. Unlike Buñuel, Mr. Stillman offers a far more sympathetic take on the young, doomed and bourgeois: They’re not really so bad, once you get to know them.

While not a trilogy in the strictest sense, the director’s two later films, Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998), feature several members of Metropolitan’s ensemble cast. Thematically, there is some overlap as well: A handful of twentysomething conversationalists weigh in on morality, relationships and social class while still going to plenty of parties and clubs. But Metropolitan isn’t as polished as the later films; in fact, considering the superb acting and shoestring production costs, it could almost pass as a documentary.

Together, this abbreviation-prone crew—they dub themselves either the SFRP (Sally Fowler Rat Pack) or U.H.B. (Urban Haute Bourgeoisie)—pass the early-morning hours in an Upper East Side co-op apartment following the evening’s debutante ball. And it’s the ensuing dialogue that people either love or hate about the film. Having just spent their first semester in college, the group takes any opportunity to spout big ideas about Fourier’s theory of agrarian socialism, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and whether or not a “popular imagination” exists. At the same time, they’re still 18-to-19-year-olds and not all that stodgy: They play bridge out of obligation, but strip poker for fun.

Set “not so long ago,” Metropolitan most likely occurs somewhere in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s. There are no references to current events—assassinations, protests or the Beatles—but subtleties lead to this interpretation (which may take more than one viewing). Even in this closed-off world, times are changing. Parents are scarcely around, and traditions are being tossed aside. While walking down Park Avenue in the predawn hours, Tom (Edward Clements) and Nick (Christopher Eigeman) discuss detachable collars, out of fashion but “symbolically important.” Nick believes that certain traditions, though they may not make sense, should be upheld nevertheless, especially now that “barbarism is cloaked with all sorts of self-righteousness and moral superiority.” “You’re obviously talking about a lot more than detachable collars,” says Tom. “Yeah, I am,” Nick responds gravely.

Although Mr. Stillman has only two films to his credit since Metropolitan, he’s developed a cult following that has been patiently waiting for something new. (In 2000, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published his first novel, The Last Days of Disco: With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards, and Mr. Stillman had a brief stint writing for Page Six the following year.) Over the past few years, it’s been reported that he was working on a film about China’s Cultural Revolution (which seemed baffling), and later that he was combining two unfinished Jane Austen novels into a screenplay (which seemed highly plausible).

Until one of these projects comes together, fans will have to rely on the excellent Criterion release, which for real nerds offers both a director’s commentary and a booklet with a critical essay by Luc Sante on the film’s importance in the indie canon. You could probably drop references to the latter at your next deb party.

There is one gruesome torture scene with a somewhat puzzling provenance, but otherwise remarkably little action in a film that incessantly buzzes with hush-voiced conspiratorial conversations in one corridor of power or another across three continents. Indeed, the movie’s one undeniable virtue is its ease in shifting the scene among the various venues of corporate and governmental crime, as if we were all locked into a global roller coaster programmed to explode in one big bang at any moment. But frankly, there’s more violence these days in one 24/7 “breaking news” cycle on CNN then there is in all of Syriana, the scenario of which is concerned more with causes than effects.

Top-billed George Clooney, who plays Bob Barnes, the ill-fated C.I.A. operative with a delayed attack of conscience, is clearly the driving force behind Syriana, along with his prestigious co–executive producers Steven Soderbergh, Ben Cosgrove and Jeff Skoll (as well as bread-and-butter producers Jennifer Fox, Michael Nozik and Georgia Kacandes). Fattened up by a reported 30 pounds and virtually unrecognizable with a scruffy gray beard (a friend claims to have mistaken him for Francis Ford Coppola), Mr. Clooney seems to be angling for Oscar consideration via the familiar route of an impenetrable disguise. At the very least, he’s demonstrating the moral integrity of the whole enterprise by not exploiting his movie-star persona. Strangely, his role is that of a largely passive and befuddled victim caught in the machinations of oil-company attorneys Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) and Dean Whiting (Christopher Plummer), who make it a point never to let their right hands know what they’re whispering to their left hands. Mr. Wright’s character, an African-American conniver who flies in the face of traditional typecasting, is cloaked in such secrecy that his own father, Bennett Holiday Sr. (William C. Mitchell), expresses his moral disdain for his son without ever saying a word.

Mr. Gaghan wrote the screenplay for Mr. Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), about the cross-border drug trade between the United States and Mexico, a more amenable subject for multi-character intrigues than the global miasma of Syriana. One can say of Mr. Gaghan, Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Clooney that their heads may be in the right place in Syriana, but their hearts are not much in evidence as far as any emotional investment in their characters is concerned. So much time and energy are expended in exposing and denouncing the evildoers that the inner lives and feelings of the major characters are left almost completely unexplored, except for some secondhand piety lavished on the Muslim characters as a form of political correctness.

The most troublesome character for me is Bryan Woodman, a Geneva-based energy analyst played by Matt Damon, whose youthfulness in comparison to the other characters—along with his intertextual eminence as an action hero in Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity (2002)—strikes just the false Hollywood note that Mr. Clooney was trying to avoid with his own very strenuous makeover. Not that Mr. Damon is any kind of action hero here, but his is the only character encumbered with anything as bothersome as a private life, in the form of a disapproving wife and two children (one of whom drowns in a bizarre accident caused by an electrical malfunction). For a time, Woodman is consumed by a Lawrence of Arabia–style vision of Arab reform in the fictional state of Syriana by enthroning the more progressive Prince Nasir Al-Subaai over the younger playboy Prince Meshad Al-Subaai, who, like the king who favors him, is a mere puppet of “the Americans.” Nasir and Woodman have long conversations (by this film’s standards) about how much good Nasir can do for his nation’s people and infrastructure with the oil revenues. Naturally, he has to be assassinated by the C.I.A. on behalf of the wicked American oil companies. As far as I can remember, there’s no mention in Syriana of OPEC, although there is mention of a right-wing cabal in Washington called the Committee for the Liberation of Iran or something of that nature. Nor am I sure whether there’s any mention of either Saudi Arabia or Iraq, and so I wondered when all this skullduggery was supposed to be taking place, or if it constituted some timeless allegory on the eternal evil of the oil industry and the politicians, lobbyists and lawyers that do its bidding.

It is embarrassing for this reviewer to admit that he sometimes misses the old conventions and clichés. I’m reminded of Vincente Minnelli’s Ziegfeld Follies (1946), which dispensed entirely with an old genre bugaboo of that era’s reviewers, namely the backstage plot. Here was a musical without any plot at all, just one musical or comedy number after another, some pretty good—and wouldn’t you know it, many shamefaced reviewers confessed that they never meant for the genre to go that far. Similarly, I must confess that I missed anything resembling the big speech on morality or democracy that told us which side we’re supposed to be on, like the old Capra-Riskin lullabies delivered to us by James Stewart or Gary Cooper. That would be as uncool today as a happy ending, which is nowhere to be seen in Syriana. Not that I believe that any sort of happy ending awaits us after the gloom and doom of recent headlines. If anything, Syriana tends to oversimplify a mind-bogglingly multifaceted problem that cannot so easily be resolved by a diatribe against the supposedly all-powerful “Americans.” I happen to be an American too, and I believe what Walter Huston (in John Huston’s 1949 film, Treasure of the Sierra Madre) told a querulous Humphrey Bogart, who was worried about someone stealing his gold if he took it to town with him from the mining camp: “If you’re unlucky enough to run into bandits, they’ll kill you for the shoes on your feet.” The world is too full of people who’d kill us for the shoes on our feet.

Keira’s Good!

Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, from a screenplay by Deborah Moggach, based on the novel by Jane Austen, turns out to be about as effectively entertaining as any Austen adaptation can be expected to be, given that there are literary savants who consider it vulgar if not sacrilegious for Austen to be adapted at all. I heard one such cinephobe recently berate the BBC for no less than its much-applauded five-hour miniseries of Pride and Prejudice a decade or so ago, with Jennifer Ehle as the smart and witty Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as a dashing Mr. Darcy. The cinephobe in question repeated the old, snobbish maxim that only bad novels should be adapted for the screen, and certainly not great ones. But then what would the cinephobes use for material in their censorious Sunday pieces? One reviewer pinned a tail on the donkey by complaining that the current Pride and Prejudice suffered from excessive Brontë-fication, thus implying that Emily Brontë was inferior enough a novelist, at least in comparison to Austen, to rest more comfortably in her grave with Cathy and Heathcliff histrionically cavorting on the moors than Austen would have been with Elizabeth and Darcy suffering the same onscreen fate. As an obsessive cinephile of sorts myself, I have never felt that the greatest books are grievously compromised by being turned into movies, however ineptly. This is not to say that Mr. Wright cannot be criticized for spending much more time on the moors than he should.

At the very least, however, Mr. Wright and his collaborators deserve immense credit for the casting of four crucial characters: Keira Knightley’s vivacious yet vulnerable Elizabeth Bennet; Matthew MacFadyen’s sympathetically subtle and shy Mr. Darcy (ironically underrated because Mr. MacFadyen doesn’t project the histrionic, Heathcliffian swagger of Laurence Olivier in the 1940 Robert Z. Leonard Hollywood version opposite the now-underrated Greer Garson); poised and talented Rosamund Pike as Jane Bennet; and Tom Hollander as Mr. Collins, the least charismatic cleric in creation. On the debit side, Brenda Blethyn is well over-the-top as dithering Mrs. Bennet, though she makes Mr. Darcy’s initial resistance to the whole Bennet family more understandable. Donald Sutherland is distractingly miscast as the long-suffering Mr. Bennet, but he does manage to capitalize on his few sagacious moments. The three other sisters, somewhat lost in the Knightley-Pike shuffle, are played with due deference by Jena Malone, Carey Mulligan and Talulah Riley. Rupert Friend’s Mr. Wickham is unmasked as a pernicious villain almost as soon as he is introduced as a teller of tales against Mr. Darcy.

Mr. Wright and Ms. Moggach have made choices in their adaptation that serve to focus the audience’s attention on what is happening in Elizabeth’s mind vis-à-vis Mr. Darcy. In one felicitous stylistic coup, Mr. Wright places Elizabeth on a swing that keeps shifting in all directions, making her mistress of all she surveys as she experiences her own swing of emotions. And, oh yes, Judi Dench makes her almost-obligatory entrance as the dowager monster, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, put on this earth simply to torment Elizabeth until she abandons her “designs” on Lady Catherine’s nephew, Mr. Darcy. She is all marshmallow, of course, though Ms. Dench makes the transition between the bitter and the sweet as subtly as possible. The fact is that, with all the softening she has endured at the hands of the worshipful mass media, it’s a wonder she thinks she can give the impression anymore of dictating to a wildcat like Ms. Knightley’s Elizabeth. There is simply no suspense there.

Though I keep raving about Ms. Knightley, I can’t remember ever having seen her in anything else before except Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), and I barely remember her in that, though even Garbo in her prime would have had a hard time attracting attention in a movie so dominated by Johnny Depp’s shamelessly grotesque pirate masquerade. This demonstrates the endlessly spinning wheel of role roulette in the trajectories of movie careers, up or down. As Ms. Knightley’s eyes flashed in the midst of the lavish ballroom scenes, I kept thinking of the fierce intensity of the early Winona Ryder in Heathers (1989), though Ms. Knightley strikes me as prettier. But who knows what the future holds for her? So you’d better catch Pride and Prejudice while she’s red-hot and clearly equipped to give audiences maximum romantic pleasure without any lingering guilt. Dare I say that even Jane Austen herself would have delighted in the final triumph of Ms. Knightley’s quick-witted Elizabeth in this film? Yes, I do, and all the highbrow and middlebrow cinephobes of the world be damned. Sadly, they don’t have the late Ismail Merchant to kick around anymore for the heinous cultural crime of helping to bring many good books to cinematic life—and showing a profit for his efforts.

Jen’s Comeback?

Mikael Håfström’s Derailed, from a screenplay by Stuart Beattie, based on the novel by James Siegel, has turned out to be so completely dismal a failure as a film noir that it blankets everyone involved with enough blame to keep anyone from getting off the hook. This includes Clive Owen, woefully miscast as Chicago ad executive Charles Schine, who is victimized by a scam that even I could see through—and I have a reputation for being notoriously gullible when it comes to movie con games. The point is that the last thing Mr. Owen should be playing is a stupid character who suffers all the guilt of an adulterer without even getting laid, and who pays and pays and pays without even suspecting that he’s being played for a sucker until it’s too late. Nonetheless, Mr. Owen has generally been given a free pass by most reviewers on the basis of the critical credit he has amassed for allegedly out-acting and symbolically intimidating the despised Jude Law in Mike Nichols’ Closer (2004). And why is Mr. Law so despised by the media? My guess is that he has been singled out thanks to the lurid reportage in gossip columns of the scandals he caused by his alleged misbehavior with his children’s nanny. Or it could be that he has appeared in too many movies in unsympathetic roles, or in too many movies that have been box-office disappointments. I generally like Mr. Law as an actor as much as I like Mr. Owen, but if the latter attempts too many roles like the one in Derailed, with his nervously approximated American accent, he may find himself on the same mysteriously motivated media hate-list.

As for Jennifer Aniston’s Lucinda Harris, a pitifully inadequate rendering of the traditional femme fatale: Everyone has been rooting for Ms. Aniston to have a big hit as delayed compensation for being so publicly betrayed by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. The mini-debauchery in Derailed obviously won’t do the trick, but winsome, wistful Ms. Aniston is not without talent, and more congenial roles may come her way. Among the major miscreants in the artistic debacle of Derailed is the French actor Vincent Cassel as the superhumanly malignant LaRoche, robber, rapist and blackmailer extraordinaire, who seems to anticipate every pathetic move that Mr. Owen’s protagonist makes to protect himself and his family.

Why doesn’t Schine go to the police? Ah, that’s the beauty of the scam: Guilt is piled upon guilt to make him tactically helpless against the machinations of the seen and unseen conspirators, who foster misleading impressions about carefully staged non-events.

Not that Schine is without real family problems of his own. He and his wife, Deanna (Melissa George), are burdened with a daughter, Amy (Addison Timlin), on dialysis. Finally, it’s all the money for her future treatment that is jeopardized by LaRoche and his confederates. Before everything is sorted out, more or less, there are five messy murders, each contributing to an ending characterized more by a disbelieving exhaustion than a classical catharsis. Someone had to work extra hard to make a movie this bad with two likeable leads like Mr. Owen and Ms. Aniston. I can’t figure out why.