LET THERE BE LITE

...Classics lite. Modern makeovers and the Gen-X pull of a
Gwyneth Paltrow, Alicia Silverstone, or Leonardo DiCaprio
mean the MTV kids can hit the Big Books without cracking
the Cliffs Notes.

Review by Ty Burr

(以下只節錄有關「烈愛風雲」的部分)

Pip is now Finn (Ethan Hawke), a brooding painter. Estella
(Gwyneth Paltrow) is a creamy jet-setting dream girl. Miss
Havisham has become Miss Dinsmoor (Anne Bancroft), mamboing
around her ruined Gulf Coast mansion to the scratchy strains
of "Besame Mucho." At times, the latest version of Charles
Dickens' Great Expectations seems specifically designed to
spark mass coronaries among the nation's English-literature
professors.

Actually, it's just the most recent in the mini-genre of
films that take works from the classical canon and retool
them for the MTV generation. Partially a by-product of the
1990s renaissance in period films--in which Jane Austen,
William Shakespeare, E.M. Forster, and Henry James have
acquired the marquee status once reserved for, oh, Troy
Donahue--"neoclassics" can be much more than pandering Cliffs
Notes aimed at mall rats. It's worth remembering that Austen's
Emma and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet were created and
received as popular entertainments, and that if the films most
recently made from them--1995's Clueless and 1996's Romeo &
Juliet--gloss over deeper themes, they both recover the solid
melodrama stowed away under all those bonnets and doublets.

As for Expectations, well, the new film fails because it
doesn't trust vulgar old melodrama enough. There lies the
conundrum filmmakers of modernized classics face: If you shoot
for the art-house crowd, the kids won't go, and the critics
will still hate you for spray-painting the masters. It may
just be that you can't honestly speak to a broad audience
unless the snobs have a cow.