I'd Rather Go to the Dentist

One movie that I shan’t be seeing, no matter how pretty the picture, is Bright Star. WSJ critic Joe Morgenstern composed a glowing review sprinkled with phrases such as “luminous”, “lyric poem”, and “delicacy that conceals a soaring spirit”.

In "Bright Star," a dramatization of the intense though unconsummated love affair between the young Romantic poet John Keats and his younger neighbor, Fanny Brawne, the filmmaker Jane Campion has performed her own feat of romantic imagination. The production is modest in physical scale, mostly reserved in tone and touchingly simple in design (apart from Fanny's dazzling wardrobe, which is justified by her gifts as a seamstress). Yet the effect is exhilarating, and deeply pleasurable. It's like the dive into a lake that Keats evokes to explain the experience of poetry. The point, he explains to Fanny, is not to get to the other side, but to luxuriate in the lake.

The film screams “chick flick”, and men who still have a trace of testosterone would do well to stay away. A visit to their dentist would be more pleasurable. The one bright spot—but far from enough to make me see the picture--seems to be a character named Charles Brown, “an enormously entertaining boor.” As another fictional Charles Brown uttered, “Aauuuggh!”