Before the Fall

Before the Fall is bad in every way. Terrible screenplay, terrible direction, terrible acting. Even the potentially beautiful Appalachian Mountains setting (which state it's supposed to be is debatable, but the mountains are not) is ruined by the overwhelming STUPIDITY of everything else. I mean, what lawyer conducts a confidential interview, discussing a third person in a way that would qualify as slander anywhere on earth, in the public hallway of his office, directly in front of the waiting room door, for anybody who may be waiting there to hear?

The whole movie is like that: stupid people saying and doing unvaryingly stupid things in the most unrealistic, unbelievable way possible. And there's an extremely annoying, cloying synthesizer-piano muzak soundtrack, the same dull, soporific notes played over and over, oozing its sappy way through every scene, constantly underlining the unrelenting stupidity of everything we see and hear.

I HATE this movie! The guy who plays Lee is gorgeous -- and I mean breathtaking -- but, just like the mountains, his beauty is buried in the mudslide of stupidity that swallows everything in its path.

Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's best work by far, one of the finest and most deeply satisfying novels ever written. It's so good that it has survived many bad adaptations, including this one. But writer-director Byrum Geisler (whoever he is) really shouldn't have told anybody what he was trying to do, because his failure is so monumental that he SHOULD be too embarrassed now to show his face anywhere. There is no HINT of Pride and Prejudice, or any of its marvelous characters, STILL alive 200 years after she created them -- not the tiniest spark of Austen's genius -- anywhere in this stupid movie.