Bright Star was not all that bad.

Bright Star was not all that bad. I planned for it to be, but it was not. I mean, most movies are bad the way most poems are bad and also the way that most parts of even the movies and poems that I like can be bad, too but still be good enough. Campion's version of this relationship and its setting is a little too self-consciously beautiful sometimes, like in the picture here, but then the dresses and hats that Fanny wears are so ridiculously gorgeous that it is okay. I mean, those dresses. I've watched a fair number of period dramas but don't remember ever being this drawn to a movie's wardrobe.

The guy who plays Charles Brown is over the top, and the Keats actor guy does a lot of acting with his eyeballs, but he is also quiet and I like the way they show him spending so much time just lying around waiting for inspiration, worrying about finding a subject. Those scenes seem more true than the readings of the actual poems, which, even though they are shot in fragments to feel casual, still feel like set-pieces rolled out to fanfares.

So on my personal movie scale of Avatar on the low end up to "not bad" at the high end, Bright Star earns an "I really like the dresses and the lying around parts."