Letters to the Editor
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What did you expect?
Karen M asks, "...what if this were some other piece of artistic work that you admired as much as Ms. Fattore and others of us admire P&P, as well as the rest of Austen's work, and it had been, in your eyes 'defiled?'"
The novel Pride and Prejudice has in no way been "defiled" by this movie; the novel continues to sit on your bookshelf and millions of bookshelves around the world, untouched and unharmed.
And if there were some piece of writing that I admired so intensely that I couldn't bear the thought of seeing it changed in any way, then I wouldn't go to the movie. I'd stay at home and re-read the book again.
C'mon, what did you expect? You knew going in that the movie was only two hours long; you knew plotlines would be trimmed and characters would be shortchanged and favorite bits of dialogue would be lost. If you didn't know those things, then either you've never seen a movie before, or you are too painfully naive for words.
The movie isn't pure Jane Austen because it can't be; an adaptation from one form to another is by definition a collaboration between the original author(s) and the new author(s). And it deserves, as does any work of art, to be judged on its own terms, on how well it accomplishes its own goals, not held hostage to the demands of a group of rabid cultists who will brook no change to their hermetically sealed view of the world.