2019/2020 Netflix Movie or Miniseries - Rebecca
If you follow me on social media you might have heard some rather declarative statements on November 14th when Netflix announced they were doing a new version of Rebecca starring Lily James and Armie Hammer. It's not that I object to their being a new Rebecca, I just happen to object to almost everything we know so far about this project. Let's start with Armie Hammer... um, he's not British. Not that I'll hold that against him... what I hold against him is that he's only three years older than Lily James. Maxim de Winter is about twenty-five years older than his twenty-one year old bride, not three! Lily could work, I honestly have liked her in everything she's been in, she just needs a different leading man. Because of all the actors out there, you need a certain something to BE Maxim de Winter, something indefinable. For example I was just watching The Addams Family last night and Raúl Juliá, he would have been an amazing Maxim. Armie, not so much.
Now let's break down the other aspects of the production. The book is being adapted by Jane Goldman, best known for two of the worst X-Men films and the Kingsman franchise, big budget superhero blockbusters don't exactly mesh well with Daphne Du Maurier unless you're keeping maybe two ideas and scrapping the rest of the story like Hitchcock did with The Birds. Yes, Goldman also adapted Stardust, which I liked, but she also did The Woman in Black, which I hated, making her hit-and-miss with adaptions. As for the director Ben Wheatley, having two episode of Doctor Who I disliked AND that horrid adaptation of High-Rise on his resume aren't endearing him to me in the least. Then I have questions for the team, is it going to be a jam-packed two hour production or a lavish four hour miniseries, because there's more chance in doing justice to the book if it's four hours. But with Netflix it could go either way... Here's hoping they salvage something good out of this star-crossed crew instead of making me hate it more than I hate the Charles Dance version.
