CORRECTION: Hong Chau is ethnically Vietnamese, born in Thailand! Apologies for that. Also my cat's name is Moonie I'm glad you all liked her! She is a diva :)

Really telling that this woman, born into wealth and privilege, keeps turning the servants into the bad guys in the movies she makes.

I found it degrading to see women be like “it’s because it’s for the girls” about the movie looking like a Pinterest-board, as if women don’t gaf about substance and meaning. I can appreciate an aesthetically pleasing and steamy movie that also doesn’t water down and white-wash a complex story about trauma and marginalization. Otherwise, I’m a little over this girl-just-wanna-have-fun attitude against literature and media analysis…

There's a reality where Emerald is an iconic music video director who sometimes directs the visuals for other peoples works

"She is a master of betraying the ethos of her own material, while symultaneously bashing your head in with the themes she thinks her material is about" - perfect summation of why I don't like Emerald Fennel's work.

She took a book about generational trauma,cycles of abuse,race and class and turned it into a Charli XCX music video with added smut to say I hated this film would be an understatement.

Children, this is why it should be mandatory to go through your "wattpad seamlessly transitioning to ao3 fanfiction" phase in your teens. Because if it happens later in your adult life, and you have enough privilege and money to make a project about your fantasies,  you end up turning them into an entire movie based on a gothic horror book about revenge, obsession and class struggles instead of writing a 2k fic tagged canon divergence//smut//race swap(lol)//aged up characters//sexual tension//p*rn with plot//fluff and angst//dom-sub undertones//dark romance etc on a random tuesday night.

Those quotation marks around Wuthering Heights are doing a LOT of heavy lifting

The decision to play Heathcliff's abuse of Isabella for laughs, as opposed to the book taking it seriously, really disturbed me. By having Isabella be turned on by this mistreatment, it implies that it's a "kink" for abuse victims, and downplays Heathcliff's nastiness, to make him seem like a better person. The novel understood that Heathcliff and Cathy weren't great people.

The reason why Nelly has to pull on Cathy's corset to make it tighter is because it's a scene also present in Gone with the Wind, which makes me suspicious that Fennel wanted to adapt Gone with the Wind in a horny way and simply couldn't. Considering that scene, the movie poster and the fact the costuming is reminiscent of the costuming in the GWTW film I wouldn't be surprised.

Also I saw someone say Elordi was perfect casting because, and I quote, he's Basque ---

i disagree that a historically accurate version wouldn’t perform well, the 2020 Emma film proves to me that the people yearn for historically accurate costuming & storytelling

Me being more excited for Broey Deschanel going in on Wuthering Heights than the actual movie

I was born and raised in Haworth, where the Brontë sisters lived and wrote their works. I spent my evenings in the cellar of their house doing arts and crafts clubs (I even worked there when I got older, in the part of the house converted into a museum) and running over the moors that inspired Wuthering Heights. I have to say that the only good thing to have come out of Fennell’s adaptation is the look of complete bamboozlement and disgust on the faces of the elderly film-goers who attended our community screening.

I am thankful that at least this has led to an amazing academic rotation of videos, because it has been cathartic to let loose. (Also, our mind meld has been amazing xxx)

Why Baz’s Romeo + Juliet works despite its tacky yet stylish appearance and modern setting is because it stays true to the characters and their motivations. You can make them any race, set the story almost anywhere in any period, but as long as there’s a war between two powerful families with two teenagers who still find love, it works. Without their naive, hopeful romance within a hopeless environment of hatred and paranoia, it isn’t Romeo and Juliet anymore. Take that away, it’s just “Romeo and Juliet” in name only.

Wuthering Heights without its othering of Heathcliff, without the abuse from Cathy’s racist brother, and without the abuse that Heathcliff heaps upon others, then it isn’t Wuthering Heights. It’s just unoriginal fanfiction of a brutish man and a horny woman who can’t help but throw herself at him.

Let’s leave the debate of “is Wuthering Heights a romance?” behind for a second.
Wuthering Heights, as a book, has some undeniably intense romantic and even erotic themes. There’s no reason it couldn’t become a good romance movie.
The problem is… it’s way too hot and heavy, way too early. There’s no sense of longing or eroticism. All the catharsis of the ending is lost because Fennell can’t contain herself and ends up blowing early all over the screen, leaving the rest as flaccid melodrama with no tension.

3:11 "i m sorry for the lack of originality here"
that's ok Emerald Fennell isn't sorry for her lack o originality lmao

I find Emerald Fennell to be representative of one of the many ongoing conversations about the state of modern art and media, specifically related to the topic of “is art these days becoming more void and anemic because The Arts are much less accessible to people not coming from insulated wealth communities.” I.e. a lot of folks making art these days don’t seem to have anything interesting to say because their life experience has been too sheltered.

Nobody kill me, I’m more so talking about cinema and TV, less so the gallery world (someone else can speak to that).

As a Brit, I wanted to point out how much accent and class are linked in the UK. It's very easy to tell how "posh" someone is from how they speak. In a story about class, particularly in Yorkshire, getting the right kinds of accents should be very important which is part of the reason I was upset to see Elordi cast here, given how terrible his accent was in Saltburn. Saltburn was also a story about class, set in England, with a main character from the north - Barry Keoghan's accent in that was arguably worse than Elordi's, which is a shame. At English universities particularly, your accent immediately implies so much about where you're from and how rich you are to the people around you, and Fennell didn't at all seem to care about any of this. I see all this as a kind of microcosm for how she is as a filmmaker in general: not caring about subtext, important details, learning from past mistakes, and having such a surface-level approach to important topics. I'd rather her not make films set in the UK in future, to be honest, it just feels like she does it to give Americans some extra whimsy.

I called it the Bridgertonification of Wuthering Heights.