upstanding Mark Darcy, his participation a cunning pretzel of allusive logic: Sounds sexy, eh, Bridge? ;-) The ending to the movie we saw in LA ends with home movies of BJ and MD as little children behaving in their usual ways is hysterical piece. I still feel cheated the more the better.

Sounds like we've missed out both sides of the Atlantic. Why do they do this different ending mallarkey, we had the same with MLSF...I still haven't seen the British ending as have only seen film on video ;-(

Grant responds: "Getting it out � the apple peel." So glad he clarified that! ;-D (Valerie) rescheduled for Monday, April 16. TV Guide online has this date listed as well. Hmmm...and the other possibility was that he would be on Rosie on Monday. Could it be possible? Could he really be coming to NYC in person and doing both? I'll believe it when I see it. *crossing fingers, toes, kidneys and superior vena cava* "Diary" will open on only about 1,500 screens, compared with about 2,600 for Josie Seems a foregone conclusion, then. And there's no mention (unless I've missed it) of how many screens that other literary masterpiece, Joe Dirt, is playing on. (Tracy) Why do they do this different ending mallarkey Vintage Harvey Scissorhands, er, Miramax. I don't get it either.

upstanding Mark Darcy, his participation a cunning pretzel of allusive logic: Sounds sexy, eh, Bridge? ;-) I guess it's a clever salute to Steely Dan, i.e., Pretzel Logic (one of my all time faves). Why do they do this different ending mallarkey It's bizarre, isn't it? I saw your note on 126, Tracy, thanks. It doesn't sound as though either of us is missing any Colin scenes, so I'm not losing any sleep.:-) I suppose this is the result when you have two different distributors, and it probably happens routinely, but we'd never think to compare notes on a non-CF film. What's your ending of Gone With the Wind like?;-) Also . . . does the Titanic go down?;-)

(Eileen) Hmmm...and the other possibility was that he would be on Rosie on Monday. Could it be possible? Could he really be coming to NYC in person and doing both? Only about 20 minutes left to *gag* Rosie show. Why wouldn't he do both? If Letterman wasn't scheduled for reruns next week, Colin could have a hat trick. ;-D At least now I see what O'Sullivan was referring to about Cleaver's alledged heterosexuality. But what school of logic would allow her to make that leap to Darcy as well. Just because both of their girlfriends had adolescent boylike figures.... ;-D Also . . . does the Titanic go down?;-) No, is saved by American submarine crew. ;-D

Firth in NY theory: maybe son, Will, is on Spring break and Colin is coming to the US to pick him up and take him to meet his new brother on the other side of the pond. Not totally implausable.

OK, they just said BJD's CF would be on Rosie on Monday (weather permitting, nappy changes delegated, etc.) but if you try to blackmail me, I will deny it. ;-D

Yes! They DID say COlin on Rosie on Monday!!! As for the Wash Post review, did anyone really see Bridget (the book) as a great feminist tract? If anything, it's a bit the opposite. A career woman realising the femisist dream isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nor is it a "call to arms" to women deserted by f%$kwits. It's more a book commiserating with the lot of women hearing the tick tock getting louder.

Anyone see Barry Normans filmnight? Unfortunately missed the first ten mins so only saw a small interview with CF. As usual there was plenty from HG,RZ,HF & SM.

Here is Christopher Tookey's review from the Daily Mail: Bridget Jones: a comic triumph Memo to diary: Have just seen romantic comedy that is going to be whopping great hit this spring. Those who predicted Renee Zellweger wouldn't be able to do English accent about to eat words. Though Texan, Miss Zellweger just as believable as Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors, and even more adorable. Remember fancying her in Jerry Maguire; here she's less of a doormat and well worth cheering on as she stands up for self while committing career suicide or falling for highly unsuitable men. Even unfeeling non-feminists may share anguish as she repeatedly makes fool of herself in public and resorts in times of crisis to vodka bottle and gorging self on Branston pickle straight from jar. RZ not really very overweight (size 12 at most); all the same, extra poundage round legs and bottom very un-Hollywood and definite boost for women who enjoy their food and don't wish to look like stick insects. Also good news for men who prefer woman to look like woman. RZ takes curse off Bridget's self-absorption by being lovably tongue-tied, gauche and joyful when thinks (wrongly) she's met Mr Right. Film might - if it had followed book faithfully - have struck some women and lot of men as alienating wallow in female self-pity - instead, bright and touching. Fancy Miss Zellweger rotten. Memo to self: Try to find more respectable, critical, non-repetitive way of expressing this. Colin Firth brave to take on thankless part of stiff, snooty English lawyer who appreciates Bridget just as she is, and turns out to be decent cove once you get to know him. Firth excellent at little eye-flickers that give away hidden sensitivity beneath. Also makes change to see articulate Englishman in movies who is not complete swine or twit. Big revelation Hugh Grant - great fun as love-rat Daniel Cleaver, believably self-centred, interestingly dangerous and distinctly sexy. Important that his Mr Nasty be v. attractive, or Bridget might have come across as idiotic slag. GRANT gives a master class in light comedy acting, not for first time either. Am not altogether surprised that reference in book to Grant's escapade with hooker off Hollywood Boulevard hasn't made it into movie. Helen Fielding (original author) and Andrew Davies (Pride and Prejudice on telly) receive co-screenwriting credits, but Richard Curtis's input obviously immense and not only in profusion of f-words. Has transformed episodic fiction into neatly structured, emotionally satisfying romantic comedy - fractionally overlong and not as uproarious as Four Weddings and a Funeral, but well up to standard of his Notting Hill, in fact better because fresher and less formulaic. Special praise for casting director Michelle Guish. Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent predictably excellent as Bridget's foolish but lovable parents. But lesser known British actors Sally Phillips, Shirley Henderson and James Callis all make an impact as Bridget's boozing partners. Pity not more British films like this, to help good young actors away from poverty line and Michael Winner movies. First-time director Sharon Maguire, friend of Fielding, not innovative but does creditable job. Wisely unflashy but competent, shows total sympathy for Bridget Jones psyche, lets terrific cast get on with it. Clever opening gets audience on Bridget's side before end of title sequence. final joke over titles (at expense of Hugh Grant character) well worth sticking around for. Minor quibbles: Patrick Barlow undeveloped as shopping channel presenter who seduces Bridget's mum; Bridget's accent and vocab wobble a bit between upper-middle posh and lower-middle genteel, though some English girls are like that at moment. Quibbles outweighed by general likeability and funny set-pieces. Especially enjoyed very silly fight between leading men both equally useless at violence and breaking off in middle of restaurant tussle to join in singing 'Happy Birthday' to bewildered diner. BJ's Diary bound to appeal to those who like Cheers, Ally McBeal and Sex and the City; but everyone to be congratulated on keeping film specifically English (despite one reference to attorney when lawyer is meant). Nice to see London used as backdrop. Still a rarity. Lightness of touch welcome, since film deals with recognisably awful embarrassments, betrayals and female self-hatred, and vaguely based on Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice. Memo to self: Scatter more references to Felliniesque fantasy sequences, post-modernism, F.R. Leavis and English literary tradition to give impression of formidably high-powered intellect if time before setting off to see vitally important screening of Rugrats in Paris - The Movie. All in all, quite a triumph. Film as whole manages tricky feat of being true to spirit of novel but also delivers slick, entertaining romp to movie-goers throughout world who have never heard of book, still less actually read one. Obvious hit chick flick with colossal identification factor for unmarried female thirtysomethings. But even blokes will respond to RZ who is talented, cute and completely gorgeous, but mustn't go on about this or people will think have entirely lost marbles and turned into more than usually pathetic example of drunken, overweight, middle-aged film critic unrequitedly in love with nubile screen goddess. Hmm. Wonder if there's best-seller in this idea? Probably not, but definitely want Hugh Grant to play me in screen version.

Lizza will be able to tell us about the UK/US endings. After tomorrow she will have seen them both.

From Primetime Q&A: Q: What would you order for your last meal? A: I think it would have to be a nice hot spotted dick � it's an English pudding. Very delicious. Q: What talent or skill would you like to have? A: I have always admired trapeze artists, but I am not sure I could � I did once try it on a Club Med holiday and I had to be helped sobbing down the ladder again because I got vertigo the second I got to the top. Q: What is the most embarrassing moment in your life? A: My first hemorrhoid. I was on the train in France and I couldn't believe I had one. I thought what's going on and I remember going to the loo in the train. I really wanted to have a look at this thing and its very hard to see your own bum. But I remember standing on the loo and sort of looking back through my legs to try and see this thing and I hadn't really mastered the lock on the loo and this German tourist came in and saw me peering back through my legs. That would have to be the most embarrassing. Put that on network telly. Q: What makes a person sexy? A: I think it's a combination of warm personality and a nice sense of humor and large breasts. Q: What do you like to spend your money on? A: I seem to spend all my money on socks at the moment, because I never ever remember to cut my toenails and I go through about 20 pairs of socks a week. It's disgusting. You'd think why buy socks, why not just buy clippers? Q: What is your secret passion? A: Masturbation � but you can't use that on TV. http://abcnews.go.com/sections/primetime/2020/PrimetimeQA_010412_hughgrant_feature.html

Hmmmmm. Methinks Hugh is going to have to rely a lot on his secret passion if he continues to discuss such appealing topics as hemorrhoids and toenail clipping. I have been taping Today all this week of the off chance of a CF sighting (hope Monday will be the lucky day). Anyway, today I was rewarded by Gene Shalit's review at the end. A very positive review or rave as Matt Lauer called it. GS made many positive comments about RZ (an irresisitible performance), mentioned BJD as having a "sparkly screenplay" and concluded that the BJD is a "smart movie, an R-rated comedy that's funny and in these days a funny comedy is not redundant". The clip showed CF talking about the naked childhood meeting and ended with his face. I just caught a segment on ET explaining that the scene in which BJ is sliding down a firepole, panty-hose clad butt in close-up to the audience, is being cut in US, (quite a shocking scene, really, considering that here in Ontario women a permitted to go topless in public). Gheesh!! Apparently that scene will be shown in UK. At the end of the segment, HG, RZ and CF were shown at the London premiere. ODB looked like he was really enjoying himself. Big smiles. Too bad I couldn't get to my VCR fast enough.

I thought I saw RZ was to be featured on Fox Entertainment today at 2 EST so took a chance and set my VCR for that instead of another fruitless Today taping. Yikes...of course the show was pre-empted by the spy plane crew being released. Oh well.

Saw a bit of the ET thing about RZ working undercover at Picador. Funny how the women interviewed on camera at Picador all sounded like RZ/Bridget. At the end was the shot of RZ, CF and HG at the London premiere. Will tape at repeat tomorrow. We saw the firepole butt shot.

Butt shot scene is in film--indeed, over and over again BJ she rewinds and fast forwards it. The networks wouldn't accept it for commercials. But apparently ET can show it as much as they want 'cause they sure did. Here's the Telegraph review *shaking head* Welcome to London, England The film of Bridget Jones's Diary is funny, charming and expertly acted - just don't expect to recognise the setting says Andrew O'Hagan IF the world ended tomorrow, British cinema would be remembered internationally for four things: Bond movies, kitchen-sink dramas, Merchant-Ivory, and mavericks such as Michael Powell and David Lean. Soon, the way things are going, you will be able to add a fifth category: the Richard Curtis romantic fantasy film. Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill are two of the most commercially successful British films ever made, and Bridget Jones's Diary, the latest child of the Curtis ethos, could suffer the assault of several hydrogen bombs and would probably still do well. Like the Bond series and the posh literary epics, Bridget Jones is a film that mostly ignores real life, choosing instead to be the kind of heightened, unlikely, instantly gratifying film that is made to invite the communion of Americans. Curtis's films offer a view of Englishness that has nothing to do with reality: a country of rolling, untroubled fields, giant houses for the poor, fairy-tale weather, cobbled streets and no black people. However, Bridget Jones is not a terrible film - it is a funny, daft one, with enough winning charm to stop you from hating yourself for laughing at its many jokes. It is full of pop songs and easy-on-the-heart human dynamics, and yet, under all its likeable front, it can be a fairly impoverished melange. Cinema-goers who have an interest in anything other than America-inclined marshmallowness will be amazed by what the film represents. It's as if the values of intelligent British film-makers from the Sixties to the mid-Eighties had never existed. Bridget Jones, indeed, even more than its sister movies, represents the perfectly watchable triumph of the formulaic over the original, the cheerily accessible over the difficult, and announces, with a new loudness, the end of a period when many British movies could easily be identified with matters of importance to British society. I know this sort of talk gives some of you a headache, but I consider it my job to express unease when there's something off in the breeze: anyone who says that Bridget Jones's Diary is a straightforwardly good film is not telling the truth. Bridget (Renee Zellweger) is a single, marginally podgy publishing assistant in the London of the Nineties. She is a bit of a laugh, with friends - Shazzer, Jude and Tom - who are up for it, confused, confessional and bright, and who act as the familiar Curtis-chorus to the main events in Bridget's hassled existence. As the film opens, the main thing in Bridget's head is an e-mail flirtation that she is having with her boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), who is funny, roguish and charming about everything from office politics to amorous boating accidents. Meanwhile, Bridget begins to form a crush on a henpecked, sad-jumper-wearing mummy's boy called Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), who also happens to be very handsome. The scene is set for Pride and Prejudice-type shenanigans (bred in the bone: Firth played Mr Darcy in the BBC's Austen adaptation, and was much admired by Bridget in the book), and before you know it Bridget is up to her big pants in generational complications. Into the bargain her nice dad (played by Jim Broadbent) is left by Bridget's flighty mother for a pompadoured TV presenter. There is plenty of evidence that the film did somersaults in the editing suite. Following Helen Fielding's book - a fictitious diary that began as a newspaper column - it starts off with the journal technique, lots of voice-over, and words appearing at the bottom of the screen. But it soon loses that, and becomes a technically standard account of sex and the single girl. There are several first-class laughs, and Hugh Grant sends himself up fantastically, filling out the role of Cleaver with an improvisational lippyness, a self-conscious buffoonery, that is brilliantly sustained. Zellweger is equally good. She has a terrific face, freshly un-Hollywood, a well-grasped English accent, and she spins from embarrassment to shamelessness to jollity with no bother at all. To bring up the British film industry in a discussion of this film might be a bit like taking a flame-thrower to kill a fly, but the frothiness of Bridget Jones can't just be laughed away, not when the success of these Curtis films becomes the fact against which so many other British films are measured. It's not Bridget Jones's fault, necessarily, nor Richard Curtis's, but the fact that so much American money went into this film must be considered if the thing is up for intelligent discussion at all. I remarked the other week on the way that Miramax are becoming specialists at banalising European culture in films aimed at the US box office. In some measure this is one of those films. It certainly has none of the guts or the relevance of the book. It has all been turned into heritage. And that, as the original Bridget might have said, is totally crap. The performances are good, the direction is crisp, and there are scenes, especially the big seduction one involving Hugh Grant, that rip up the audience. The film is shapeless, though, and it meanders into the cliches of romance - cinema romance - in a way that defies the on-its-toes vivacity of Fielding's original. The film really has nothing to do with Fielding's creation - she was much sharper, much more Zeitgeist-defining, and she lives a much more emphatically human life on the page. Curtis's Bridget Jones is not so much a real modern girl as a flighty, second-string cipher in a chocolate-box study of England. The film opens and closes with snowflakes the size of wedding bouquets, and the country lanes near Bridget's mother's house are like a sketch that John Constable would have rejected for seeming too romantically epic. Even the biggest-budget directors in Hollywood these days manage to make New York look something like New York. I know, I know: call me an agitated old bore with a fetish for Romanian movies starring half-starved babushkas, but I'm able, by the skin of my teeth, to be only half-nice to a movie as cynical as Bridget Jones. Let's give it the benefit of the doubt. Curtisworld is like something conjured by the Brothers Grimm: castles, lakes, and enchanted forests are served up as part of the Britain of today, and everyone behaves in the way that people used to behave in British sitcoms before they went brazen and trendy. Director Sharon Maguire (Fielding's best friend, and the model, apparently, for Shazzer) is a fine furnisher of the Curtis touch: it's all pretty and hilarious and perfectly useless. But what the hell. It's fine, for an evening, if you just want to pack your troubles in an old kit bag.

Marianne, who is that supposed to be in the Prime Time interview, Huge? Gross! BJD's CF would be on Rosie on Monday That means he will be traveling on Easter Sunday--bad Catholic! ;-) Of course, Luca will be babtised soon. Too bad I don't plan on Umbria this summer. explaining that the scene in which BJ is sliding down a firepole, panty-hose clad butt in close-up to the audience, is being cut in US, We saw that scene in LA! I can't believe they are still cutting the film. Thanks for all the articles, ladies.

anyone who says that Bridget Jones's Diary is a straightforwardly good film is not telling the truth. Is he calling me a liar? Moon, they are not cutting any more scenes.

Think we need yet another post reassuring one and all that the firepole butt shot is indeed *in* the film?;-) Yes, that's the charming Gnat quoted; he's on Prime Time at 10:00 p.m. I think RZ is on Conan O'Brian tonight.

Just to be redundant: the networks would not accept *commercials* with the firepole/butt scenes...no problem with the movie. Heck...even shallow, ignorant Americans will accept that scene in a movie. Of course, we will blush about all the bad language-we may be dumb, but we're sensitive ;-) Sure hope the DVD has *both* versions of the end/credits. May feel v. deprived if not allowed to see all possible alternatives. Hmmmm...may have to go to London later in the year to see a play about a "great" dane...perhaps could rent BJD by then. :-)

From the Today/MSNBC web site: http://msnbc.com/onair/default.asp MONDAY, APRIL 16 - 7:00 AM ET Actor Colin Firth A look at Charlotte Church�s new book, �Voice of an Angel.� �Today�s Woman� with Judy Reichman. A look at Valerie Harper�s book, �Today I am a Ma�am.� �Today�s Family� and �Parents� magazine team up to talk about a five-part series on what makes a great parent. Actor Colin Firth talks about his role in the movie, �Bridget Jones� Diary.� Author Malika Oufkir with her book, �Stolen Lives.� Yeah, right! At least he is prominently "displayed".

Attaboy, Colin. If little Charlotte Church can do it . . . *Won't believe it until I see it* Think is cruel bait and switch scam in manner of mail informing me that You Have Just Won $1,000,000.00 (in type size generally reserved for declarations of war or dissolution of Cruise/Kidman marriage), while word "may" after You is in small gnat (as opposed to huge) print.;-) V.g. review in the NY Times; it's not online yet. BTW, I misspoke (miswrote?;-) before; Huge is on Regis & Kelly domani, Rz on The View and Conan tonight.

Whatever happened to the Telegraph's feature where you sent in questions for Bridget and they were going to publish them the following month? Another article in EW about RZ facing the wrath of British critics: http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,106030~1~0~reneezellwegerfaceswrath,00.html The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw has a very bizarre review. Good thing no one reads your broadsheets. The screen Bridget may be good knockabout fun, but it lacks the devastating insights of the original, says Peter Bradshaw Well, here it is. The film of the book of the newspaper column of the deeply important single-women-in-their-30s zeitgeisty phenomenon. Or, to use Friends parlance, The One Where Bridget Gets Anal Sex From Hugh Grant and Likes It and Wants to Do It Again. I am not making that last bit up. It might happen off camera, but it's one of the film's raunchier, chancier, more grubbily English things, superciliously ignored in the acres of consumer-style journalism devoted to all things Bridget in the past few weeks. Sharon Maguire's broadly enjoyable, knockabout, sitcommy picture takes the sophisticated creation of Helen Fielding and - well, doesn't dumb it down exactly, but transfers it to a medium in which much of her distinctive qualities are inevitably lost. What we've got isn't so much postmodern Pride and Prejudice as pre-modern Mills and Boon. Bridget, the screwed-up publishing assistant, played by the Texan Ren�e Zellweger, is torn between the adorably sexy cad Daniel, played by Hugh Grant, and the sullen but morally superior human rights barrister Mark Darcy - or perhaps that should be plain Mr Darcy, played by Colin Firth. Who should she choose? (The answer, frankly, is Hugh, who blows everyone else off the screen with a cracking performance as the naughtier-than-thou heartbreaker. Of this, more in a moment.) We all know how Bridget Jones has been the template for the jokey single-gal confessionalists in fact and fiction. How Bridget famously spawned a billion imitators in books and newspapers, who get daringly drunk and are "rubbish" and "sad" about men and everything else. But really we know that they are in control by virtue of writing it up themselves, very wittily, and having a prestigious columnist job. Putting their great ancestor Bridge on the screen, however, abolishes this contract of understanding between writer and reader. When we see Bridget drink her bodyweight in chardonnay, fall over, get up and make a funny face, it isn't being filtered through her own prose. In print, we were laughing with Bridget. On screen, well... The awful truth about this film is that it makes Bridget look like the world's biggest prat, and an egregious emotional imbecile. And the camera's glimpses of her own diary disclose not the devastatingly acute document we have come to know and love, but crass, sub-Adrian Mole, semi-literate jottings with big girly handwriting. So Bridget has to be reimagined as a lovable, infantile clown - but once this leap has been made, Ren�e Zellweger's impersonation of Bridget is entertaining. She has an excellent English accent, the best since Gwyneth Paltrow's Emma. And her Jake La Motta-ish weight-gain is a thing of joy. Her cheeks have become plump, hamster-ish, pushing her mouth into a continuous, unsexy pout of anxiety and self-reproach. Her thighs are massively dimpled and her great bottom is as stately as a sinking galleon, and it's always in our face, particularly when Bridget wears a bulging Playboy bunny outfit to her mother's vicars and tarts party. It is a quintessentially English bottom which should by rights be encased in an unflattering netball skirt. We don't get much about her mates, Shazzer and Jude - a bit of a waste of two first-class actors, Shirley Henderson and Sally Phillips (much of their stuff was presumably lost in the edit). Colin Firth reprises his smouldering act as Mr Darcy, although oddly it's Hugh who gets dripping wet this time, drunkenly falling out of the rowing boat he and Bridget have hired on a romantic weekend break. The big comic set-piece comes when Daniel and Darcy, consumed with mutual loathing, have a punch-up out in the street, and Bridget's gay friend Tom (James Callis) blunders into a restaurant queenily to announce the exciting fact: "Fight! Fight!" As I have said, any red-blooded member of the audience will be longing for Hugh to win it. [Ed note: HUH???] He is effortlessly the best thing in the film. His Daniel is, as they say, Not Safe In Taxis or anywhere else. There is nothing floppy or limp about his hair here; it is flowing and Byronically sensual. Daniel is mad, bad, dangerous and extremely funny to know. And he's much more interesting than dull old Darcy or indeed silly old Bridget. What a pair they are. A stuffy bore and an emotionally needy, not-very-talented person whose one professional success, as a television presenter, is the gift of Darcy in the first place. Richard Curtis's London, swirling with picturesque snow, is that weird imaginary place, that ersatz London-from-another-planet we saw in Notting Hill. It's an unreal London where barristers can smash up restaurants without getting into trouble with the police or the Bar Council. It's a virtual-reality zone where Bridget organises a publishing party attended by Salman Rushdie and other self-conscious literary celebs playing wooden cameos of themselves - a very uncertain moment, in which the film appears to be absorbing its own status as a media event. But this is a strong debut from former documentary-maker Sharon Maguire, who directs with chutzpah and style. Richard Curtis's script (taken from original drafts by Helen Fielding and Andrew Davies) may not be as sharp as Four Weddings or Notting Hill, but it has its moments, including a tremendous gag about, of all people, FR Leavis. It reminded me of Leavis's comment about Edith Sitwell: she belongs to the history of publicity, not literature. The same could be said of that one-woman hype sensation Bridget Jones. But what a monumental place in the history of publicity she has.

This is one they'll be quoting in the ads! From Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune. Doesn't get much better than this. Thanks to Janet. Bridget Jones's Diary amuses almost as much in movie form as it did between book covers.The film kept me smiling all the way through. And it's about time. Good romantic comedies with charming characters and witty dialogue -- especially in the hands of masters like Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor or, more recently, Woody Allen -- have always been among the movies' chief delights. They sizzle and refresh. But recent romantic comedies have tended to fizzle on screen. The Wedding Planner, Someone Like You and What Women Want came across as overcalculated pseudo-comedies -- curdled valentines. Bridget Jones's Diary is an exception. It's a chronicle of the romantic misadventures of a brainy young publishing-house publicist in her early 30s whose love life and family have become disasters. Based on Helen Fielding's incredibly popular book, it's chock-full of delights. Among them: the brilliant acting of stars Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth and Hugh Grant; the effervescent dialogues and crackling monologues; the empathetic and limber direction by first-timer Sharon Maguire; the clever in-jokes and ribald ripostes; and the way the whole movie seems to gleam and dance as you watch it. Zellweger is an actor of such pixie charm yet deep humanity that she defies category. How can this milky-complexioned Texan play a role considered so quintessentially British that much of the British Isles' female populace seems to identify with it? How can they accept Texan Zellweger as Bridget? How can we?Well, how did we all accept Britain's Vivien Leigh as that ultimate Southern belle, Scarlett O'Hara? While I found her clipped London accent and fruity diction strange for the first few scenes (wondering where her drawl disappeared to), I soon completely accepted her. Zellweger may have learned Bridget's accent from a diction coach. But the brains, warmth, earthy charm, sympathy, goodness and sturdiness are her own. And they definitely work for Bridget. Who is Bridget? Obviously, she's a surrogate for writer Fielding. But Bridget struck a chord with so many readers because of her universal predicament: Thirtyish, likable, fairly successful in life (Fielding herself worked in TV documentaries), Bridget is deeply discontent because she is without a partner. She blames herself, obsesses about food, makes lists, breaks resolutions. She has a deep crush on her publisher boss, Daniel Cleaver (Grant), a twinkly guy who's a bit of a rake. Another man, Mark Darcy (Firth), seems unavailable -- guarded by a possessive girlfriend, Natasha (Embeth Davidtz).There are other crises in her life. Her mom (Gemma Jones) has left her dad (Jim Broadbent) and fallen for a shopping-channel huckster with phony-looking hair. So her dad quietly suffers, watching the shopping channel. To combat all this, Bridget welcomes her friends (Sally Phillips, Shirley Henderson and James Callis), who always try to cheer her up. Or, she opens her diary and writes about life, sex, food, money, family and almost everything else. What helps make the movie work so well is the way Bridget's voice dominates it. Diary echoes with her slants, laughter and whines. As with Woody Allen, that recognizable voice draws us in, and we feel strongly for our imperfect narrator.As in many romantic comedies, the heroine is torn between two men: the dark, solid and mysterious Darcy; and Cleaver, Bridget's irresponsible Casanova boss. Firth gives Darcy a wounded grace. And Grant gives Cleaver all his finesse. Usually, Grant plays the good lover; here, he's just as effective playing the bad. And the Zellweger-Firth-Grant triangle works as irresistibly as Hepburn-Grant-Stewart in The Philadelphia Story. The rest of the cast is fine, too, especially Broadbent as the hurt dad. (There's also a wonderful cameo at a publishing party from novelist Salman Rushdie.) Director Maguire may be a first-time dramatic feature-maker. But she is deeply versed in film: She has directed many documentaries for British television on subjects like Picasso, Margaret Thatcher and H.G. Wells. Though her touch is never intrusive, we can always feel her hand and voice: urbane, sophisticated, strongly involved with her characters.The links between the moviemakers and the book are fascinating. Writer and executive producer Fielding is, of course, the inspiration for much of Bridget. But director Maguire is the model for Bridget's best friend, Shazza (Phillips). Co-writer Richard Curtis, who has written several hits for Grant (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill) in which Grant plays a version of Curtis himself, here has written a part nearer Grant's own personality -- at least according to Grant. Firth is playing a character named Darcy, the story's quiet hero, much like the Darcy in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. And that's a role that Firth also has played on screen -- just as Grant has acted in Ang Lee's film of Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Austen, that supreme British romantic-comedy novelist, is the right measuring rod here. Fielding obviously is thinking of her, as are the other writers, director Maguire and the actors. And, if we are, too, neither the film nor Zellweger, who plays Bridget with such wit and courage, will disappoint us.

Woo woo!! Wilmington comes through (will buy paper tomorrow). Sun-Times hasn't changed over to Friday yet.

http://startribune.com/viewers/qview/cgi/qview.cgi?template=free_article&slug=bri13 Bridget Jones's Diary Jeff Strickler [Minneapolis] Star Tribune Friday, April 13, 2001 'Bridget Jones's Diary'' isn't pretty -- but that's the point. This romantic comedy about an overweight, chain-smoking, heavy drinker who's chronically attracted to jerks is offered as a counterpoint to all the fairy tales about the beautiful people. Adapted from the bestselling novel by Helen Fielding, who helped write the screenplay, it alters some of the book's content -- why do filmmakers have a knee-jerk instinct to change endings? -- but remains faithful to its spirit. It's a chick flick, but the humor is loopy enough to keep guys entertained. Credit Renee Zellweger for that. She has said former boyfriend Jim Carrey taught her a sense of comic timing. It appears that the star of such goofball comedies as "Dumb and Dumber" and "Ace Ventura" also taught her the value of checking her ego at the soundstage door. Zellweger isn't playing the kind of buffoon that made Carrey a millionaire. But she certainly is cashing in on her own embarrassment. Zellweger, who gained 20 pounds for the role, freely lets the film make fun of her appearance, manners and naivete. Bridget is a frumpy London publicist who ends up spending yet another dateless New Year's Eve with her parents. Convinced that if she doesn't take drastic action, she's "doomed to die fat and alone," she resolves to turn her life around: She'll lose weight, quit smoking, cut down on the drinking, stop dating losers and keep a diary to record the glorious accomplishments. The only commitment she manages to keep is the diary. Shared with us via voice-over narration, the journal chronicles each painful setback. BAD BOY The most obvious concerns her love life. Her lecherous boss, Daniel (Hugh Grant), puts a move on her. He's a cad through and through, and she knows it. But she's helpless in his presence. Bridget finally meets a nice guy, Mark (Colin Firth, "Shakespeare in Love"). But he's, well, dull. Therein lies the dilemma: Does she opt for the romantic equivalent of a double-chocolate brownie a la mode -- certain to be regretted later but oh, so delightful at the time -- or go with Cupid's version of a rice cake? The announcement that Zellweger had snagged the movie's starring role did not go over well in England, where they resented an American being imported to play the quintessential British Everywoman. But Zellweger -- whose serious work in such independent films as "The Whole Wide World" has been overshadowed by her fluffy performances in the likes of "Jerry Maguire" -- nails the accent. All the roles are wonderfully drawn. Grant, who too often plays the same befuddled character, attacks his bad-boy part with zeal. Firth's comic touch is delicately understated. Bridget's parents, who could have become simplistic stereotypes, are given depth by veterans Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones. This is the first feature film for director Sharon Maguire, who spent 10 years working for the BBC. The narrative is episodic -- an inescapable shortcoming of the diary format -- but Maguire more than compensates with a lightweight tone and snappy pacing. Still, it's Zellweger's unselfishness that sells the movie. How many other young actresses would be willing to let a movie make fun of their fat thighs? She turns "Bridget Jones's Diary" into something to write home about. *** out of four stars The setup: A lovelorn woman has to choose between an exciting cad and decent but dull guy. What works: The performances are topnotch. What doesn't: The narrative is episodic. Great line: "She smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish and dresses like her mother." Rating: R; profanity, sexual situations and raunchy humor.

Cupid's version of a rice cake I think that's an all-time first as a description of CF!

http://www2.onwisconsin.com/scripts/staticpage.dll?only=y&spage=AE/movies/movies_details.htm&id=29616&ck=&ver=2.8 Duane Dudek Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 2 1/2 stars of 5 Published: April 13, 2001 Like its protagonist and the actress who plays her, "Bridget Jones's Diary" is short, sweet and a little incomplete. The movie is shaggily likable but doesn't convey whatever intangible turned the character into a chubby cult figure. Why British novels like the "Harry Potter" and "Bridget Jones" books become cultural phenomena beyond the printed page is left unanswered, probably because the filmmakers don't know the answer either. The result is an amusing ramble of a film that is driven more by plot than character, and which finds humor in the awkward situations it places its heroine in rather than who she is. Like the film "High Fidelity," which transferred a popular novel about a neurotic, single male thirtysomething from London to Chicago yet retained its arch qualities, "Bridget Jones" suffers from a sense of dislocation that is a product of similar and clashing sensibilities. Screenwriter Richard Curtis, who wrote the successful and entertaining films "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Notting Hill," and first-time feature director Sharon Maguire, are friends of the book's author, Helen Fielding, who co-wrote the screenplay. Fielding even based a journalist character in the book on Maguire. Perhaps this intimacy caused them to unconsciously turn something extremely familiar to them into a shorthand that shuts out others. On the other hand, casting Texas native Renee Zellweger as the quintessential single neurotic thirtysomething Londoner signals an attempt to open up the film into something the slim volume cannot sustain. Like the film's protagonist, the scrappy Zellweger jumps gamely into the fray knickers first. The conundrum is that, while the book's popularity is due to its universal themes, it is its specificity that makes it universal. In expanding the universal elements to broaden the story's appeal, the filmmakers tend to dilute whatever specifics made it unique in the first place. Yet like the remake of Eric Carmen's classic maudlin anthem "All By Myself," which a tipsy, pajama-wearing Bridget pantomimes in the opening scene, the film's limitations may only be apparent to those who are familiar with the original. Since the diary entries - in which Bridget chronicles her weight gain, cigarettes smoked, alcohol units consumed and pathetic love life - is a novelistic device, the filmmakers barely refer to it and use narration in an attempt to achieve the same effect. But the entries communicate her compulsions in ways that supplement her comic desperation. When the film tries to achieve the latter without the diary's interior voice, the result is simply just funny rather than poignant. (And you do laugh at the wry audacity of having writer Salman Rushdie, who appears in a party scene, being asked for directions to the loo, twice.) Hugh Grant is the shagalicious boss she knows better than to trust yet does anyway. How Grant, whose past "troubles" do not have anything to do with Northern Ireland, has become the foppish British Everyman is perplexing. Here he is grimly insufferable, as required, and the effect is frankly unsettling rather than sexy. Colin Firth is a glum barrister named after the Jane Austen character he played in "Pride and Prejudice," who dislikes Bridget as much as she dislikes him, which, of course, is every fairy tale's prelude to living happily ever after. Other delicious characters, such as Bridget's parents, wonderfully played by Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent, are underdeveloped. Too, transitions in the character's lives, such as Bridget's career crisis, are abruptly portrayed and affect the film's pace and continuity. Such are the pitfalls of a debut director handling material whose appeal is a mystery in the first place.

http://ent.twincities.com/scripts/staticpage.dll?only=y&spage=AE/movies/movies_details.htm&id=29616&ck=&ver=2.8 Sentimental Journals By Chris Hewitt Saint Paul Pioneer Press Published: Thursday, April 12, 2001 Bridget Jones' mouth has two left feet. 3 stars out of 4 "You tend to let out whatever's in your mouth without much thought to the consequences," a potential suitor tells her in "Bridget Jones's Diary." That is the appeal of Bridget, a Londoner who blabs to us like a best friend about her obsessive quest to do less smoking, drinking and eating and more smooching. Bridget's mouth is also her downfall, especially when it has recently been occupied by an entire bottle of Chardonnay. "Bridget Jones's Diary" preserves the boisterous, ironic, slightly sentimental spirit of Helen Fielding's novel despite the inevitable changes it makes. Bridget's friends are barely in the movie, even though it was directed by Sharon Maguire, who is Fielding's real-life best friend and the model for the character of Shazzer. Apparently, they were cut in favor of Bridget's parents, whose troubled marriage gives "Diary" a few serious moments, interspersed between Bridget's guzzling, puffing and juggling of two men (priggish Colin Firth and duplicitous Hugh Grant). In its basics, "Diary" is pretty much the same story as TV's "That Girl," with different vowels and liberal use of the f-word. The hiring of native Texan Renee Zellweger touched off controversy in England, but her accent sounds terrific to these Midwestern ears. Zellweger seems both more authoritative and more screwed up than in her other performances. That's perfect for the film, which represents Bridget's efforts to reconcile her own confidence in herself with her belief that the world thinks she's a loser. There's plenty of Bridget Jones in "Bridget Jones's Diary," but not much diary. Bridget's day-by-day log of the cigarettes, glasses of wine and cupcakes she consumed was a hilarious part of the novel, but the movie wisely resists the temptation to translate all of that stuff into voice-over narration. Here, we get the idea early on (wittily, Bridget's diary entries taunt her from the billboard she walks by in Picadilly Square), and then the movie forgets about the diary until it's needed for a plot point. That plot point -- the wrong person gets his hands on Bridget's journal -- is the sort of hokey storytelling device that crops up in most romantic comedies. But "Bridget" distinguishes itself from the pack because the woman is the engine who powers the movie -- the heroine gets to make up her mind about what she wants, instead of being the rope in a tug-of-war between two chiseled jaws (in fact, when "Bridget" does get to the obligatory Firth/Grant punching match, it's depicted for what it is: ridiculous macho posturing). Another characteristic of current romantic comedies is an Agatha Christie-like insistence on withholding information from us. Even in the likable "Someone Like You," the movie is so concerned about keeping us in suspense about which man Ashley Judd will choose that it makes both men look like jerks, so that neither seems to have an edge on the other. As a result, when she finally picks one, we're not sure why. "Diary," on the other hand, manages to show what's appealing about both guys and, by the time Bridget figures out what she wants, her choice makes as much sense to us as if we'd been reading her diary all along.

http://ent.twincities.com/scripts/staticpage.dll?reviewid=164237&only=y&spage=AE/movies/movies_details.htm&id=29616&ck=&ver=2.8&userid=1&userpw=.&uh=1,0, A sweet, feisty 'Bridget' By Mary F. Pols Contra Costa Times Published: Wednesday, April 11, 2001 3.5 of 4 stars Any fan of Helen Fielding's best seller "Bridget Jones's Diary" knew that elfin actress Ren�e Zellweger would have to beef up to play the part of Bridget, a romantically challenged hedonist prone to late-night chocolate snacks and no sense of due diligence when it comes to exercise. Despite all the tales of Zellweger's enforced bingeing on milkshakes and pizzas in preparation for the role, it was hard not to be both resentful and skeptical. For Bridget, an extra roll or two around the stomach comes naturally, and achieving it was merely a matter of existing; it certainly didn't involve work. But from the opening frames of the movie version of "Bridget Jones's Diary," when Zellweger's genuinely puffy face first heaves into sight atop a pair of slovenly pajamas, all that skepticism is likely to vanish. Oh, she's not fat at all, but then again, Bridget wasn't, either. She's just not thin in the way that, say, Zellweger typically is. She's fleshy, with most of the weight distributed between her breasts and her face. Her clothes never fit her quite right, and she has a habit of wearing inappropriately sexy or ill-fitting garments to her job at a London publishing house. There's even a glorious glimpse of cellulite on her thighs. Males welcome Zellweger's complete physical transformation into Bridget is just one of the pleasantly surprising ways in which Fielding's book has been translated into an extremely entertaining movie. The book's bawdy, hilarious sensibility is very much intact - there's heavy use of the F-word, as well as alcohol-swilling and smoking - but it's also been broadened into something that might actually appeal to a wider spectrum than its original, largely female demographic. A man who picked up the book might have felt as if he'd stumbled in on a conversation about bikini waxing, but he probably won't feel as excluded by the movie. This may be because Zellweger conveys an interesting blend of sweetness and feistiness, but none of Bridget's more bitter, off-putting (to some) qualities. Much of the success may also be owed to Fielding's early collaboration on the script, and the fact that Fielding's friend Sharon Maguire, a documentary filmmaker making her debut as a feature director, was the model for the character of Bridget's friend Shazzer. Clearly, the director knows the material. The book was unabashedly shallow. Each of Bridget's diary entries began with a litany of her sins: alcohol consumption, cigarettes smoked, weight gained or lost, poor judgment used in making phone calls to men. Bridget's distinct lack of self-esteem and her deep need for validation through male companionship appalled some of the more uptight feminists out there, who expressed both dismay and disbelief that women would still operate on this level. To which many would say, oh please. Yes, there are women out there who don't worry about never finding love, who have relaxed, have completely nonjudgmental attitudes about their own self-image and manage to entirely dodge the shallow cycle of need perpetuated by fashion magazines and such. Would you want to have a spa day with any of them? Regardless, the movie doesn't dwell on the diary as a construct, beyond an occasional scene of Zellweger scribbling. At one point, after Bridget has enjoyed a night of frolicking with her raffish boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), she's seen walking through the streets of London, with a big grin on her face, and a giant electronic billboard on a building flashes a quick diary entry. Maguire is smart enough to only use this too-cute technique once. Zellweger's Bridget gives enough away with her face and actions; she doesn't need this kind of assistance. Firth comes forth Also understandably absent is one of the book's assets, the way Bridget's life parallels "Pride and Prejudice," including the fact that her love interest is a rather stiff but dashing lawyer named Mr. Darcy, whom her mother (the outstanding Gemma Jones, who played the mother in Emma Thompson's "Sense and Sensibility") wants her to date. Fielding's Bridget lusted after actor Colin Firth, who portrayed Mr. Darcy in the BBC's much-loved adaptation of Austen's novel, but since Firth plays Mark Darcy in the movie - in an absolutely inspired bit of casting - Zellweger's character could hardly talk about how hot the actor Firth is. Although if she did, she would be speaking the truth. As Mark Darcy, Firth is exquisitely haughty. None of the casting can be faulted, actually. Grant, after years of simpering and stammering, is finally playing a complete cad, the attractive office scoundrel who can't be trusted, and it's a perfect part for him. The trio who play Bridget's chain-smoking, hard-drinking best friends Sharon (Sally Phillips), Jude (Shirley Henderson) and Tom (James Callis) do nice comic work as well. If at times they seem like characters straight out of "Notting Hill" or "Four Weddings and a Funeral," it's because the same production team is behind this movie.

The NY Times is up: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/arts/13BRID.html 'Bridget Jones's Diary': 120 Pounds and 1,000,000 Cigarettes Later By STEPHEN HOLDEN So what if you've put on a few extra pounds, appear gawky and tongue-tied in tense social situations, and wear bulky, little-girl underwear on a heavy date? And so what if you don't follow "The Rules" and still give your heart too easily to a suave charmer you suspect (no, you're pretty sure) of being a cad? What's important is being yourself. After all, isn't it the real you, the quirky, quick-witted, honest, plucky, chin-up, lovable, wonderful inner you that he's going to recognize as the genuine ruby shining amid a pile of fakes? Allegiance to blind faith in the true-blue inner you to attract Prince Charming is the reassuring romantic philosophy trumpeted by the film adaptation of Helen Fielding's best seller, "Bridget Jones's Diary." That wisp of novel is so charming with its mixture of insouciance, wit and candor that it's enough to restore a belief in fairy tale endings to the most embittered casualty of the urban dating wars. True, Billy Joel expressed the same sentiment a bit more bluntly in a love song addressed to a woman he has long since divorced: "I love you just the way you are." But the song and its promise live on. Who could resist such convincing valentines? Bridget Jones, in case you didn't know, is a 32-year-old bachelorette who works in a London publishing house and frets with sad amusement about her increasingly iffy prospects for finding a long-term relationship. Summoning up her shaky willpower, she decides to adopt the usual self-improvement regimen to make herself more desirable. She will lose 20 pounds, cut own on alcohol, cigarettes and sweets, and land the boat of her dreams. Her diary entries are prefaced with meticulous records of her progress (and lack thereof) in achieving her stringent numerical goals. What makes Bridget irresistible is that even when downhearted, she maintains a rueful sense of humor. Defeated by her immediate circumstances and gone into hiding, she remains intrepid in spirit. A woman who loves men and loves sex, she is a true believer in the possibility of romantic fulfillment without any moon-June-spoon ickiness: it's just you and me, babe, the real you and the real me. Openhearted and girlish in some ways, canny and sophisticated in others, Bridget's entertaining even when in the deepest funk. Most important, everything she thinks and says is informed by a critical, clear-eyed intelligence, even if she botches the actual words. Yet having soldiered through romantic diappointments, she remains remarkably uncurdled by bitterness and cynicism. Aside from her highly questionable taste in clothes and her inability to cook a multi-course home feast in which the soup isn't an alarmingly metallic shade of blue, what's not to adore? In translating "Bridget Jones's Diary" to the screen, all that really matters is bringing this complicated, somewhat reactionary character fully and lovably to life. In choosing the princess to play this princess, who could have imagined that Ren�e Zellweger, a native Texan, who put on 20 pounds for the role, would be so perfect? Adopting an impeccable British accent that's not too hoity- toity, and softening her character's romantic desperation, Ms. Zellweger brings the same qualities � a flinty integrity, a childlike stubbornness and an innocent face across which emotions melt like strawberry ice cream � that animated her performances in "Jerry Maguire" and "Nurse Betty." But this role is bigger and richer than those parts. Ms. Zellweger accomplishes the small miracle of making Bridget both entirely endearing and utterly real. It is a performance so airy you barely sense the work that must have gone into it. Throughout the film you ardently root for her to succeed and pray that the two men who end up coming to blows over her (in an improbable and awkwardly staged fistfight) recognize her goodness, inner beauty and all-around specialness. Those two men are her snaky but sexy boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), and Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), a grim young lawyer (and early childhood playmate) introduced to her by her dithery matchmaking mother (Gemma Jones). Although Bridget herself is no fashion plate, Darcy makes a disastrous first impression by wearing a silly looking reindeer sweater. A glib, elusive womanizer, Daniel elicits the same hooded-eyed Mephistopholean slipperiness in Mr. Grant that Woody Allen discovered and used so effectively in "Small-Time Crooks." By lowering his eyelids and adopting a faintly supercilious tone of voice, Mr. Grant expertly adjusts his stock screen persona from the ingenuous, girly-boy stumblebum of movies like "Notting Hill" into a duplicitous, testosterone-driven lothario. The joke behind Mr. Firth's Darcy is that the same actor played a version of a similar character, Mr. Darcy, in a television mini-series of "Pride and Prejudice." Here again, Mr. Firth is the stiff-backed Mr. Right whose wonderfulness is revealed by degrees as he peels away layers of formality to bare the sensitive soul beneath his forbidding but handsome (despite sartorial misfires) exterior. The movie, directed by Sharon Maguire from a screenplay by Ms. Fielding, Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis, begins with a blitz of fast-cut, witty observations and short satirical takes on Bridget, her friends, the London dating scene and the inner workings of her publishing house. The velocity leaves you almost breathless. The barrage continues for the first half of the film, after which it relaxes into a standard-issue will-she-or-won't-she-get-the-guy romantic comedy of crossed signals, misunderstandings and last-minute saves. What began as a tartly witty evisceration of the feverish single- but-looking state of mind (a scene of Bridget's being regarded condescendingly by people she calls "smug marrieds" is especially withering) turns into a variation of Cinderella. An undernourished subplot follows the separation of Bridget's parents and her mother's humiliating affair with a sleazy home-shopping network pitchman who enlists her as his assistant. Don't expect "Bridget Jones's Diary" to deliver any searing revelations about the human condition. Even as a do's and don'ts resource about the dating life, the wisdom it dispenses is questionable. What it is is a delicious piece of candy whose amusing package is scrawled with bons mots distantly inspired by Jane Austen. So was "Clueless," now already six years old. "Bridget Jones's Diary" is the best and smartest film of its kind since then.

http://ent.twincities.com/scripts/staticpage.dll?reviewid=164234&only=y&spage=AE/movies/movies_details.htm&id=29616&ck=&ver=2.8&userid=1&userpw=.&uh=1,0, Diary of a Mad Singleton By Bruce Newman Mercury News Published: Wednesday, April 11, 2001 3 stars of 4 ...Darcy is played by Colin Firth, who not only was mentioned for his yummy looks in Fielding's book but who played Mr. Darcy in the 1995 BBC production of ``Pride and Prejudice.'' This Darcy, therefore, is based on the Austen character and on the actor who played him, and is played by the actor who played the Austen character upon whom his own character is based...

The award for most Austen references in one review goes to... http://ent.twincities.com/scripts/staticpage.dll?reviewid=164262&only=y&spage=AE/movies/movies_details.htm&id=29616&ck=&ver=2.8&userid=1&userpw=.&uh=1,0, A dear 'Diary' buoyed by an un-British Bridget By Carrie Rickey Philadelphia Inquirer Published: Friday, April 13, 2001 3 stars out of 4 London''s most amusing slinging single, that knockabout imbiber of alcohol, cigarettes and men, is made flesh, 130 weight-obsessed pounds of it, by Ren�e Zellweger in "Bridget Jones''s Diary." It is as adorable and predictable a film as the Helen Fielding best-seller that inspired it. The movie, like the novel, traces its DNA to Jane Austen''s "Pride and Prejudice." To make it fit the rhyme scheme of a romantic comedy, its screenwriters - Fielding herself, Richard Curtis ("Four Weddings and a Funeral"), and the BBC''s veteran Austen adapter Andrew Davies - have imposed rhythms ineluctable as those of a limerick. This need not be so, as "Clueless" - a loveletter to Austen''s "Emma" postmarked Beverly Hills 90210 - nimbly showed. But it is so, and however unsurprising its surprises - the dashing man (Hugh Grant) is a cad and the sneering snob (Colin Firth) a dear - it is enjoyable to clock Austen''s insight about the swiftness of the female imagination, racing from blush to crush, love to matrimony in a heartbeat. You would think that Zellweger was closer to Austin, Texas, than to Austen, Jane, but you would be wrong. As the embodiment of the present-tense-imperfect modern career gal, she is present, tense and perfection. The ebullient Texan nails the English accent and self-deprecating attitude. And it''s not just the English she masters, but also the body English. Even when her gestures are irrepressibly, irresistibly, irretrievably American - her corkscrew of curls tangled up in her semaphore of arms - she doesn''t blow her bangs from her eyes (an American gesture of exasperation patented by Goldie Hawn and Meg Ryan), but struggles to recover a cockeyed composure, a "veddy English" Maggie Smith kind of dance. While Zellweger does her utmost to distill the book''s droll tone in the ding-dong of her voice-over narration, this proves a challenge for director Sharon Maguire (a documentarian and Fielding crony making her feature debut here). Bridget''s first-person account invites the reader to laugh with her. The movie camera is not subjective and necessarily sees from perspectives other than Bridget''s. The shift in vantage inadvertently encourages the audience to laugh at Bridget - her ungainly getups and her stammering soliloquies. While the novel involved the reader in Bridget''s tiny, face-saving self-deceits, the film magnifies these into huge, narcissistic self-delusions, which renders her a less sympathetic figure. The book made readers her confidants; the movie makes viewers her critics. I mentioned huge. There has been much talk about the whippet-like Zellweger''s bulking up 20 pounds to play the calorie-counting heroine. While it''s a pathetic commentary on Hollywood wraithdom that she had to gain to be on the slim side of average weight, it must be said that since most actresses are hardbodied size 4s, it''s novel to see a softfigured size 8 on-screen, even though she''s still easily 10 pounds shy of Bridget''s fighting weight. The bad news is that the screenwriters have reconfigured Bridget''s freewheeling narrative into a conventional love triangle. The good news is that the happy result includes a wickedly funny performance by Grant, oozing charm and toxic effluences, and an aloofly earnest turn by Firth, which should do for his career what "Four Weddings" did for Grant''s. Firth''s casting is something of an inside (or do we say intertextual?) joke. He played Darcy in the well-received BBC adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice," a performance much commented upon and drooled over by Bridget in this "P&P" update. Thus Firth makes an ideal Mark Darcy, the barrister Bridget thinks too square and judgmental for her eccentric, kicky tastes. Janeites, as Austenians call themselves, will also note that while Firth''s BBC Darcy was something of a bare-chested hero out of a pulp romance novel, his performance here pays explicit homage to Laurence Olivier''s Darcy in the 1940 MGM version of "P&P." Dreamy. So what we have here are three hilarious performances embedded in a humdrum context, which is more than one can say about most romantic comedies.

Actress adds heft to 'Bridget Jones's Diary' By Connie Ogle The Miami Herald Published: Friday, April 13, 2001 2.5 of 5 stars ...She's sick of her mum's attempts to fix her up, especially after meeting Mark Darcy (Colin Firth, probably stunned to find himself playing Mr. Darcy a second time), an aloof barrister with appalling taste in sweaters and a way of staring at Bridget like she's got two heads. He also seems to run into her whenever she's embarrassing herself. This happens a lot�. �Still, the cast could not be better. That the handsome Firth (Shakespeare in Love, The English Patient) reprises his role as Mr. Darcy may be the single most hilarious joke in the movie (he played Darcy in A & E's Pride and Prejudice and shows up as himself on the pages of Fielding's Bridget Jones sequel)...

This guy's obviously never read P&P, since he calls Darcy "D'Arcy": http://ent.twincities.com/scripts/staticpage.dll?reviewid=164247&only=y&spage=AE/movies/movies_details.htm&id=29616&ck=&ver=2.8&userid=1&userpw=.&uh=1,0, "Bridget Jones" won't challenge you, but does have a sugary charm By Lawrence Toppman The Charlotte Observer Published: 4/12/01 2.5 of 5 stars ...Firth's character, bizarrely, is an imaginary version of himself. Fielding watched the BBC "Pride and Prejudice," an adaptation of Jane Austen's novel with Firth as Mr. D'Arcy. Then she tried to guess what the actor would be like in real life and gave her Darcy those attributes. So in "Bridget," Firth is supposed to play Firth. He's OK at it.

http://ent.twincities.com/scripts/staticpage.dll?reviewid=164288&only=y&spage=AE/movies/movies_details.htm&id=29616&ck=&ver=2.8&userid=1&userpw=.&uh=1,0, Fat chance: Renee Zellweger doesn't convince in dull "Diary" By Terry Lawson Detroit Free Press Published: 4/13/01 2 of 5 stars ...All the actors struggle gamely to make this look like fun, but except for a couple of Bridget's more amusing humiliations -- she shows up in bunny ears and fishnets for a costume party that isn't, and accidentally shows her "enormous" bum on national television -- there is not much they can do with such soggy material....

Last one! Bad one to end on though: http://ent.twincities.com/scripts/staticpage.dll?reviewid=164261&only=y&spage=AE/movies/movies_details.htm&id=29616&ck=&ver=2.8&userid=1&userpw=.&uh=1,0, Weighing in on Bridget's charms By Sono Motoyama Philadelphia Daily News Published: Friday, April 13, 2001 ...The only dud among the main characters is the dark and stand-offish Darcy (reference to the Jane Austen character intended), played by Colin Firth (who portrayed a come-hither Darcy in a BBC version of Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"). The character is so unpleasant and --worse--dull that we can't understand why a lovable incompetent like Bridget would think he was her Mr. Right. (There's also little chemistry between the two actors.)...

Hmmm..reading the British reviews, all pro-Hugh, makes me realise why CF hesitated. Come along Colin, reprise the role that made you famous, but hey, let's get rid of the original script amd make it into a vehicle for Hughie boy(who's so-o-o sexy and irresistible and gets all the funny lines and gets to wear the wet shirt ) and he'll get all the good reviews, and you can be a dull, stiff, boring mummy's boy, whom no red-blooded male/female would root for. Excuse me? In the book, MD was never dull in a negative sense. And if he smiled and cracked jokes at their first meeting, there'd be no movie! Am seeing BJD this weekend...But the Brit reviews infuriate me...I feel as though Working Title have "used " Colin and let him take the flak from the (male)reviewers, whilst HG is re-born as "sexy". Hopefully female audiences will see things differently. And he should say "no" to a sequel. Thank goodness for (most of) the US reviews!!! It's a pity he reads the Guardian!

I agree Bethan, that most of the UK reviewers favour HG & RZ(rightly so in her case) but if you read the "user reviews" at the IMDB they praise Colin equally and have some very nice comments, such as "dreamy, wonderful, etc.perfect casting" The US reviews are more favourable towards ODB. HG does have the showier role buth there is more depth to MD, imo.

Have you seen Ebert's review yet? Not near enough Colin so I guess we can guess at the Huge bent to this weekend's TV review.

Am wondering if Mari helped write that Philadelphia review. ;-D But Ebert gave it 3-1/2 stars; is v.g. review from someone who has obviously read the book (Alsatians not wild dogs) and wants to do a public service (defining cocktail gherkins as pickles). Liked the symetrical reference to Bridget's verbal incontinence to Mark's being emotionally constipated.

New York Post says "Firth, on the other hand, seemed a little too dour and dark." http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/38351.htm Excellent review in NY Daily News (3-1/2 stars); very even comments re: Huge and CF: "Firth's achievement is to seem simultaneously like Mr. Right and Mr. Wrong, a man who is handsome and clearheaded but who also wears dreadful socks." http://www.nydailynews.com/today/New_York_Now/Movies/a-107060.asp

From the LA Times' Kenneth Turan: It is this essence of the character, rather than literary fidelity, that "Bridget Jones" is successfully focused on. Key central elements from the book do remain, but many things, critical details from the kind of sweater worn in a key scene to the kind of man Bridget's mother is attracted to, are changed. The screenwriters have both pared down the book and pumped up selected elements, like the rivalry between the two men in Bridget's life. They've also strengthened the book's charming parallels to "Pride and Prejudice," down to having Firth, who played Mr. Darcy in the BBC version of the Jane Austen novel, expertly play the modern Mark Darcy here. http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Movies-X!ArticleDetail-28983,00.html OK, am done posting reviews. Are brilliant!!

Thank you Ann, Mari and Karen for all of the reviews. I'm off to check The Miami Herald. Here again, Mr. Firth is the stiff-backed Mr. Right whose wonderfulness is revealed by degrees as he peels away layers of formality to bare the sensitive soul beneath his forbidding but handsome (despite sartorial misfires) exterior. LOL! He doesn't know the half of it!

One more...from CNN, a v.g. review although says it is too long and "Adding to the confusion over the what was and wasn't included in the film is this little fact: Some of the plot has been lifted from 'The Edge of Reason,' Fielding's second Bridget Jones book." Huh????? http://www.cnn.com/2001/SHOWBIZ/Movies/04/12/review.bridget.jones/index.html

Gaah! Am on review overload! Thanks to all for posting (and especially to Ann for bolding the pertinent parts). Am off to see the movie at noon *leaping about in fits of ecstasy* Saw the HG Q&A and was grossed out (and it usually takes alot to gross me out). I don't remember the hemorrhoid one, though--was this cut from the broadcast as he dared them to? As for HG's glowing reviews taking precedence over CF's: Mari said it ages ago, RC would unquestionably make this a vehicle for his (what's the word? partner? protegee? pimp?)...whatever, you get my drift. As expected, HG's being pushed hard here in the states. The important thing at this point is that CF is getting more recognition than he did in SiL (not hard to accomplish), his reviews are mostly good (save the odd male critic, and I do mean *odd*) and the fan reaction will hopefully continue in the positive vein pointed out by Ann W. Whee! CF on Today and Rosie on Monday! *Will also believe it when I see it* Hurrah!

Positive review from Jay Carr of the Boston Globe. Will try to drag boyfriend to film tonight (have sex toy party to attend... argh!); he is adamant about NOT seeing BJD, thinks it's a "chick flick"... typical male. Anyway, here is the review... Zellweger gets 'Diary' right By Jay Carr Boston Globe Published: 04/13/2001 She smokes too much, drinks too much, talks too much, worries too much about weighing too much, and is just about as adorable on the big screen as she was between the covers of Helen Fielding's novel. She is, of course, the heroine of ''Bridget Jones's Diary,'' which should handily survive the flap over whether Renee Zellweger has any business playing a Brit. The movie will speak as loudly as the book did to 30-something women whom Bridget describes as singletons and whom I can't help thinking of as afflicted with a condition much more debilitating than PMS. I call it TWM, short for Talented Woman Malaise, a mysterious condition of a severity that increases in direct proportion to intelligence. The most obvious symptom is the assumption that if something is missing from your life - the right man, say - it's your fault. The film gets off to a brilliant start, with Zellweger's self-flagellating Bridget in pj's, lip-synching the words to ''All by Myself,'' alone in her flat in an oddly shaped triangular housing block that doesn't quite seem to belong to the rest of the neighborhood. It sits like an upthrust piece of ocean floor that has crashed through the pavement, having taken on the permanent look of an alien outcropping. Which is pretty much how Bridget sees herself. She resents being shoved by her anxious mother into the field of vision of this or that eligible man, in this case Colin Firth. He's a boyhood playmate turned successful barrister, with a weakness for unsuitable holiday sweaters. Given her resentment-bred social death wish, her maladroitness exceeds his. She'd rather go all soft and mushy over her smooth but untrustworthy boss, a character cut to order for the dark side of Hugh Grant. Bridget's clumsiness in chasing him is exceeded only by her ill-advised abandon. Brave as Zellweger was to take on a British accent, she's even braver in having packed about 20 extra pounds onto her tiny frame and allow ed herself to be photographed from behind in a short skirt revealing lumpy thighs in black fishnet stockings. Zellweger's endearingly tarty plumpness may not be in a class with Robert De Niro's putting on 200 pounds or whatever it was to play Jake LaMotta in ''Raging Bull.'' Still, it's eye-catching. The main problem facing director Sharon Maguire (reportedly the model for Shazza, one of Bridget's confidantes) was how to turn an essentially interior monologue into external action. The differences between the novel and the film are sometimes pretty pronounced, even with Fielding on board to preside over the screenplay. The parts of the novel featuring Bridget's support network have been whittled down, and the additions include a brawl between Firth and Grant, both of whom, by the way, are excellent - Firth in his tight-lipped rectitude, Grant in his glib murmurings. The big challenge, however, lay in the preservation of Bridget's voice - not a matter of correct accent, but of sufficient presence. Maguire's direction sometimes seems choppy, as it perhaps inevitably must, given the novel's episodic structure. Still, the film not only works better than expected but gets the important things right, starting, of course, with Zellweger's Bridget and Bridget's mind-set. Nobody can say Zellweger hasn't dialed in to the precise frequency from which Bridget is transmitting. The actress's ability to project sweetness has never been in doubt, but ''Bridget Jones's Diary'' reminds us (as ''Nurse Betty'' did, but ''Me, Myself & Irene'' did not) of her comic timing and emotional vulnerability. In short, she gets the job done. Zellweger's Bridget is my kind of schlump.

NY Post also has an item about HF's lawsuit over her 'nightmare' LA home: http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/38326.htm

Glad to see another city with a positive review. Still can't understand why Wash Post dissed the movie. Hmmm, must be those republicans. ;-D

Another review from the Wash. Post (Post has a very byzantine system of movie reviewing--they have at least four reviewers on staff, who review for differrent sections of the paper.) http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13423-2001Apr12.html Best bits: "I also liked the part where he [Gnat]got beaten up. Any movie in which somebody kicks the crap out of Hugh Grant is okay by me." -and- "Grant is casually fabulous and very amusing, but all power to Firth the actor. He's the compleat Darcy, and he never wavers. There's no sentimentality, no flirtation with the audience, no final moment of pandering to the niceness gods; he's a cold geek all the way through. You can see him simmering with rage -- at Bridget for being so attractive, at himself for never quite knowing what to say, at both of them for being prey to such childishness, at his libido for wanting and at his ego for fearing. Especially poignant are his long looks at her. You see in his eyes his yearning hunger and his fury at his own ineloquence and inability to find the will to move ahead, from across the unbridgeable distance of a large room filled with happy people."

I was talking to some of my coworkers, yesterday, who are going to see BJD this weekend and I said that CF was ever so handsome, they said 'Who?' My eyes widened, I paused and said 'Did you read the book?' They said yes and I said... 'OBVIOUSLY NOT!' Then I proceeded to give them a nice lecture on the lack of CF injections and told them where they could pick up a copy of P&P. And since it is a holiday weekend for us, they could spare 6 hours... (Moon) Thank you Ann, Mari and Karen for all of the reviews. Indeed! As regards to ODB, the reviews seem to go one way or another, but we love him dearly!

Hmmm, must be those republicans. ; } Careful, I know at least one Republican who liked it :)

"...Any movie in which somebody kicks the crap out of Hugh Grant is okay by me." Clap, clap, clap!! Love that review's write-up of CF's performance. Am surprised is a man as is soooo observant. ;-D

Barry Norman (Barry Norman's Filmnight Sky Premier) (who incidentally loved P&P and preferred it to S&S, ), also loved the movie, lot of interviews with SM, HF, RZ & HG but there was also a tiny interview with Colin (in red shirt). BN praised HG and Renee who he said he has always thought would be excellent in the role and is pleased to have been provced correct. Of Colin's performance he says" Firth develeops splendidly as every girl's dreamboat"!! Hmmm.

Hugh just redeemed himself a little on Regis... "Colin Firth, sexy Colin Firth...don't know why I call him sexy..." He then goes on to say Bridge chooses Colin over him.

Damn, missed that one and I'm even home today. Thanks for filling us in, Ann. (Eileen) Still can't understand why Wash Post dissed the movie. Hmmm, must be those republicans. ;-D LOL! 'Course the Post redeemed itself later with that lovely paean to Colin that Jen posted: You can see him simmering with rage -- at Bridget for being so attractive, at himself for never quite knowing what to say, at both of them for being prey to such childishness, at his libido for wanting and at his ego for fearing. Especially poignant are his long looks at her. You see in his eyes his yearning hunger and his fury at his own ineloquence and inability to find the will to move ahead, from across the unbridgeable distance of a large room filled with happy people." Substitute "Elizabeth" for "Bridget" and what do you get? I'm happy with 99% of the reviews. Colin is holding his own quite nicely. I thought I remembered some very positive mentions of him in the Brit reviews too. Watching what happens to this film in the next few months and the reaction to it will be quite an adventure, I think.

Miami Herald review, good but she had a problem with the end. She's read the books. Zellweger adds heft to `Bridget Jones's Diary' BY CONNIE OGLE The most common fear about the film version of Bridget Jones's Diary was whether a slim, attractive Texan (Ren�e Zellweger) would be even remotely convincing as a slightly overweight, chain-smoking, wine-swilling Brit. No worries there. Zellweger, who reflected a sweet dignity and a great deal of heart as Tom Cruise's love interest in Jerry Maguire, is a funny, believable Bridget, and not just because she put on extra pounds and frequently allows the camera to zoom in on her backside. The real issue is this: Can Helen Fielding's popular novel be transferred to the screen in all its crude, hilarious glory? The answer is mostly yes, thanks to a talented, appealing cast and some clever translations of Bridget's diary entries. As a romantic comedy, the movie works better than most -- after all, Fielding swiped the basics from Jane Austen, who wielded quite an amusing pen herself in Pride and Prejudice. And viewers don't necessarily have to be familiar with the book to enjoy the good parts. But the promising screenplay sadly reels off track in the last half-hour. Bridget is 32, single, working in public relations for a publishing house. She decides one New Year's Day that she is going to change her life so that she won't be alone chugging vodka and singing bad Eric Carmen songs the next time the holidays roll around. She's sick of her mum's attempts to fix her up, especially after meeting Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), an aloof barrister with appalling taste in sweaters and a way of staring at Bridget like she's got two heads. He also seems to run into her whenever she's embarrassing herself. This happens a lot. But Bridget's not interested. In her diary, she vows to stop forming ``romantic attachments to any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitmentphobics, peeping toms, megalomaniacs . . . or perverts.'' Unfortunately she also has a wicked crush on her boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant, immediately predatory), who embodies most if not all of those attributes and is fond of sending her innuendo-laced e-mails about her skirt (or lack thereof). In between discussions of her love life (or lack thereof) with boozy friends Jude, Shazza and Tom, Bridget worries that her mum (Gemma Jones) has left her dad (Jim Broadbent) for the host of a Home Shopping Network-style show. (Bridget's over-the-top mum, by the way, has been toned down as to be almost unrecognizable in the movie). Eventually, Bridget gets one boyfriend and then another, and if you know your Austen, you know many misunderstandings ensue before things work themselves out. The funny bits fly fast and furious at first. Bridget's diary takes the form of voice-overs, scribblings on the screen and her own imaginings. A strange sense of melodrama creeps in now and again, intruding on but never totally vanquishing the book's frenetic spirit. A baffling and unnecessary fistfight finally derails the movie -- it's too long and seems out of character for the combatants. The resolution itself seems awkward and forced, a cheap way to bring the diary back into the picture. What you want to happen, happens, just not in a way that makes actual sense. Still, the cast could not be better. That the handsome Firth, probably stunned to find himself playing Mr. Darcy a second time, reprises his role may be the single most hilarious joke in the movie (he played Darcy in BBC's Pride and Prejudice and shows up as himself on the pages of Fielding's Bridget Jones sequel). Grant flirts with stealing the whole show as bad boy Daniel, confounding expectations because you think you'll see him earnest, stammering and foppish and he's none of those. It's Zellweger's movie to win or lose, of course, and she succeeds without the slightest touch of Hollywood glamour. She sports neither a cloy asymmetrical Meg Ryan haircut nor fit, toned limbs (It's easy for Ashley Judd to prance around in skimpy underwear in Someone Like You; she didn't have to pack on 20 extra pounds). Not only has she mastered a natural accent, she's adept at eliciting laughter through her character's utter humiliation. That's the backbone of the best British humor. She also brings a vulnerability to the part not evident before. Fans unable to divorce themselves from the relentless hilarity of the novel may grumble, but it's kind of nice to see that Bridget, in addition to a sense of humor, also has a heart. ** 1/2 BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY

Am reposting Evelyn's from above: Hey Allison.....Mid -America Oklahoma gave it 4 Stars. CBS This Morning interviewed Sharon Maguire. She talked about casting and said she always had Colin in mind for the role...no one else was even considered. Showed clips of P&P and she said HF and I had a big crush on Colin and here I was on the set directing him. (Bethan) But the Brit reviews infuriate me. They suck. He should leave the country...they don't appreciate him. I'm off to see the movie, someone pl find Dallas Morning News...they loved P&P.

"...Any movie in which somebody kicks the crap out of Hugh Grant is okay by me." Clap, clap, clap!! Adding a standing ovation (of one)! *whew* Was wondering why I moved to this backwoods town... (Ann) Careful, I know at least one Republican who liked it :) Does he squint alot and have a wife with helmet head? ;-P Ooh, am 'very sorry' for that last remark. ;-) Am off to the show. Yippee! Happy Easter to all!

and an aloofly earnest turn by Firth, which should do for his career what "Four Weddings" did for Grant''s. . . Firth''s casting is something of an inside (or do we say intertextual?) joke. He played Darcy in the well-received BBC adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice," a performance much commented upon and drooled over . . . Thus Firth makes an ideal Mark Darcy . . . Dreamy. (Karen) Am wondering if Mari helped write that Philadelphia review. ;-D Helped write? Honey, I dictated it! LOL! Must send Ms. Carrie Rickey case of chardonnay.:-) The reviews are super for most part; all the biggies liked it--all the NY papers, LA Times, the Chicago papers, Ebert's big thumbs up, Boston, Philly, the 2nd Washington Post review obviously written by a Democrat of unimpeachable taste;-), Time and Newsweek. We really couldn't have asked for better on this side of the pond. Ann and Bethan, the Mail review was outstanding and that's the one most people read, no? Besides, in UK, this film will be critic-proof. BTW, has anyone else in US seen a change in the print ads? They're now using the UK poster, with MD's eyes showing and BJ partly covered by Diary.

Time to resolve ending! Have seen it twice here now as well. At last night's preview people got up the minutes the credits began (always someone!) and I said to my friend ,"Hang on there's a great bit Coming" I stared in disbelief as the old home movie did not materialise. Initially I was horrified as IMO it's a very clever final touch. Instead we have a different soundtrack ending and loads of stills of RZ only, soundtrack fades and we HG with "new woman" Paula. More stills of RZ then a bit from The Darcy's , sexist jokes from dad etc a bit from Neil Pearson 's Richard, then even more from HG (was even more horrified)!

Just a side note, but The Bridget Jones's Diary ad in the Boston Globe was the only color ad in the paper (in the Arts & Entertainment section) and it was the one with Colin on the left, Huge on right and BJ covering her nose with the book (up to the eyes).

Then final joke as Mari has related of DC's "new partner" and it ends in a still of RZ and Colin. Think I prefer US version at this stage, subtler touch and NO HG. Wonder what it says about each "market"? Am getting vg at waving at MarkG when he appears. Both showings I went to were very undersubscibed, so not really much atmosphere or audience reaction to to check out either. Possibly that's why I plumped for the US ending because that premiere had so much atmosphere. Need to go again with full UK audience in order to complete my research! What hardship. Thanks to everyone for all the reviews. It is Guardian's "Film of the week" only 3 stars, Spykids is on 4! Lovely picture of the kiss in today's Telegraph but lots of criticism too. Don't care, ODB has never looked better.

Apologies for disjointed post and typos! I have a severe case of "whiskitosis" brought on by kitchen scene! Actually sounds like I have been at a certain brand of cat food , better than Bridge's penchant for Branston thou'.

This is from NY Newsday...a rag in its own right, but it has a monopoly over the Long Island print media market. http://www.newsday.com/content/movies/nd4652.htm By John Anderson Staff Writer (2 STARS[out of 4]) BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY. (R) Singleton Agonistes: From the best-selling novel by Helen Fielding, the self-told story of Bridget Jones, career girl, part-time inebriate and unconvincing cynic about romance. Not quite the book, but that doesn't make it a good movie. With Ren�e Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Gemma Jones, Jim Broadbent. Screenplay by Helen Fielding, Andrew Davies, Richard Curtis. Directed by Sharon Maguire. 1:34 (adult situations, content, language). At area theaters. NEW YORK comedian Scott Blakeman has a routine that goes something like this: "Why does every political campaign have to be about 'the family,' or 'our kids'? Why doesn't a candidate ever stand up and say, 'This election is about being SINGLE! And DATING!!'" Because, Scott, the tradeoff has been made: Marrieds get the politics; singles get the movies. "Say It Isn't So," "Someone Like You," "The Brothers," "Chocolat," "Tomcats," "The Wedding Planner." The last big-budget domestic movie, "The Family Man," essentially was wedded bliss as nightmare. "Gladiator"? Wife and kid dead within minutes. In the movies, marriage means end of story, if not life itself. And what does America's cinematic slant on nuptial limbo have to do with the insistently English, English cast, English-made and suety "Bridget Jones's Diary"? Because it's an English movie for Americans-as were those other Working Title Films productions, "Notting Hill" and "Four Weddings and a Funeral," which successfully reduced British culture down to a lump of softened, if not actually pre-chewed, Cadbury. The most humiliating situations are resolved with either exquisite good manners or painful self-effacement; the tawdriest of situations are made sophisticated, by precise placement of the proper bon mot. It's un-American in its manner and never good-mannered enough to be stuffy, unless the purpose is making Englishness seem amusing. Starring in this creation is the expertly vocally coached and calorie- enhanced Ren�e Zellweger, whose presence must indicate that there are no film actresses available in Britain-or (gasp!) that the Working Title/ Miramax people couldn't trust a native to carry such a valuable literary property across to audiences in...you know where. This may also explain the totally awkward and distracting use of old Motown hits or Van Morrison (twice), which comes across like the last-minute insurance policy someone buys before their ValueJet takes off. Bridget Jones, slightly dissipated and lovelorn heroine of Fielding's faux memoir, is 32 years old, 129 pounds ("but after Christmas") and has few romantic prospects-other that her clearly untrustworthy editor and boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant, at his slightly gaunt and seedy best). Sick of "smug marrieds" and importune questions about her love life, Bridget begins a diary, telling it she's cutting back on booze, "ciggies," the wrong kind of men(describing Cleaver to a tee) and sulking about said love life. Bridget's resolve, we can tell, will be somewhat less than steely. We can also tell, with very little effort, where the story is heading, Tip- off No. 1 being the suggestive name of Mark Darcy (actor Colin Firth, whose performance as Jane Austen's Darcy in "Pride and Prejudice," coincidentally, is mentioned in the book). Bridget's mum (Gemma Jones)-who will soon leave Bridget's dad (the marvelous Jim Broadbent) for a ginger-skinned TV-shopping pitchman-wants to pair Bridget and Mark, but neither candidate is impressed, a sure sign of things to come. Bridget, meanwhile, trades suggestive office e-mail with Cleaver, who is easily the most entertaining character in this film (the debut feature by filmmaker Sharon Maguire, former commercial director and documentarian). Zellweger is, as usual, adorable; Firth is appropriately stolid and Grant gets all the good comic lines, or just knows how to deliver them. The thrust of the story is how miserable it is being a single young woman while still making it look like a lark. One peculiar note about "Bridget Jones" is, again, the music. The songs in the film itself-such as the Weather Girls singing the ubiquitous "It's Raining Men" (during a preposterous Darcy-Cleaver fistfight that I don't recall from the book), or the Supremes ("Ain't No Mountain High Enough," for whatever reason) and the two versions of the same VanMorrison song, would seem to be imposed on the film to generate CD soundtrack sales-but the songs aren't on the CD. So don't be misled. This badly constructed pop score is just a badly constructed pop score.

also, re: the discussion about the firepole scene not being on commercials: as I was watching the Today show this morning, towards the end, they played a commercial for the film. Bridge ending up on the camera was in it, along with Tom's "Fight!" line...plenty of CF (equal amount to HG). I'm really curious to know what was cut out of the film in the editing process...

actor Colin Firth, whose performance as Jane Austen's Darcy in "Pride and Prejudice," coincidentally, is mentioned in the book Twit. There was no coincidence about it. It was deliberate!

(Lizza) I have a severe case of "whiskitosis" brought on by kitchen scene! LOL! Have just seen the movie and that scene is one of my faves. Don't think the rest of the audience got it, though (greater Washington has apparently never heard of beet root cubes). Salman Rusdie's cameo also 'rushed' (yukyukyuk) right over their heads, since I believe I was the only one laughing. Go figure. To make your day, Lizza, we had the home movie ending. V.v.g.! (Ann) Twit. There was no coincidence about it. It was deliberate! Can you stand these reviewers? Why do we listen to them? ;-D

I just got back from seeing the movie and I loved it. So did my friends who are not CF junkies (in fact of course they didn't know who he was.) Both thought they will be seeing him a lot more, though! I saw MarkG and pointed him out as well. I'll definitely be seeing it again. The theater was very empty, but it was the first show, 12:15, so I hope they will get a better turn out later.

Must confess--I am one of the Washingtonian's who has never heard of beet root cubes--am I missing some critical sub-text? Gah! Yet another Wash. Post critic has put in her two cents about the film--she liked the movie as a nice bit of fluff, but had the nerve to say (*cringes as she types*) "...I'd rather take my chances with a scoundrel like Hugh Grant than a sober, steady sort like Colin Firth. What a stodge." What do they put in the water over there?!?! And for those still angry about the first review from the Post, the author (Desson Howe) hosts a discussion live on-line every Monday, 1230 pm Eastern. He's actually quite good about answering questions (although he is,unfortunately, a Man U fan--yet another strike against him). Cannot wait until tomorrow to see film again...believe I am suffering from whiskitosis, as well(what a great term, Lizza J!)

I saw MarkG and pointed him out as well. Where was he in the film again? -- (Jen-Jen)-- (although he is,unfortunately, a Man U fan--yet another strike against him) Now we see the reason for the shoddy review. He obviously saw Fever Pitch and holds a grudge against CF for having played an Arsenal supporter.

There is a very good review for Colin in the San Francisco Chronicle, actually very good for everyone and the film. very long address perhaps someone can post it.

Ann, you know I'd do anything for you.:-) Here's the SanFran Chonicle review, v.v. good! Dear 'Diary' 20 pounds, 1,100 cigarettes later, Zellweger triumphs in hilarious 'Bridget Jones' Carla Meyer, Chronicle Movie Critic �Friday, April 13, 2001 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Bridget Jones's Diary" contains a sight so shocking it might upset sensitive viewers. It's cellulite! Up there on the big screen, in all its dimpled glory. On a leading lady, no less. It's but one of the let-it-all-hang-out joys of "Bridget Jones," the hilarious and sexy adaptation of Helen Fielding's best-seller. Renee Zellweger gives a full-bodied, full-throttle performance as the weight-obsessed, chain-smoking and irrepressible single woman in her 30s. Matching her comic panache are Hugh Grant as her charming but romantically toxic boss and Colin Firth as his stiff but sincere romantic rival. Any trepidation about an American actress assuming the role of the very British Ms. Jones vanishes in the opening minutes. Zellweger's crack comic timing and enormously expressive face pre-empt the idea of any other Bridget. She embodies the daffy determination, self-skewering wit and vulnerability of her character. The 20 pounds she gained for the role fill out her face and enhance her girlish appeal, rendering her instantly and infinitely sympathetic. But Zellweger's Bridget is no chump. Self-destructive, sure. Goofy, yes. Occasionally arch, of course -- she's British. But Zellweger shows that the silly and sometimes slovenly character also has a spine. She demonstrates it through Bridget's tortured but determined attempts at public speaking or her surprising resolve in matters of the heart. "Bridget Jones" is a triumph for all involved. Screenwriters Fielding, Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis have wisely pared down or excised subplots to focus on Bridget's romantic travails and career missteps. Director Sharon Maguire, Fielding's pal and the inspiration for Bridget's cynical chum Shazzer in the book and movie, has crafted a production that zips along at a laugh-a-minute pace and fully involves the viewer in Bridget's little slice of life. Bridget works at a London publishing house and pines for her handsome cad of a boss, Daniel (Grant). She passes time by documenting her sad-sack life in her diary (Sample entry: "Weight: 140 (but post-Christmas); cigarettes: 40!; alcohol units: 15!") while slagging off the Smug Marrieds whose glowing self- satisfaction is an assault on her single status. Real life interferes when the boss shows interest and she succumbs to his roguish charms. Zellweger's chemistry with Grant is electric, and their scenes crackle with sexuality and quick-witted humor. Their sex talk is refreshingly frank and natural. Grant sheds his trademark stammering and fluttering in favor of an aging lothario's lived-in sexiness. He allows himself to look older onscreen, and it works wonderfully for the role. Grant's Daniel is witty, undeniably hot and maddeningly sheepish about commitment. Bridget's parents want to match her with the more solid Mark Darcy, a barrister who was her childhood playmate. In an inspired casting move, Darcy is played by Colin Firth, the actor who was Mr. Darcy in the BBC's "Pride and Prejudice" and also the object of Bridget's obsessive lust in the book. (The character's name is one of "Bridget's" nods to the Jane Austen story). At first, Firth seems to be channeling Mr. Darcy's diffidence and off- putting, cheerless manner. Ultimately, though, he proves a nice contrast to Zellweger as their characters' relationship starts to thaw. Zellweger's chemistry with Firth is just as palpable as it is with Grant but not as sexually charged. It's more a meeting of comic minds, with his straight-man countenance drawing out her wackiest work, like Burns and Allen. In one scene, Bridget struggles mightily to maintain a cool facade in front of Darcy, all while sporting a ridiculously windblown hairdo. Zellweger is playing so many emotions in this scene it's hard to keep track. There's pride, embarrassment and the conflict of realizing that she cares enough to put on a show for this guy. It's the kind of layered acting that makes a great performance -- and sublime comedy.

By Eleanor Ringel Gillespie Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer The verdict: Definitely keep up with this Jones. "It all began on New Year's Day in my 32nd year of being single." So begins "Bridget Jones's Diary," the delightful new romantic comedy based on Helen Fielding's best seller of the same name. As millions of Bridget buffs already know, she is a self-described "Singleton" who lives in London and works at a publishing house. Bridget worries about her weight. Worries about her alcohol intake. Worries about her nicotine addiction. And, most of all, worries that she'll never get married and will end up dying alone in her apartment, her undiscovered body half-eaten by dogs. Yes, Bridget can be a bit much. But as played by Renee Zellweger, she's simply irresistible. Directed by first-timer Sharon Maguire (a friend of Fielding's who also figures in the book), the movie chronicles a year in the life of the self-deprecating and often stingingly funny Bridget. She's looking for love in, well, any place she can. Even at her parents' (Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent) annual New Year's Day party, where she will inevitably face "the question dreaded by all Singletons: 'How's your love life?' " Nor is she exactly ecstatic that her mother, as always, has invited a suitably available male into whose face she can thrust her unmarried daughter. This time, it's Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), a handsome but standoffish barrister who, after Bridget dutifully flounders through some small talk, dismisses her as a "verbally incontinent spinster." No wonder she rushes home to resume the most meaningful relationship in her life: It's just her and a bottle of chardonnay. Back at the office, her devilishly sexy boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), initiates an e-mail flirtation. When she shows up in an extremely short skirt, he messages, "Is skirt home sick?" The film's first part is amusingly tart, with a number of poor-Bridget gags that are biting but not truly cruel. Though she's subjected to numerous humiliations, she's still capable of giving as good as she gets. Her take on dinner with "the Smug Marrieds" is hilarious. Though the romantic ending is telegraphed from the first scene (c'mon: Mark Darcy, as in Jane Austen's 19th-century dreamboat, Mr. Darcy?) the fun is in getting there. Watching Grant play a predatory cad is a welcome change from his bashful stutterers. Firth, who played Darcy on the BBC's splendid "Pride and Prejudice," unwinds winningly, going from snooty to starry-eyed. Yet the film would be unimaginable without Zellweger. The whip-slim Texan transforms herself into a slightly plump Londoner not just through extra pounds but through adopting the attitude of a woman who has a hard time feeling good about herself. Zellweger brings to the role the same buoyant innocence she had in "Nurse Betty." But where Betty was often oblivious, Bridget is all too self-aware. Thanks to the star, a heroine who could've seemed brittle or bitter becomes someone with a kind of blessed wide-eyed gumption. This Bridget is no loser; she's merely a victim of cultural circumstances and her own shaky self-confidence. Criticisms? There are about 12 endings too many and the early scenes' series of mortification can get repetitive. But that's quibbling. To echo Mark Darcy, we like Bridget (and Renee) "just the way she is."

Actors, story make this 'Diary' a dear one Apr 13, 2001 BY DANIEL NEMAN - STAFF WRITER for the Richmond Times-Dispatch Poor Bridget Jones. She stumbles haplessly from disaster to disaster, a perpetual cloud of embarrassment hanging glumly over her resigned head. Her only shields against each new social crisis are too much booze and too many cigarettes. Naturally, we can't help but love her for her spirit, her pluck and her wickedly sharp sense of humor - she dismisses women who are glamorous and thin as "stick insects," while a woolen floral vest her mother forces on her makes her look like she is "wearing a carpet." The great paradox of Bridget is that she is so exceptionally charming, yet she has such trouble getting men into her life. It is this paradox that contributed to making Helen Fielding's book "Bridget Jones's Diary" such a blockbuster success. Countless women identified with Bridget, thinking themselves lovable and unloved. Men who read the book - and they were a significantly smaller number - liked it just because it was so hilarious. Inevitably, "Bridget Jones's Diary" has been made into a movie, which we are happy to report retains much of the charm of the original. Renee Zellweger stars, and her selection sparked a storm of protest in England, where the story is set, because many people insisted the actress should be English. But Zellweger turns out to be sparkling as Bridget, despite an accent that is wildly uneven at first. Even when her accent settles down, it is too posh for her character. The only real problem with Zellweger is that Bridget is supposed to be a little plump, and although Zellweger did indeed gain weight for the role, she will never see the 140 pounds Bridget hits in the movie, unless she is carrying bars of lead. Bridget's roguishly sexy boss is played by Hugh Grant, who does the irresistible cad thing extremely well. As Daniel, he conducts one of the great e-mail flirtations captured on page or film, and Grant makes it easy to see why Bridget would be so carried away by him. The other man running in and out of Bridget's life is the aloof and somewhat moody Mr. Darcy, played by Colin Firth. This casting selection is an uproarious joke, but it ends up limiting the movie a little. "Bridget Jones's Diary" is loosely based on "Pride and Prejudice," and the character of Mr. Darcy is much the same in both. The book version of "Bridget Jones's Diary" takes place during the airing of the immensely successful television version of "Pride and Prejudice," which starred Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. Sharon Maguire makes a decent debut as a director, though she relies far too heavily on song cues to emphasize an emotional point (during a fistfight between two men she plays the song "It's Raining Men"). Maguire was chosen in part because she was Fielding's real-life inspiration for the character Shazza, whose only characteristic is that she likes to use the f-word a lot. Apparently, Fielding knows her friend well. This movie tosses around the f-word like it just heard it for the first time and wants to impress everyone with how naughty it is. This movie is certainly the most profane version of "Pride and Prejudice" ever conceived. Yet it is mostly delightful. Although the movie falls apart a bit toward the end - and seems rushed before that - the fun part of "Bridget Jones's Diary" is getting there. *** Hmm? That last part seems repetitive...

Big Bridget day for me. Saw film again and, shockingly, was another huge Colin fan in same row as self. Lots of audibles (moaning, groaning, ooohing and aaaahing) and applause when Colin's name first appeared in opening credits. Was a very good audience and I don't think that Huge stole the show...not from this audience. They were smart and onto him from the beginning. As this was professional and scientific day at movies, I decided to go a second time, as was on two screens in complex anyway. This time audience had more men. They responded loudly to Huge and the more crass and vulgar humor (firepole slide). Excellent responses overall. (Eileen) Salman Rusdie's cameo also 'rushed' (yukyukyuk) right over their heads, since I believe I was the only one laughing. And they probably had no clue as to the other literary gents standing in front of Bridget as she's making a complete ass of herself. Other than the quip about FR Leavis being dead since 19xx, Americans wouldn't grasp the significance of him either. Ann: MarkG is the only one in a suit (blue Burberry) walking on the sidewalk as Bridget and Daniel drive off for the minibreak. Excellent review from the Chronicle. Someone who gets it. Loved the opening re: cellulite.

(Ann) Careful, I know at least one Republican who liked it :) Two. My audience today applauded at the end...er.. I mean The Beginning.. They started to get up then sat down when home movies started. It's a charmer.Agree with Lizza...thankfully they spared us .At the end I've had enough of Huge and wouldn't care to see him again....evah. You are cheated by not getting this adorable ending of little Bridge and Markee.I hope you get it in the video.In the rest room I started to tell my companion ( a lurker) about the British ending. "I'll tell you later", I said. "No ,No"...came the cries from the other stalls...."Tell us Now". I had an audience!! My companion complained that Mark wasn't listed in the credits...hey they list the drivers fergodsakes. (evelyn)I'm off to see the movie, someone pl find Dallas Morning News...they loved P&P. So...No one found that one, uh? I'm away for the day doing my box office duty and this is what I get. Humph!! (I get no respect around here.Lazy lumps ;-)

(Evelyn) My companion complained that Mark wasn't listed in the credits...hey they list the drivers fergodsakes How should Mark be identified? My suggestion: "Burberry Man"

Opening Ren�e's diary Actress underwent weighty changes to portray beloved Brit Bridget Jones Actress underwent weighty changes to portray beloved Brit Bridget Jones 04/08/2001 By Gary Dowell / The Dallas Morning News Actress Ren�e Zellweger has had some tricky roles in the past � a Jewish woman experiencing a crisis of faith (A Price Above Rubies), a small-town waitress suffering a break from reality (Nurse Betty) and the girlfriend of pulp-literature bad boy Robert E. Howard (The Whole Wide World). But she really stuck her neck out as the title character in the film adaptation of Bridget Jones's Diary. When Helen Fielding's novel hit the stands in the United States and England in 1998, it was an instant success, and Bridget became a "cultural icon," the quintessential '90s woman trying to balance a career and a love life while contending with ideas about how a modern woman should look and behave. English journalists, fans of the novel and its author took exception to the idea that an American actress � one from Texas, no less � could portray their beloved Bridget. Fears of shelling out pounds sterling only to hear "Y'all want to go to the pub for a pint of bitter?" abounded. But those skeptics may soon breathe a sigh of relief: Ms. Zellweger is the ideal choice for the klutzy and awkward yet spunky and unconventional heroine of the new movie, which opens Friday. The charming combination of bubbly goofiness (in a good way, mind you), irrepressible charm and sweet earnestness that she's used in the past suits Bridget to a tee. "It was [involved], and it was pretty extraordinary at the same time, because the more involved it is, the more creatively satisfying it is, I suppose," says Ms. Zellweger, who had to gain 20 pounds and master a British accent for the role. During a telephone interview, her Texas twang is more noticeable than any leftover vestiges of an English accent, but a few tiny Britishisms occasionally slip through. The possibility of playing Bridget was "a great shock, actually," says Ms. Zellweger, who had already read the book when her manager mentioned the role. Soon, she was off to London, where "we sat down for a few days and we all kind of tested the waters to see if it was possible that I might not destroy this character in the translation, and we went from there." It marked the end of a two-year search for an actress who represented the embodiment of Bridget, as well as the beginning of a lot of preparation and dedication. Ms. Zellweger spent six months in London making the transformation from Yank to Brit under the tutelage of Barbara Berkery, the dialect guru who helped Gwyneth Paltrow pass as English in Sliding Doors and Shakespeare in Love. She then went undercover, sort of, on the staff of the London publishing house Picador, where she pretended to be a relative of the boss doing a temp job. Actually, it was to get a handle on Bridget's daily activities as a publicist as well as practice the middle-class English accent so necessary to the role. Still, many were skeptical at first. "Well, me too, just by the way," adds Ms. Zellweger. "I just knew we had some work to do and there was time to do it. It really, really quickly became our personal experience. It was about the day-to-day challenges and the work and 'Let's do it, let's do the work and use it to create this really neat thing.'" One of Ms. Zellweger's challenges was to match Bridget physically. At 129 pounds, Bridget is barely chunky, but she obsesses about her weight. She also smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish, all of which she details in her diary. "It was just part of it, part of bringing her to life. And for me it was essential. I wanted her to look like she looked in my head when I read the book. It was part of the process." There may be a large cultural difference between them, but Ms. Zellweger thinks she and Bridget have a lot in common. "I totally, completely, thoroughly understand the wax strip in the bathroom experience. I know that well," she jokes, referring to the art of leg waxing. "I know the self-conscious, 'I'm absolutely going to destroy this moment' public-speaking experience. I know all about trying to find balance between personal and professional life. I understand that journey of self-discovery that she experiences in the book and in this film. Who can't relate to that?" As for the pressure of living up to the expectations of fans of the novel, Ms. Zellweger did her best to put it out of her mind, focusing instead on how to bring to life a self-absorbed single woman in her 30s trying to work the kinks out of her life. "Your world gets really small really quickly when you start to make a film, and again it becomes about the pressure that you put on yourself to not be the weak link in the project." During the course of her misadventures, Bridget (and � by extension � Ms. Zellweger) experiences the thrill of being torn between Hugh Grant, who plays Bridget's womanizing boss, Daniel Cleaver, and Colin Firth as Mark Darcy (basically reprising his role as Jane Austen's hero in the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice.) And throughout it all, Ms. Zellweger manages to mix her charm, innocence and seeming lack of worldliness with a feminist perspective, a talent that has served her well in previous movies. She also evokes the blend of strength and vulnerability that worked so well for her as the objects of desire in Nurse Betty and Jerry Maguire. "I so did not feel like the object of anyone's desire [during filming]," she says. "Not so much because of the physical change but because I was so out of my element.' Ms. Zellweger says that assuming the identity of Bridget put an unusual spin on her life, but not necessarily an unpleasant one. "I felt awkward in my personal time. I didn't really recognize myself or my life or the place I lived. It was a completely isolating experience, and while it was creatively so exciting and fulfilling, it was still alienating to me. "Now, if you're asking in a roundabout way what it was like to work with Colin and Hugh, it was not a bad day at the office."

Sadly, The Houston Chronicle, her hometown, gave the film a C-. I won't even post the review. The reviewer just didn't get it.

(Evelyn)(I get no respect around here.Lazy lumps ;-) Hey, never let it be said that Ididn't take care of you--you've got an earlier article up there--here's the Dallas Morning News review--v.g. By Gary Dowell It takes a brave soul to attempt a film adaptation of a popular novel. Living up to the combined expectations of faithful readers is tricky business. If it works, you've got a classic along the lines of Gone With the Wind or The Godfather. If you fail, you're stuck with a Bonfire of the Vanities on your resum�.Fans of Bridget Jones's Diary can rest assured: The movie is true to its source and full of the book's trademark wit, style and good humor. And while it may not rate as high as one of the "classics," it's no less enjoyable. Bridget (Ren�e Zellweger) is an endearingly inept 30ish "singleton" who worries nonstop about her weight, smokes too much, drinks even more, and dreams of finding the perfect man before she's sentenced to a life of spinsterhood, "destined to die alone and be found three weeks later, half-eaten by Alsatians." Unfortunately, the only eligible blokes she meets are her sexy, womanizing boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant, as an enjoyably unpleasant cad), and haughty, dull family friend Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). As the film begins, Bridget makes a New Year's resolution to get her act together, turn her life around and break all those old habits. On top of that, she soon has to deal with a career change, the potential breakup of her parents' marriage and being the subject of an emotional tug-of-war between Mark and Daniel. The result is a yearlong odyssey of heartache, embarrassment and obsessive calorie counting. Not surprisingly, the casting of a tiny Texan as a chunky Englishwoman caused a bit of an uproar among fans, the British press and even (initially) the book's author. If anything, the presence of Ms. Zellweger helps to make Bridget feel like more of an outsider trying to fit in, adding a subtle note of isolation and alienation to her performance. It doesn't hurt that she threw herself wholeheartedly into the role, putting on the extra pounds and spending many months in London working on the accent and other details. Ms. Zellweger even shows a knack for slapstick and gamely engages in a little self-deprecating humor, indulging in a few pratfalls and even running through a (simulated) snowstorm in leopard-print underwear. She hasn't been this funny since Jerry Maguire, or this endearing since Nurse Betty. Her earnestness and uniquely goofy charm bring depth and warmth to an otherwise brittle character. The casting of the gents is equally inspired. Mr. Grant's infamous incident with a Los Angeles hooker is made light of, and Mr. Firth played Mr. Darcy, the inspiration for the character of Mark Darcy, in the hit BBC miniseries version of Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Grant seems to be having the most fun he's had in years, and he's wonderfully rotten when he's at his worst. Mr. Firth is given the thankless task of portraying the tightly wound and seemingly unlovable Mark, and aptly rises to the occasion, gradually warming Bridget (and viewers) to the man. Granted, there's an air of familiarity about it and very little suspense as to how it will all end (it plays very much like Pride and Prejudice set in modern London), but what Bridget Jones's Diary lacks in original plot devices it makes up for in style and spunk.

Just got back from seeing BJD! Hurrah! At last can go to Spoilers! Film is wonderful. Colin is gorgeous! Never looked better! Not a sell-out at 5:30 showing, but a fair crowd. And they laughed. Even the men laughed. Renee is so good she made me want to cry in places. Huge was not particularly sexy in manner of "love rat", but was convincingly caddish, in manner of "rat." Oh, but Colin. DING DONG!! BIG SIGH!!! At the end, one woman in the audience asked another WHO was that man? Felt v. good in manner of Smug Fan. Restrained self and did not say "Keep your eyes to yourself you cow--he's MINE!!!!!!"

My crowd today was sparse (to be expected at 12:40 on Good Friday), but I did hear a little clapping at the end, and I could feel everyone pulling for CF in the end. BTW, the new ads on the tv (the ones with the press quotes) clearly show the firepole scene. So, whoever was complaining about it must have gotten over it. Think I'll go for the second time today, and third over all this evening...need to go look for MarkG, and to bring along my watch to do a scientific study of the final kiss scene--it must be timed :) (BTW, over on the Tea Room at Austen, someone didn't like it! Very surprised :( )

(Kate) "Keep your eyes to yourself you cow--he's MINE!!!!!!" LOL!!

(Kate) At the end, one woman in the audience asked another WHO was that man? This seems to be the watershed moment for becoming a Firthette. Felt v. good in manner of Smug Fan. Ah, but on the other hand, this means she has not seen P&P2 yet. Boy, is she is for a treat! Has anyone else noticed that the OOP online video market is pedalling ODB's movies with a vengeance? Glad I bought my vids when demand was low�.:-) .

Just got back from seeing BJD. What can I say that hasn't been said before? I loved everything about it, except that it was too skimpy on the BJ and MD relationship and left me wishing for more - but that's as it should be. Like a good book, a good film leaves one wanting more. Earlier in the week, I saw What Women Want and was getting itchy for it to come to an end. Not so with this film. The theatre was almost filled, and with a laughing audience throughout. HG was fine - but I certainly didn't fall in love with DC. The very brave RZ was terrific - funny, feisty and poignantly vulnerable by turn. ODB was beyond lovely to look at and listen to. The critic who preferred the foul-mouthed DC to the decent MD most be a masochist, even conceding, very grudgingly, that she might find HG more attractive than CF. Colin has never looked better and if this film does not get him noticed in a big way...? My 17-year old son and my DH enjoyed it as much as I did (well, almost, considering they were not drooling over MD).Turns out my husband is a closet RZ fan. I would have liked this film even without ODB, but will watch it again and again because of him. As will we all. And it is such a pleasure not to have to mortgage the house - and invest major amounts of time -to do so. There is something so pleasing to know that ODB the romantic lead, with second billing ahead of HG - not just on the poster, but in he film - is available on two screens less than ten minutes away from home. All and all, a real feel good movie. Now, am off to read the spoilers topic. Will keep my fingers crossed for Today and Rosie on the 16th.

From the Los Angeles Daily News: http://www.dailynews.com/socal/film/feature/0401/13/lif01.asp �Zellweger gained more than respect for 'Bridget� Stuff we�ve already heard, but this looks new: Colin Firth, who plays Mark Darcy, Bridget's more suitable suitor, isn't as generous toward his countrymen. "It's bull----," Firth says. "I've traveled around the world and I've never seen that kind of reaction from any other country. The English are simply too territorial. It's strange that people would have a problem with it. It is all about acting, after all." http://www.dailynews.com/socal/film/review/0401/13/mov01.asp 3 stars �Plus, Hugh Grant gets beat up, which makes the film slightly better than adequate.�

Doesn't mince words, does he? ;-D Am putting this here as is question for London experts who may not be reading the spoiler topic, but will try to refrain from revealing important bits. In the last scene, the store appears in very ritzy area, which wouldn't be a few blocks away from Bridget's flat. Did that street look familiar?

LOL, Karen...just noticed the hidden message under the picture. Glad this isn't a family site ;-) Thanks Mari...you can really dig 'em out. Tell'em Colin!

Charlotte O'Sullivan provided this recap in The Independent: ARTS: THE WEEK IN REVIEW THE FILM BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY OVERVIEW The film of the book of the newspaper column has made it to the big screen. Renee Zellweger stars as the eponymous diarist, with Hugh Grant and Colin Firth as the love interests. CRITICAL VIEW "Good news for men who prefer a woman to look like a woman," relished the Daily Mail. "The film is shapeless and meanders into the cliches of romance," berated The Daily Telegraph. "This adaptation sends you out with a smile on your face," countered Time Out. According to the Financial Times, it was a case of, "Acting 9 (vg). Dialogue 8 (g). Ending 1 (must do better)". "A triumph, and one that I am looking forward to seeing again," gushed The Mirror. ON VIEW On general release. Certificate 15 OUR VIEW "You forgive it everything because it's introduced you to Zellweger's Bridget... It's nice to go to the cinema and fall head-over- heels in love with a character." ***************** The Financial Times: THE ARTS: Acting 9 (v.g.) Dialogue 8 (g.) Ending 1: CINEMA: Nigel Andrews is mostly won over by Renee Zellweger as the definitive London worrier in 'Bridget Jones's Diary' Every diary-keeper is a Robinson Crusoe. Alone on his or her island, a wildlife refuge for manias, worries and self-obsessions, the loner taps out the daily bulletins. With Crusoe it was stuff about water, food and shelter, with occasional scares involving unknown footprints in the sand. With Bridget Jones it is stuff about weight, smoking and drinking, with occasional scares (or thrills) involving strange men tramping over her heart. The tone of Helen Fielding's bestselling original book was quintessentially English, a dowdy, semi-deranged Bohemianism full of comically transferred classism. Bridget's odious aristos were the Smug Marrieds, a collective reproach to her thirtyish single status. Her salt-of-the-earthers were her unattached, gossipy, happily slumming girlfriends like Jude and Shazzer, whose real-life role model Sharon Maguire directed this film. The tone had to be right in a screen version and mostly is. As Bridget, Renee Zellweger scatters the naysayers who complained of Hollywood casting by getting the measure of both role and accent. Barely a vowel is out of place, though one or two ("neoghble" for noble) are posher than needed. She can even do tipsy-and-slurring when Bridget, as not infrequently, ODs on the chardonnay. Fattening herself to play this definitive specimen of millennial London weight-worrier, she also bravely looks the part. Not even Robert De Niro in Raging Bull had to humiliate himself by tucking his calorie-enlarged girth into a bunny suit. Zellweger does so here for the "tarts and clerics" fancy-dress party, her surplus flesh trying to escape over her top like prisoners climbing over a wall, her face a moon of embarrassed social goodwill. [Ed note: Obviously these writers are not cognizant of engineering marvel of Playboy bunny suit.] The film's second casting triumph is Hugh Grant. Playing a creep with no morals, he excels. As Bridget's caddishly concupiscent boss and later boyfriend, Grant's Wodehousian twittishness is enhanced with a womanising leer and a curdled suavity. No woman could resist him, or no woman as frightened by potential shelf-life as Bridget, who can get drunk on one small dram of male attention. The strong screenwriting team - author Helen Fielding, Richard Notting Hill Curtis and TV adaptation veteran Andrew Davies - make fun fly in the first half, even though the book's diary format is downplayed in favour of a more orthodox comedy of Sloane or sub-Sloane manners. The writers especially re-nourish Bridget's parents for the screen, played with a twitchy, touching, beleaguered individuality by Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent. The film goes astray only in the last half-hour when Bridget decides to jettison the awful-but-lovable Grant for Colin Firth's erect stick of a Mark Darcy. [Ed note: Andrew Davies script instruction, no doubt.] Playing the Jane Austen heartthrob's surnamesake as if the character had had a charm bypass, and with no wet-shirt sequence as when Firth played the original Darcy on TV, the actor provides scant reason why a girl as feckless, fun-loving and allergic to smugness as Bridget would end up yielding her heart to him in a snowbound London street. Come to that, why is the street snowbound? Did the makers decide that Frank Capra had to step in for Helen Fielding as the closing master of ceremonies; that instead of taking satirical particularity up to the wire they must send the filmgoer home with a head full of snow, feelgood music and fadeout clinching? I know what the book's Bridget would have said in her diary. "Acting 9 (v.g.). Dialogue 8 (g.). Ending 1 (must do better)."

Time between first lean in and actual lip contact, not counting 2 instances of prior neck nuzzling, 4 minutes 35 seconds.

(Evelyn) just noticed the hidden message under the picture Is dialogue from film. Glad this isn't a family site ;-) Precisely! Why do you think I'm here. ;-D And from The Scotsman's Damian Love (2 stars): WITH the appearance of Bridget Jones�s Diary comes a lightening of the heart, like the feeling that greets the first hints of spring after winter. Because pretty soon, you realise, it�ll all be over. Those posters of Ren�e Zellweger sitting gazing up with that I�m-just-a-funny-little-lost-chicken look that have been appearing in more places than foot-and-mouth warning notices will begin disappearing and the chuntering buzz about the movie that has been pervading the atmosphere like background radiation will swiftly recede. By now, it doesn�t matter particularly whether the film of Bridget Jones�s Diary is a good movie or a bad movie - the only thing that matters is that it is the film of Bridget Jones�s Diary. By that standard, it succeeds: whatever else it may or may not be, there�s no denying Sharon Maguire�s film is an adaptation of Helen Fielding�s book. But, of course, it is one other thing: the latest collaboration between scriptwriter Richard Curtis and Hugh Grant, the men who gave us Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, and who bring with them that sweet smell of export-friendly success. So, in the UK, the movie is an event long before it is a movie and you have people modestly agreeing to be seen in it ironically, the way they once queued up to be seen ironically in the Spice Girls� film: here�s Salman Rushdie; there�s Jeffrey Archer. Fielding�s novel became one of those lightning-in-a-bottle sensations, mostly through word of mouth, like Trainspotting with cigarettes instead of heroin. A lot of women found a character who drank and smoked and regretted it, who bought magazines and self-help books and got confused by them but half-realised they were ridiculous, who got embarrassed, pondered underwear, worried about her weight and wondered why she couldn�t find a decent man - who, that is, did all the stuff feminism was supposed to have drummed out, but in aware, post-feminist ways. And they decided "this is me!" - the way lots of men reading Nick Hornby books about football and old records reached the same conclusion. It�s doubtful, however, that many viewers of Maguire�s functional movie will make that tight connection. Part of the reason is that there�s nothing to connect to. Zellweger is charming within the constraints of the role, but it�s the constraints you notice. The film is pitched at a level close to a run-of-the-mill prime-time sitcom: people don�t talk and don�t listen but say lines, then wait, then say lines again; you see punchlines as they are set up and they turn out as disappointing as they looked from a distance. In the same way that conversations never develop, Bridget herself doesn�t come together as a character but as a set of character traits, moving predictably through a repetitious cycle of situations in a comfortable Sunday supplement Britain. Like a figure on the mechanical diorama of a clock above a village square: Bridget�s sad. Bridget wants man. Bridget makes a fool of herself. Bridget sees right man and wrong man. Bridget goes for wrong man. Bridget makes a fool of herself. Bridget sees wrong man was wrong. Bridget�s sad. Bridget makes a fool of herself. Bridget gets right man. As the wrong man, while obviously enjoying himself, Hugh Grant is still Hugh Grant, still fluttering and wincing and hesitating as though trying to dislodge wind before he says anything; it�s just that, now, when he does say something, it�s frightfully laddish-caddish and liberally sprinkled with virile "f**ks" and "bollocks". As the right man, Colin Firth plays Colin Firth. The other reason audiences might not look up at Ren�e Zellweger and see themselves is precisely to do with all the chatter preceding the film�s release. By osmosis, it�s virtually impossible not to be aware of how Zellweger "piled on the pounds" for the role, "ballooning up" from her regular size to what is obviously considered a monstrous 12 or 14, and how she couldn�t wait to get back down to her usual fit again. As if Bridget resembled the aging Jake LaMotta. Maybe it�s me, but this stuff adds a nasty flavour to the movie. OK, actors are not the people they play; but the curtain is pulled back here. It turns out the go-girl clutzy everywoman we�re supposed to be celebrating is actually regarded as someone to be scurried away from by the people asking us to pay to join the party. When Bridget steps on the scales in this film, even though she weighs just over nine and a half stones, she whimpers; meanwhile the wrapper surrounding her film screams that this is unacceptable, in very different tones. http://www.arts.scotsman.com/film/reviews_specific.cfm?id=3400

Here's Ebert's full review, which apparently was cut down on the Sun-Times' website. This is from his Compuserve column--lots more on Colin (highlighted). BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY by Roger Ebert * * * 1/2 Glory be, they didn't muck it up. "Bridget Jones's Diary," a beloved book about a heroine both lovable and human, has been made against all odds into a funny and charming movie that understands the charm of the original, and preserves it. The book, a fictional diary by a plump, 30-something London office worker, was about a specific person in a specific place. When the role was cast with Renee Zellweger, who is not plump and is from Texas, there was gnashing and wailing. Obviously the Miramax boys would turn London's pride into a Manhattanite, or worse. Nothing doing. Zellweger put on 20-something pounds and developed the cutest little would-be double chin, as well as a British accent that sounds reasonable enough to me. (Sight & Sound, the British film magazine, has an ear for nuances and says the accent is "just a little too studiedly posh," which from them is praise.) As in the book, Bridget arrives at her 32nd birthday determined to take control of her life, which until now has consisted of smoking too much, drinking too much, eating too much, and not finding the right man, or indeed much of any man. In her nightmares, she dies fat, drunk and lonely, and is eaten by Alsatian dogs. She determines to monitor her daily intake of tobacco and alcohol units, and her weight, which she measures in stones. (A stone is 14 pounds; the British not only have pounds along with kilos but stones on top of pounds, although the other day a London street vendor was arrested for selling bananas by the pound in defiance of the new European marching orders; the next step is obviously for Brussels to impound Bridget's diary.) Bridget's campaign proceeds unhappily when her mother (who "comes from the time when pickles on toothpicks were still the height of sophistication") introduces her to handsome Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), who is at a holiday party against his will and in a bad mood and is overheard (by Bridget) describing her as a "verbally incontinent spinster." Things go better at work, where she exchanges saucy e-mails with her boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). His opener: "You appear to have forgotten your skirt." They begin an affair, while Darcy circles the outskirts of her consciousness, still looking luscious but acting emotionally constipated. Zellweger's Bridget is a reminder of the first time we became really aware of her in a movie, in "Jerry Maguire," where she was so cute and vulnerable we wanted to tickle and console her at the same time. Her work in "Nurse Betty" (2000) was widely but not sufficiently praised, and now here she is, fully herself and fully Bridget Jones, both at once. A story like this can't work unless we feel unconditional affection for the heroine, and casting Zellweger achieves that; the only alternate I can think of is Kate Winslet, who comes close but lacks the self-destructive puppy aspects. The movie has otherwise been cast with dependable (perhaps infallible) British comic actors. The first time Hugh Grant appeared on screen, I chuckled for no good reason at all, just as I always do when I see Christopher Walken, Steve Buscemi, Tim Roth or Jack Nicholson -- because I know that whatever the role, they will infuse it with more than the doctor ordered. Grant can play a male Bridget Jones (as he did in "Notting Hill"), but he's better as a cad, and here he surpasses himself by lying to Bridget about Darcy and then cheating on her with a girl from the New York office. (An "American stick insect," is what Bridget tells her diary.) Colin Firth on the other hand must unbend to become lovable, and when we do finally love him, it's largely because we know what an effort it took on his part. "Bridget Jones's Diary" is famously, if vaguely, patterned after Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"; Firth played Mr. Darcy in the BBC's 1995 adaptation of the novel, and now plays another Darcy here. I didn't see the TV version but learn from the critic James Berardinelli that Firth "plays this part exactly as he played the earlier role, making it evident that the two Darcys are essentially the same." It is a universal rule of romantic fiction that all great love stories must be mirrored by their low-comedy counterpoints. Just as Hal woos Katharine, Falstaff trifles with Doll Tearsheet. If Bridget must choose between Mark and Daniel, then her mother (Gemma Jones) must choose between her kindly but easy-chair-loving husband (Jim Broadbent) and a dashing huckster for a TV shopping channel. The movie strings together one funny set-piece after another, as when Bridget goes in costume to a party where she THOUGHT the theme was "Tarts & Vicars." Or when she stumbles into a job on a TV news show and makes her famous premature entrance down the fire pole. Or when she has to decide at the beginning of an evening whether sexy underwear or tummy-crunching underwear will do her more good in the long run. Bridget charts her own progress along the way, from "tragic spinster" to "wanton sex goddess," and the movie gives almost unreasonable pleasure as it celebrates her bumpy transition.

The film goes astray only in the last half-hour when Bridget decides to jettison the awful-but-lovable Grant for Colin Firth's erect stick of a Mark Darcy. [Ed note: Andrew Davies script instruction, no doubt.] Playing the Jane Austen heartthrob's surnamesake as if the character had had a charm bypass, and with no wet-shirt sequence as when Firth played the original Darcy on TV, the actor provides scant reason why a girl as feckless, fun-loving and allergic to smugness as Bridget would end up yielding her heart to him in a snowbound London street. (Financial Times) That's cruel. And again, the implication is that it's only the "wet shirt" that made Darcy attractive. And we wonder why CF doesn't want to play romantic roles. Who would in the UK? The change in the ending over the credits is significant (probably based on audience research!). In the US you get a heart-warming, life-affirming ending, we get tacky sexist jokes, and more super-stud Hugh Grant. GRRRRR!!! Has any British paper said anything nice about CF? I knew there'd be a BJD back lash in the UK, but it's the romantic aspect that sems to be catching the flak! Thanks for all the US reviews!!

Actually I have read nearly all the US reviews (at Rotten Tomoaoes, over 70), and I think Colin comes off very well andI agree with Heide, he certainly holds his own with HG, some very nice remarks. However, the UKcritics are another thing, except Christoper Tookey who said some nice things about ODB, but then I always like CT.

We're going to see the movie tonight, Ann (my DH has actually expressed interest in seeing it!) and so I'll stop whingeing about our male critics. But, jeez, they are a major let down....to put it politely! I noticed they trounced "What women want" which did extremely well at the Box Office.....evidently they do not know what women want. Shall not read our "critics" any more!!!

Saw the film for a second time yesterday afternoon although should have opted for a later showing as cinema nowhere near full ;-( Took (for took read dragged ) with me my faithful, non-CF aware, friend and sat there, oozing smugness, in anticipation of the adoring noises and constant chuckling which would ensue. Gave friend strict instructions e.g. look out for this bit, don't forget such and such and ....look out for Burberry Man - we know him! Was disappointed as found was only person laughing in places but generally film was well received (though no sharp intakes of breath when MD appears in BJs flat *sigh* - unlike London Pre-Release screening). The fight scene and especially had everyone LOL and practically ROTF as well! At end credits stayed firmly (and even more smugly) rooted in seat as the 'masses' trundled out- only to race back in again when DC bits to camera appear. When we did eventually leave, the next audience were queueing and there were shed-loads of them so am feeling v pleased with sure-fire box office smash portents! Verdict from unbelieving friend? She loved it (but then she has read BJD and P&P so got some of the references) - did however think that the on screen scribblings should have continued through film to perpetuate diary motif. But AARRGGGHH - she still can't understand what I see in ODB, is the woman mad? Her saving grace is that when I dropped her home her DH was flicking though channels and P&P was showing on BBC Knowledge so she insisted I got another Darcy fix before I set of on the car journey home *double sigh - was Rosings piano scene and ill fated proposal episode* Hurrah! Survival BJ screening tickets have just plopped though letterbox am skipping around bedroom in manner of extremely happy (Easter) bunny and preparing, a tad too premature perhaps, to see HIM introduce the film....lets face it he could stand up there and read the entire London Telephone Directory and I don't suppose any of up die-hard droolies would notice ;-)

Jus thad to tell you about this review, the first one where the words "and especially Firth" have been said... From Appollo Guide - http://appolloguide.com/mov_fullrev.asp?CID=3053, hope this works but if it doesn't go to appolloguide.com and find the review for BJD. Here is the bit I like "Zellwegger is helped here by strong performances by Grant and ESPECIALLY FIRTH, whose restraint makes his character utterly real and all the more tantalising when he seems unattainable" hurrah

Oh, it doesn't seem to be working but the review can be found at the iMDB. or http://appolloguide.com