What a boar!

I do not know if the online staff at the Village Voice read today's Daily News before or after it allowed the bizarrely incongrous display at right, but no matter: Tweaking Jane Austen fans seems as pleasurable a media bloodsport as any, if we are to believe Lloyd Grove:

There's a spot of bother brewing between fledgling Brit director Joe Wright - whose movie version of Pride and Prejudice opens tomorrow - and members of the Jane Austen Society of North America. ... Wright sniffs that he's not interested in "quibblers," adding that he didn't make the film for them. "I made it for myself, really," he reportedly reveals.

The trouble started a couple of months ago when University of Colorado English Prof. Joan Klingel Ray, president of the Jane Austen Society, slagged off the movie in an interview with the U.K.'s Telegraph, criticizing everything from Matthew MacFadyen as the male lead, Mr. Darcy, to the movie's in-your-face sexual imagery.

"The Darcy in the film does not have the quality of attractiveness that Colin Firth has," Ray asserted, referring to the star of the acclaimed 1995 miniseries.

She added: "The film is full of sexual imagery, which is totally inappropriate to Austen's novel. In one scene, a wild boar, which I assume is supposed to represent Darcy, wobbles through a farm with its sexual equipment on show."

Oh. No. They. Didn't! Grove writes that so many lace doilies got fucked up over Ray's interview that Focus Features threatened to axe the preview scheduled for the Society's convention in... Milwaukee? When the screening DID go off, the Austen loyalists evidently gathered around a few kegs of beer and "complained about 'lame' dialogue and Keira Knightley's posture." Yeah, jeez! The effrontery!

But if you ask me, Wright did not make his adaptation sexy enough. After all, if it comes down to P&P's hot, wobbling boar action or the sexual-equipment-showing of the Playboy program in the Voice ad, Playboy takes it 10 times out of 10. The poor guy just cannot win for losing.