Superficial adaptation compared to last version

I can't believe I'm about to say this. I just got done watching the 2016 Anne and I honestly liked it better than I thought I would. I went into the movie thinking I was going to have the same reaction I had to the 4th Anne movie they did a few years ago, I watched a few minutes of that turned it off in disgust.

The 80s cast did such memorable movies, they're not going to be topped. Hell, I had looked up clips of the 2016 Anne movie and saw people making passing references to the 80s movie that people were mistakenly calling the original. That goes to show how strong the movies are with a lot of people that they mistakenly think Megan's version was the first and only Anne movie at the time.

I've watched the 30s version of Anne...it was alright. If I had to play favorites and bullet point from favorite to least favorite from what I've seen:

1. 80s version
2. 2016 version
3. 30s version

I'll never get the 1985 film out of my head, but this was just nowhere in the same league as Kevin Sullivan's adaptation. Too short, not nearly as well cast, and it had no real heart.

It was more like a ticking off of certain boxes

WARNING -- SOME SPOILERS ARE CONTAINED BELOW

Yup. I had that same sort of experience. This new version fell short of the mark established by the 1985 film in every way. I wasn't thrilled with the cast. The only one who was really as good as in the 1985 film was Martin Sheen. No one could do what Colleen Dewhurst did as Marilla -- she was one of my all-time favorite actresses and simply topnotch. Megan Follows was a better actress than Ella Ballentine, with a lot more appeal in my book. The musical score in the 2016 film was repetitive and boring to the point of annoyance, as if they kept playing the same few minutes of music over and over again. Too many important story elements were glossed over. The incident where Anne grabs the syrup of ipecac and undertakes to save the deathly ill child with whooping cough, for example, couldn't convey in the 60 seconds allocated just how serious the illness was (or even what it was), and what Anne had to do over quite a period of time before the parents came back and the doctor was summoned. On the other hand, they spend way too much time establishing Matthew's heart condition. In the book and in the 1985 film, he died suddenly with no warning (though the circumstances of when the heart attack happened were different). Of course, they truncated the story after having rushed through it, with the scene at the train station where Marilla rushes to change her mind and tell Anne that she can stay at Green Gables if Anne wants to. 85 minutes for the new version compared to 199 minutes for the 1985 version. Of course, the 1985 made-for-TV film was in narrow-screen format and not broadcast in high definition, but, hopefully, they did it on film so a DVD version would at least provide a sharp, bright picture compared to the VHS videocassette tapes I've owned for so long. It's hard to believe 31 years have gone by since the 1985 version was made and that Megan Follows is now 48 years old. I don't care about narrow-screen vs. wide-screen given how well-made both the 1985 version and its 1987 sequel were compared to the 2016 version.

i re-watched parts of it last night....really along the end, i didn't know it was on until then..

but, i thought that in the end, the only one that suited her character was anne....

the rest...not really

especially diana...i mean she showed no spunk, no anything at all

i know i too prefer the original 80's version and all that.....

and i am saddened to the fact that gilbert, is dead......

susan