Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'll try to keep this vague so as to not spoil it too badly for those unfamiliar with the story. I love the book Little Women and have mostly enjoyed film adaptations of it. This adaptation was both unneccessary and disappointing. It seems like a vanity project. The acting was good, as was the look of the film, but the so much of the story's charm was lost by the flashback nature of the narrative. Even for someone familiar with the story, it was hard to follow and frustrating. I left the theatre very upset by what had been done to a beloved story. The only thing I really liked was that Amy's romance, which always seems like an afterthought, got a great deal of focus. Beyond that, it was painful. Meg's romance seemed one-dimensional and Jo's romance was rendered practically ridiculous. The flashbacks made it hard to tell, but she seemed to barely speak to her love interest before reaching an absolutely horrendous scene (it made me cringe) where everyone told her she loved him and then she chased him down at the train station. The character of Jo was further diminished by the way she dealt with her loneliness at one point. I also felt that Laurie's grandfather was misrepresented as if he had been sitting at home waiting to be invited to join in the jolly antics next door. His character, although more of a background character, has a more complex journey than that. To me the absolute travesty of this film was the casting of the actor to play Laurie (aka Teddy). This was a huge mistep. I didn't like him from the start, but could accept him when Laurie was a teen, but when Laurie was a grown man in his mid-twenties, both when living wildly and when taking responsibility, it was abasolutely impossible to take his character seriously when he still looked 13. I'm not sure that there are enough words to decribe how much I disliked this adaptation of Little Women.