Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Heartbreaking! I grew up reading the Anne books and watching the first two movies when they premiered on the Disney channel. I was hooked! I have had the first two movies (Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea) these many years and have loved them to near disintegration. I was delighted then to learn that some of my most treasured childhood friends had come back to the big screen in a new adventure. Well, it certainly was new. Though the first two were not identical to the books, they were faithful to the spirit of the story and dialogue. Where this stilted, era-jumping mockery of L.M. Montgomery's story came from, I'll never know. I watched one time through, hoping it would get better. Many months later I decided to try it again and I turned it off after 10 minutes. I had to re-watch both of the previous movies to make myself feel better. This movie took the cheesiest aspects of the characters, turned up the volume on them, and removed all of the wonder of P.E.I. so beautifully harnessed in the previous movies, plus took us to Europe and NYC?! Josie Pie morphs from a bratty gossip-monger to a militant war-monger, and Anne a near adulteress. These are not the characters I loved (and loved to hate). The scenes showing the ruin that Green Gables had become were as heartbreaking as seeing my grandmother's house after Hurricane Hugo. Perhaps this project was an attempt to make Anne a little more edgy, but unfortunately, the whole appeal of the previous movies and indeed of the books was that they were not edgy. They were sketches of ordinary life with extraordinary characters. There was nothing extraordinary about this movie, except how extraordinarily disappointed I was.