“A neglected house gets an unhappy look. This one had it in spades. It was like that old woman in Great Expectations, that Miss Havisham and her rotting wedding dress and her torn veil, taking it out on the world because she had been given the go-by.” — Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard.

Now that I’ve seen the trailer for Mike Newell and David Nicholls‘ adaptation of Charles DickensGreat Expectations, I have a fairly clear idea what the movie will more or less be. I didn’t exactly beat a path to see it at in Toronto. (Or, to put it more precisely, I passed.) Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet went and called it “perfectly serviceable, but overall nothing that offers a shift to the landscape.”