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Janice Beard
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Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 0741952301196
Format: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
Label: KOCH LORBER FILMS
Languages: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Manufacturer: KOCH LORBER FILMS
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: KOCH LORBER FILMS
Region Code: 1
Release Date: November 11, 2003
Running Time: 78 minutes
Studio: KOCH LORBER FILMS
Theatrical Release Date: 1998
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Editorial Review:
Janice Beard 45 WPM is a film for anyone who ever swam in the typing pool. It also provides reassurance that anyone who works in an office isn't alone in feeling alone. Scottish Janice (newcomer Eileen Walsh) suffers a never-ending bad hair day while temping at Kendon Motors during a car launch. She's earning pennies for her agoraphobic mother, to whom she sends elaborately staged videos fibbing about her successes in the big world. So simple a life gets complicated by the evil machinations of typing-pool shark Julia (a fantastic Patsy Kensit), and the dangerous allure of office boy Sean (Rhys Ifans sporting the same haircut from Notting Hill). An industrial espionage subplot tugs the light-hearted tone downward only very occasionally. Co-written and directed by first-timer Clare Kilner, on its original release this became a film festival favorite thanks to its dizzy charm (especially Walsh), for seeing the Kensit of Absolute Beginners struggle at a salsa class, and for opening with the line: "My father died in childbirth." --Paul Tonks
We are introduced to Janice Beard at her ill-starred beginnings. Her father dies of a heart attack during her birth which plunges her mother into a post-natal, post-mortem agoraphobic depression that lasts 23 years. Determined to earn the money for her mother's treatment, Janice sets off into the work force with no skills or experience with disastrous results. Struggling to win everyone over, she thinks she has found love with the mail room boy but has actually become a pawn in an industrial espionage scheme that could ruin the company. Can little Janice find a cure for her mother, save the company and find true love in the bargain? Anything is possible!
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Eileen Walsh makes her debut as the winsome wallflower Janice Beard
The life of Janice Beard (Eileen Walsh) was marked from the start when her father died in childbirth and her mother fell into a "post partum/post mordum depression" from which she has yet to recover. To help her mum, Janice comes up with a rich fantasy life to try and lift her up from the pits of despair, but now Janice has graduated from school and the time has come for her to join the workforce so that she can earn enough money for her mother's treatment back home in Edinburgh. So our heroine goes ... Read More
Rating: - Zen Innocence
This film has been described as a British Amelie and that blurb is true in both respects: the main eponynomous Janice Beard captures the sensibilities of the British in the way Amelie captured the ethos of the French. The film is very well written, but it lives and dies on the performance of Eileen Walsh as Janice. And on that basis, it not only lives but it shines. These fairy tale movies can so easily devolve into a Hallmark card. This movie walks a tightrope over that danger. My only quibble ... Read More
Rating:  - Traveler
I first saw this movie on a British Airways flight and don't think it was ever released in the U.S. Rhys Ifans' comic genious is now well known to U.S. audiences and is matched by Eileen Walsh in this film. The film begins with the unique premise of Walsh's father (yes, father) dying in during childbirth, her mother who refuses thereafter to leave her house and the tales the daughter weaves to bring the world to her mother ... and then, the consequences of unleashing that imagination on the world when ... Read More
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