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Sunday, February 08, 2009

Query

So I just sat and laughed and cried through La Vita è Bella for the first time. Hey, I'm only about, what, eleven or twelve years behind the times, right? It is, no pun intended, an absolutely beautiful movie and if you're like me and you routinely watch well-known movies for the first time over a decade after they come out, by all means quit waiting on this one. Just make sure you have a box of kleenex handy. I've never seen such a brilliant use of comedy in a tragic film. Or... such a touching depiction of tragic events in a comic film. Or... such romance in a... oh, man, let's just move on, OK?

(By the way, HOW is it that 1997 is over a decade ago? DOES NOT COMPUTE. Well, OK, really it does, but... nevermind.)

Here's what I knew about this movie before I watched it:

• It was about an Italian guy who used humor to help his family through the Holocaust.
• That actor/director guy who won an Academy Award for it went absolutely bananas when they called his name at the awards ceremony.

Yeah, that was pretty much it. Notably, I had somehow missed that the movie was in Italian, even though I knew it was made in Italy by an Italian director with Italian actors, until the opening credits started. I am not a person who dislikes foreign-language movies with subtitles; in fact I like them just fine, as they kind of make me feel smarter and more cultured than I really am. I'm certainly not complaining at all. The whole point of sitting down here to blog was to ask this question:

When you're watching a movie with subtitles, do you forget that you're watching a movie with subtitles? Meaning do you just absorb the words and later on have to actually remind yourself that you read them on a screen instead of understanding them as they were spoken? This always happens to me. The subtitles become like the black bars when I'm watching a widescreen movie (definitely my preferred format); I just stop noticing them. I suppose I would like to know if this is normal, or if it is something that goes along with my previously discussed mental issues involving seeing words in my head as people speak them. (Because for years -- decades -- I thought that was normal. In fact, in my heart of hearts, I still think so, and that you all [except Kat] are pulling my leg.)

Saturday, May 17, 2008

I knew it would tick me off...

...but I didn't know it would tick me off this much.

We were casting around for something to do for me for a belated Mother's Day, and I hit upon the idea of going to dinner and to watch Prince Caspian, even though I had guessed from the trailer that it would not be an entirely relaxing experience for me. Little did I know.

As usual (this is a common theme in my reviews of film adaptations of beloved novels), if there had never been a C.S. Lewis, and he had never written a charming and inspiring series of novels about a group of four ordinary British children who staunchly face down frightening odds with the help of a God-figure, then this would have been a fine movie. The effects are quite good, acting is fine, casting is great, costumes are lovely, etc. etc. etc. But there was a C.S. Lewis, and if people actually turned over in their graves, the poor man would be rotating at an alarming rate right now. A lot of people don't mind changes in the story as long as the idea is the same, but I would be surprised if even those people can appreciate this adaptation, since what the writers did was skin and gut the story completely and then fill out the bare remnants of its distorted skeleton with something that was barely even remotely related to what had been there before. I've had people defend way-out adaptations to me by saying that the original book is still intact and I can always go back and read it again if I want. This is true, but it doesn't excuse this kind of flagrant rip-off for me, for two reasons: First, it's an insult to the author. The screenwriters and directors in effect said to Lewis, "Hey, old chap, you wrote a jolly good story but it just won't sell in today's market, so we're going to tweak it a bit, you know? Make it more like those Lord of the Whatayacallit movies that made so much bank a few years back." Second, there are going to be thousands and thousands of kids who see the movies first, and instead of being drawn to the books by them, they're going to find that the books are much less action-adventurish and also there's this whole religion angle, and those same kids who might have given the books a chance and learned to love them probably won't get past the second chapter because of the expectations they had going in.

I don't even know where to begin. Well, I may as well start with a disclaimer: I am about to spoil the living daylights out of this movie. If that bothers you, stop after this paragraph and come back after you've seen the movie. I mean, if you've read the book, you might think that there aren't any large-scale details I could give away that you wouldn't already know... but you would be very wrong. Yes, people, it was that bad. I'm going to leave out little unimportant stuff like the fact that they emerge in Narnia on the beach instead of in a thicket (actually, there is no thicket on the island) and the fact that they rushed the first few chapters of the book so terribly that they completely neglected to have the children come up with an explanation for why the Narnia they had known a year ago had aged by a thousand years.

The London scenes at the beginning are bizarre. Peter... getting in fistfights? Because... he used to be a king and people should... respect him more? Or... kings don't walk away from fights? Or something.

Also, as everyone noticed in the trailer, Caspian looked to be about five or ten years too old (IMO, Peter and Susan were too old as well), and as Paula pointed out (she said it -- I didn't), Caspian is "not supposed to be that hot". Except he had to be for this film, so that he could be a love interest for Susan. Yes, you read that right. THERE IS A KISS. (My son covered his eyes.)

Caspian blows the horn before the badger and the dwarves take him into their house. Also, Trumpkin doesn't go off looking for the kings and queens; he gets himself captured by Miraz's army as they chase after Caspian who has barely escaped (by a matter of seconds) the henchmen who were coming to kill him in his bed, in a very LOTR-ish killing-a-person-in-bed-who-turns-out-not-to-be-there moment.

The Narnians storm Miraz' castle in a very long (LOTR-ish) battle segment. Because Peter says they need to strike out on their own, because they've waited too long for Aslan.

Peter and Caspian draw swords on each other at least twice and spend a lot of time sniping at each other. It's those rampant teenage hormones, see.

During the consultation around the Stone Table with the Hag and the Werewolf -- where Edmund, Peter, and Susan are present -- the White Witch appears as the result of an incantation, encased in ice, and very hokily demands a drop of Adam's blood to bring her back to life.

The bit where Lucy walks away from the sleeping group at dawn and meets up with Aslan and sees the tree people move? It's beautifully done. I actually was thinking that it was going to be the one part that really clung to the original, until it turned out to be a dream. In fact, nobody actually sees Aslan until Peter is in the middle of the fight with Miraz, and that's because Lucy and Susan take off into the woods alone on Caspian's horse to look for him, only Susan stops to fight off attackers (she really likes to hit people with her bow; it must be a very strong one, and she's got a heck of an arm) and has to get rescued (flutter eyelashes) by Caspian while Lucy goes on alone. Aslan and Lucy finally show up together just before the water god wakes up and destroys the (newly-built for the battle) bridge with Miraz's army on it, after another LOTR-ish battle scene complete with giant trebuchets.

Good moments: Um. The sword battle with Miraz, and what leads up to it, are pretty good, except that they're filmed in that modernish jerky kind of way, which seems out of place in among all the lush (LOTR-ish) cinematography. The attack of the tree people was interestingly done. Reepicheep was well-animated, although he was more smartass than valiant warrior and I found his voice to be too deep. And oh, yes: Regina Spektor sings the first song in the closing credits. Still, overall, that is $35.50 and two hours of my life that I'll never get back. At least we didn't buy any popcorn. Now please excuse me while I stay up all night curled up with the book, to get the taste of that film out of my mouth.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

I think I may be the only person in Western civilization to say this, but...

...this annoys me very, very much. (Beautiful and all as it is.)

Monday, December 12, 2005

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005)

We went to see this yesterday. I'm so frustrated, because they made a beautiful movie, with good music and good casting, but ack. Uh oh, here comes a list. Things that bothered me:

1) Whole-cloth fabrication of several scenes. Peter, Susan, Lucy, and the Badgers pursued by the Witch's wolves onto the frozen-but-breaking-up Great River and floating down a raging torrent on a chunk of ice into which Peter has plunged his sword as a handhold? And that's not all.

Which leads into:
2) Complete alteration of the 'feel' of the story.The whole series of books have this very British, measured, carefully-paced feeling of restraint to them which is totally absent here. The filmmakers essentially gutted the original stories, added in a good number of the original elements compacted together for a greater sense of urgency and tension, and mixed in this whole load of new stuff, turning the entire production into a Narnian "Indiana Jones" adventure.

3) Script fiddling. Again with the modern phraseology. Maybe they think your average nine-year-old won't relate to a movie in which the people don't talk like him. Maybe they're right. If they are, that's a shame.

4) The absence of 'deeper magic from before the dawn of time'. I was a little surprised at this, because the reviews I've heard and read of this movie from a Christian perspective have raved about how the entire Aslan/Christ angle was kept intact. And yet there is nothing in this version to indicate that Aslan predates the White Witch or has any greater understanding of spiritual matters than she has -- which is pretty darned important if you're looking at the story as a theological allegory.

5) Character alteration. Not one of the children was written faithfully, in my opinion. Peter is a reluctant hero, with none of the book Peter's best-foot-forward no-nonsense bravery. I got so, so tired of seeing him indecisively point his sword at whomever he was supposed to be killing. Susan is a contrary, doubting bratty sister in many scenes. The nature of Edmund's betrayal is altered. Remember that in the original story, Edmund did not know that he was betraying his brother and sisters into the Witch's hands when he gave away their location at the Beavers'. He still thought he was going to be a Prince and that his brothers and sisters would be his servants -- not that they'd be killed. So much was handled -- eh, OK -- in the movie, but then afterward Edmund repeatedly betrays Aslan and the children -- sometimes in quite desperate moments, but still. Even Lucy, who was otherwise very, very well-handled, gloats when they all reach Narnia together. Quite different from the "brick" of a Lucy who never said "I told you so."

OK, enough negativity. Some things I liked:

1) The casting. The children, the White Witch, the Professor, Mrs. Macready -- everyone looked the part, and the acting was excellent all around.

2) The animated animals. Aslan and the Beavers, especially, were wonderful. I had a few moments of disliking the way the Wolves looked when they were talking -- something about the eyes -- but overall they were also done well.

3) The coronation scene. Excellently done.

4) The execution of Aslan, as watched by the girls. Just about the only story element which I found to be completely, satisfyingly faithful to the original was the one with Susan, Lucy, and Aslan in the time before and after his execution. It was pitch-perfect.

It really sounds like I hated this movie. I didn't. If I'd never read the book I might have loved it. As it is, it is yet another addition to my "pretty good movie but pretty bad adaptation" file. Which is pretty fat. :)

Thursday, November 24, 2005

"Pride and Prejudice" review

I'm brewing a post about Psalm 2, as Kristen and I are going to kind of meander through the Psalms together (all are welcome to join us in this, by the way! This means you! Right, Kristen? We're not some kind of exclusive Blogging the Psalms club with a secret handshake or anything....) But before I do that post, I wanted to sort of empty from my brain into text all the stuff that's rattling around in there about the new version of "Pride and Prejudice", which I went and saw today.

Yes. I. In a movie theater. With two girlfriends. On the first day of wide release. SO MUCH FUN. Wish you were there. (There were only about ten other people in the theater, so that was nice too.)

First, I have to just say right up front that of course this is only a two-hour movie and so they couldn't tell the whole story in lavish, subtle, beautiful detail the way BBC did in 1995. BBC's edition still reigns as the authoritative adaptation, surpassed only by an actual reading of the book for Austenish pleasure. That is sort of the overarching truth of this review, and it's something that is just assumed in every phrase of the rest of it. I didn't want to sound either too critical or too glowing in my review, but I don't want to say that about every point either, so just keep it in mind.

OK, I'll start off with something that was just different without being necessarily good or bad. It's almost similar to the Rozema adaptation of Mansfield Park, the way the filmmakers took the story and sort of blew a whole different feeling into it. The way I put it to my friends today was that it was as if Tchaikovsky had written a variation on a theme by Vivaldi or Mozart. You have this light, satirical, effervescent, witty story which is oh yes by the way a romance (the original book); in this movie, the satire is blunted, the bubbles are turned into more standard Hollywood funny moments, and the romance takes position as the front-and-center raison d'être for the film. This is... well, you can't complain about it without complaining about the entire movie itself; you just have to accept that that's the premise of what happened, and see it as a different view of the same events. The musical analogy is a good one, I think; this is a Romantic retelling of a Classical story. Or, as a friend told me before I watched it, they made it more Brontë-ish than Austen. I don't know if I'd go THAT far -- there were no wives in attics or bleak moors or gnashed teeth -- but I definitely see her point. I must add that in the past, this would have ruined the movie for me -- this 'reinterpretation' rather than 'direct retelling' approach. I don't know why, but I'm more tolerant of this sort of thing than I once was. It doesn't mean I think it's OK when, say, Kevin Sullivan combines characters and shifts their lines around and alters his characters' entire personalities to suit his film-making preferences. One has to draw a line, after all. But I can accept this sort of reinterpretation more readily than I once did, putting it in a similar category to modern retelling of myths, or, say, the movie "Clueless".

Now for some things that I thought were, well, bad. Negative. Took away from my enjoyment of the story.

• DONALD SUTHERLAND. I'm sorry, but this man did NOT come across positively to me at all. His Mr. Bennet was a sad, defeated, tired old man. There was very little humor in the character, and that's a crying shame, because Mr. Bennet is probably the most humorous of the sympathetic characters in the novel. He's self-deprecating; he sees the folly of his situation as a man who married a pretty girl who became a shrill, annoying woman; he finds pleasure in absurdity because it provides a diversion for him. I didn't see this in Sutherland at all. He just came across like a depressed guy who had a really bad hangover most of the time. There were glimmers -- but only occasional ones -- of the man Mr. Bennet is, but overall, eh. Poor choice, in my opinion.
• Modern language. I don't think Elizabeth Bennet would have used the phrase "what you're going through," nor do I think Mr. Darcy would prate on about "our relationship". I could be wrong. Those could, I suppose, be direct quotes from the text. But they certainly rang a false note for me, along with half a dozen or so similarly anachronistic phrases.
• Of course (see above) they had to chop the story a good deal to make it fit in two hours. Things that happened separately happened together, that sort of thing. It pains me to see things like that, but I understand that it has to happen. Why, though, do they cut out so many secondary characters? There were no Mr. and Mrs. Hurst; no Maria Lucas; no Gardiner children; no Aunt Phillips; no Denny and Carter and Sanderson. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some.
• Some of the casting choices (besides Donald Sutherland who deserves his own section above) were wack. I had a hard time watching Mr. Wickham (who got WAY LESS screen time than his character should have, even so), for example, and Mrs. Gardiner was far too old.
• They rather senselessly changed the times and things of lots of events. Lady Catherine shows up in the middle of the night. Darcy proposes at dawn. I suppose this was done to add to the appearance of urgency each felt in his or her mission, but I didn't like it. I didn't like the way Darcy and Elizabeth met up at Pemberley, but maybe that's partly because that's my absolute favorite scene in the BBC version so I'm biased.
• The whole second half of the movie is quite rushed. Very little time is given to Lydia's situation; Lydia is the one to tell Elizabeth that Mr. Darcy paid for everything, rather than Lydia letting it slip that Darcy was there, and Lizzy writing to her aunt Gardiner for details.
• Oddly, some of the scenes -- dreary ones especially -- seemed dragged out much longer than necessary. The ball at Netherfield, aside from Elizabeth's dances with Mr. Darcy and Mr. Collins, is nearly humorless and is painful to watch, and especially the dinner portion seems neverending -- which I suppose gives us a hint of what Elizabeth may have felt, but ehh. still. There were other scenes similarly dealt with that I thought might have been trimmed. But then, I'm not a multimillion-dollar film director, either, so what do I know.
• Lizzy herself is altered. She's more bookish and less -- not fiercely, that's the wrong word -- less archly independent. She feels more passion for Darcy, earlier on, than she does in the novel. She's more passionately and verbally angry at him, less reserved, than I think she would have been.
• I think they dropped the ball with Miss Bingley. I was looking forward to seeing what they did with her, because she's one of the few sore points in the BBC version. She's supposed to be pretty, and charming in a traditionally feminine way, not just supercilious and conniving -- although she's supposed to be those things too. So I was hoping they'd do handle her a bit better in this new adaptation, and at first I thought they had -- she is prettier than Anna Chancellor -- but she wore the exact same bored expression through every scene she had. Eh. And there were very few moments that showed how much she wanted Darcy for herself -- moments that just make her character.
• I could be wrong but I think they used a modern piano rather than a period-correct pianoforte for the internal music.
• Initially I really disliked Matthew McFadyen as Darcy. He grew on me a bit, but I never did really get used to him. He lacked the intensity that I thought Darcy should have, and (through no fault of the actor, probably, in all honesty) you never really got a good sense of his struggle not to fall for Lizzy.
• NO MENTION OF FINE EYES.
• Several lines were added/scenes were changed; this goes along with the two paragraphs above. But just as one small example, Lizzy and Jane are both eavesdropping on Darcy and Bingley when Darcy says the bit about 'tolerable' -- and she lacks the laughing bravado which she has in the novel (and the BBC version) in that scene; she's hurt and she shows it. She does later cast the line up to him in a possibly-Lizzyish-but-totally-invented way.

That's all the complaining I'm going to do for now, although I may think of things to add later.

On to the list of things I really enjoyed about this movie -- in some cases, even more than the BBC version (sacrilege!)

• MR COLLINS. David Bember did a fantastic job for the BBC, don't get me wrong, but I think maybe the guy in this one did a TEENY bit better. Less oily, but just as obsequious, and short. Mr. Collins has many of the laugh-out-loud moments in this movie. His expressions are priceless, his timing is totally perfect, his appearance is spot-on. He reads Fordyce to them, just as he does in the book.
• The dancing was amazing in most of the dancing scenes. It was more boisterous, more energetic -- the people who were dancing really looked like they were enjoying it. The speech between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy during the infamous dance at Netherfield was very well-done.
• Mr. Bingley was SO nervous and geeky and just generally totally and fumblingly and obviously in love. There wasn't that air of almost-smugness he seemed to have -- just because of his expressions, I think -- in the BBC version. This was VERY nearly carried too far -- Jane can't marry a clown, after all -- but not quite.
• I think the Focus version is more generous to Mary than the BBC version was. It was like they felt there had to be a truly ugly sister for that adaptation, and they made Mary far more disagreeable than the book has her. The 2005 Mary was much more like the book's Mary: a girl who's a bit awkward, and not AS pretty as her sisters, who takes refuge in her books and music, thinking that they will put her on an equal level. She doesn't have to be a prissy little toad with repulsive manners to accomplish this.
• As I mentioned, this movie is WOW pretty. It's not that the BBC one wasn't nice-looking -- at least they'd shed The BBC Look by then, ugh -- but this has a much more Hollywoodish look to it -- more lush, better lit, better camera angles, that sort of thing.
• Kristen will like this: Mrs. Bennet is less over-the-top shrill than she is in the BBC version. It took a while to get used to that, but once I did I kind of appreciated it.

All in all -- Austen fans don't need to be afraid of this movie, I don't think. I enjoyed it more than I thought I might -- in fact, really, I enjoyed it quite a lot. It certainly won't replace the BBC version in my affections (duh) but I might want to own it when it's available to complete my collection, and for occasional viewing. I'm even glad I paid the $6 to see the matinee in the theater, rather than waiting for DVD.

Sunday, June 26, 2005

sigh

T is still gone. He'll probably come home tomorrow night at his regular time. We hope. He was supposed to have a four-day weekend (well, Thursday he had to go to the lab, so he took it off, but whatever) and ended up getting called on Friday evening to go in early Saturday. So the last any of us saw him was Friday night, because no, I did NOT manage to stay up till 3:30 and make him pancakes. I've done it before in situations like this but I just couldn't this time; I was nodding off sitting up, and finally headed to bed around 12:30 or 1:00 in a sleepy haze of guilt.

I have a papercut (from a paper plate. What kind of person gets papercuts from a paper plate? Oh yeah, me. Nevermind) right in that web of skin between my finger and thumb on my left hand. A papercut has always been right up there with a hangnail as favorites for sarcastic excuses for getting out of work, as if they're these negligible little nothings. Well, I did do some work today, but I am here to tell you that papercuts and hangnails hurt. They really do. Whine.

Also, VBS starts tomorrow (that's Vacation Bible School, which lasts a week and takes all morning, for those of you who are either child-free or not from the Evangelical Christian planet). I did not sign up to help this year, but odds are I'll be helping anyway, since I have nothing else to do during the four-hour duration of the event. I'm certainly not driving home (15 miles) and back (15 miles again) when I don't have to and gas is still at European-style prices. The night before something like this I always dread it, and try to figure out ways to wiggle out of it, but the fact is that the kids are really looking forward to it. Well, C is. I think LT could probably do without VBS just fine and never miss it, but C is a little social animal who loves her fun and games. And once I'm actually there I'm always glad we went.

However. I have been a good girl this weekend and actually stuck to my diet, overall. I hate that word -- it's right up there with "blog" -- but it sounds even lamer to say something else, like "healthy eating plan" or what have you. So diet it is. For those of you who joined us late, I lost 30 pounds in the fall/winter of 2003/2004. Which is great, except that I wanted to lose 45 pounds, but I just sort of stopped at 30, way back over a year ago, last spring, and in the last few months I've actually gained five pounds back, and that is just purely unacceptable. So this past weekend has been that really fun time at the beginning of a new way of eating when you're basically starving all the time, especially in the afternoons and evenings, when I feel like I could eat a Mack truck if someone would deep-fry it and serve it with ranch sauce for dipping. If I hang in there for a week it'll get better, I know this, but augh. Oh, wait, that was a happy thing. Yay.

And I've been catching up on laundry. And the house is clean. I figure the least I can do for a man who leaves the house at 4:00 to go work two or three nineteen-hour days to feed our family when he thought he'd be at home relaxing (well, working. On projects. But... whatever. It's relaxing to HIM) is to have the house comfortable for him when he walks in. Now watch, tomorrow it'll get totally destroyed just in time for him to come in the door.

And I watched "The Phantom of the Opera" again tonight. My new favorite part this time was the Don Juan scene where the Phantom has just offed the male lead guy and taken his place on the stage and he's singing and Christine and Raoul and Madame Giry and Mssrs. Firmin and André have all just figured that out and the tension is just palpable and augh must NOT put it in again must NOT must go to BED.

Friday, May 27, 2005

not QUITE an exercise in futility

Tonight I didn't feel like just sitting around; I wanted to do something productive. (whoops, sorry, should have warned you so that you'd be sure to be sitting down before you read that. Are you OK?) So I cleaned out the car.

I have noticed, in my walks around town, that most people's cars have... what's it called, that place under all the JUNK... um, floors. That's it. You can look in their car windows and see floor mats, and seats, not just in a couple spots where the stuff's shoved out of the way, but all the way around. I'd comfort myself with the knowledge that these people must not have kids, but I happen to know that's not always the case. (still clinging to hope that maybe the cars were NEW...). Ours used to be much, much better than it has become lately; I think it's largely that the kids are old enough to take stuff INTO the car, but they aren't old enough to take it OUT yet.

That and I'm a total and complete slob, that's also part of it. Maybe.

Anyway. I started thinking I really REALLY needed to clean out the car yesterday, when I tried to find my little bottle of glasses-cleaning solution on the way to Awana, and I couldn't. Before I was sure that it was lost, though, I'd gathered up a full grocery bag of garbage just from around my feet in the passenger side and what I could reach of the back floorboard. (not GROSS garbage, just papers and receipts and junk mail and plastic grocery bags and that sort of non-maggoty, non-food-item, non-stinky stuff. But still.) Today we went to the valley to watch Star Wars and eat at Applebee's and spend our retirement (well, not really, but it felt like it) at Wal-Mart, and when we got home, I was going to sit on the porch swing and read and listen to the snick-snick-snick of the sprinkler on the newly-mown front lawn, but I just couldn't, knowing that That Mess was out there, WAITING. So what started out as emptying out the junk, putting away the non-junk, and washing the inside of the windows (the rear window still bore the ghostly remains of a fog-written "BUSH 2004", done by my politically astute son last fall, and of course I only noticed it when I was actually driving the car down the road and hence could not exactly just reach back and clean it off) turned into a full-out wash job. Which was really pretty stupid. Because guess where we're driving tomorrow. If you guessed "down miles of dry dusty dirt road to your parents'", you are right! Bingo! You win the prize! Oh well; at least the inside will be clean.

P.S. re: Star Wars: I really enjoyed the movie, better than Episodes I and II, and also better than the earliest three episodes, at least in that it has no Mark Hamill, who, I'm sorry, belongs in a ballet class somewhere, not in an adventure movie. And the way Luke changed from a whiny teenager to a condescending know-it-all in the space of a mere three movies did not impress me. Anyway. Episode III was very nicely done, and emotionally stirring, and all that. But you know what had me in choky tears and cold chills simultaneously? Was the preview for "The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe" that came before it. MY GOSH I CAN NOT WAIT.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

ahh, Mr. Darcy

Not in a "ooh, isn't Colin Firth handsome," kind of way, you understand. Just in a "what a totally fantastic and amazing dynamic character, how well-written, how subtle, and most of all, how TOTALLY-SIGH-WORTHILY ROMANTIC" kind of way. My new-but-already-dear friend Kristen was mentioning to me today (er, yesterday?) that she enjoys watching A&E's "Pride and Prejudice" when she's sick, and she's right, it's the perfect accompaniment to sniffles and fever and a cozy bed on the couch. I love reading (and watching; this is a rare excellent adaptation, even though there's the periodic use of a crow sound effect which reminds me startlingly of the cat-swinging scene in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail") the subtle ways in which Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth change their attitudes, and analyzing their reasons for doing so. I love Mr. Bennet's wry remarks. I love Caroline Bingley's expression every time she tries to get Mr. Darcy to say something nice about her, and he says it about Elizabeth instead. I love that when T is in the room while the movie's on he doesn't even pretend not to watch it.

I'm up late, coughing, watching/listening to P&P while reading online journals (Amy Loves Books just took up a good two and a half hours of my time, thank you Amy), using a roll of toilet paper in lieu of the box of tissues which always manages to disappear exactly when it's needed most, smelling of VapoRub and cough drops, surrounded by heaping baskets of clean laundry which I had intended to fold whilst watching the abovementioned P&P and by little fluffs of tissue. Just so you can have a little snapshot of my undeniably glamorous life.

And now I'm going to make a night of it and put in THE SECOND DVD. I won't be sleeping with this cough anyway; I may as well have the pleasure of seeing Pemberley.
--------

Thursday, February 03, 2005

"Mean Girls" and a meme

We just finished watching "Mean Girls". I've wanted to watch this for a long time. The reason I have given whenever I mentioned that in the past has been that I wanted to see how it treated homeschooling (which is, by the way, really pretty badly, but who's shocked about that? not me), but I will just come clean and admit it, right now, right here:

I wanted to watch it because it looked like a funny movie.

And it was. Even though the previews told us loud and clear, before we even got to the menu (yes we watch previews on purpose. I LIKE previews. I must not be the only one. Right?) that we were about fourteen and nineteen respective years outside the target demographic for the film, we laughed. A lot. I've heard this movie called the Heathers for this generation, and I can see where that comes from. (Query: I wonder if the fashions and attitudes in "Heathers" are as unfathomable to a modern 16-year-old WHO OH GOOD LORD WAS, WHAT, A NEWBORN WEARING BOOTIES AND A LITTLE PINK-FABRIC-COVERED ELASTIC BAND AROUND HER HEAD WITH A BOW ON IT WHEN HEATHERS WAS MADE as the fashions in "Mean Girls" were to me. I mean, come on. There are about five million more flattering styles for girls' jeans than low-rise boot-cuts. But I guess "flattering" isn't necessarily what we're aiming for nowadays.)

Also, the whole bit about friend C rejoicing a little when friend A gets mad at friend B because that means that friend C can get closer to friend A -- eerily, creepily familiar. And I couldn't figure out why until I remembered the dynamics of this one trio of girls, of which I was one, where there was a friend A, and then friend B and C (I and another girl) were constantly jockeying for the position Right Next to friend A. Sometimes not very nicely.

Thank you, God, that I will never ever have to go to junior high or high school again. Oh, God, thank you.



And then I stole this from KiwiRia:


List five fictional people -- from television, movies, books, whatever -- that you had a crush on as a child (or early teens). Then post this on your [journal] so other people can know what a dork you've always been.


1. The most memorable was Justin from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Just finished rereading this book and I can still see why. ;-)
2. Stan Crandall from Fifteen by Beverly Cleary. The button-down shirts! The politeness! The dip in his hair!
3. Like KiwiRia, I must confess to having had a thing -- just a LITTLE thing -- for Uncle Jesse from Full House.
4. Jim Craig in "The Man From Snowy River".
5. Frank Hardy in the Hardy Boys series.

Thursday, June 24, 2004

it's just not the same anymore.

Watching Dirty Dancing as a mother is so very different from watching it as a 13-year-old.

Then: Ooh, that dance move is so sexy. I am going to imagine Patrick Swayze doing that with ME.
Now: Anyone even thinks about violating my wide-eyed innocent daughter's "dance space" in that manner and he'll be emasculated. By my fingernails.

Then: What a loser that Neil guy is. Loser loser loser.
Now: What a loser that Neil guy is. Loser loser loser.

Then: Ooh, that dance move is also very sexy. I am going to try to arch my back over like that. Hmm, not quite.
Now: Ouch.

Then: I will practice for months until I figure out how to shake my maracas like Cynthia Rhodes does in that gazebo scene.
Now: Ouch again.

It has been -- holy cow -- more than fifteen years since I watched this movie so many times that I wore out my pirated Beta videocassette of it. And yet, tonight I still knew exactly what everyone was going to say next. Why the heck couldn't, say, World History stick with me like that? Maybe if World History had starred Patrick Swayze (I don't think he frowns enough. Do you?) and involved a strangely satisfying combination of early 60's and mid-80's music, it would have worked better. I wonder if the California State Department of Education has a suggestion hotline for their curriculum standards division...

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