I highly, highly recommend Lynda Obst’s piece for The Atlantic about how the Golden Globes represent the future of our entertainment:

Increasingly, the TV and movie industries are blurring together. Their executives are commutative: the head of Disney Channel just took over Walt Disney studios, where many studio heads have been grown; Grey Gardens, which won best TV movie, stars movie veterans Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore; Laura Linney is starring in a new cable TV series – a venue where women movie stars over 40 now go to thrive; moviepeople are making TV; and TV stars, like Blake Lively of CW’s Gossip Girl, are making movies. Lively, in fact, is the movie business’s newest “it” girl, and a client of CAA party host Josh Lieberman. In some weird way, the Globes anticipated this mish-mash.
On a meta level—as its first ever host, the Globes chose a foreign import who starred in a British TV series that was remade here (becoming a TV hit with a movie star who became a TV star), who then started making American movies before he ever made a British one… (Got all that?) Very hybrid.

 And if you look at the bottom of the piece, her bio indicates Obst is going to be writing and blogging for The Atlantic‘s new culture channel.  This is great news.  She’s funny, and smart. 

But I’m sure it’s fairly abundantly clear from the title of this post that I didn’t.  It may be nostalgia from enjoying the book much more than I expected, and as a result, feeling more protective of the property than I intended.  But I think Peter Jackson’s movie adaptation has a couple of significant flaws.

First, while the movie strips down the book quite a bit, both in terms of plot and characterization, it still manages to feel slow.  As my friend and regular movie-going buddy Alex Remington pointed out, after the murder is committed, a large part of the movie happens in slow-motion and repeated takes.  Some of the images we see over and over again are lovely, but they’re limpid, the movie takes a lot of time.  It’s too bad, because the opening section of the movie has tremendous momentum, particularly in two scenes, one where the main character races across her back yard to take clandestine pictures of a neighbor girl, another in which she commandeers her parents’ cherry-red Mustang to driver her brother, who has swallowed a twig and has an obstructed airway, to the hospital.  There’s a later scene in which her sister runs away from a man who wants to kill her that has tremendous energy as well.  Jackson hasn’t lost his ability to shoot great horror or exhilirating action, he just chooses not to for most of the movie, and it’s frustrating.

Second, a lot of the effects manage to look precious, rather than awe-inspiring.  Again, I don’t doubt Jackson’s ability to awe, but at least the way I interpreted Alice Sebold’s vision of heaven was a little more…rigorous than the candy-coated paradise Jackson occasionally conjures up for Susie to spend her afterlife in. And Jackson shifts some of the events in the novel around in a way that I think actually drains the dramatic tension from them.  I won’t say more in the name of spoilers, but Sebold manages to have a larger scope than Jackson does, and also tell a story more economically than he does at least in this outing.

That’s not to say there aren’t some things in the movie that are worth watching.  Susan Sarandon’s turn as the boozy grandmother who holds Susie’s family together after her death is marvelous.  Full of life and a little usefully placed bile, she careens into the haunted house where Susie’s family is marooned, drinking, overfilling the washing machine and dancing in the bubbles, lighting things in frying pans on fire, and believing Buckley, Susie’s younger brother, when he insists she’s still present in some way.  There’s a gorgeous shot of her shaking back her hair and lighting a cigarette through hospital glass that made me extremely happy.  Saoirse Ronan is lovely, if saddled with some narration that’s tough to swallow, much less say.  And Rose McIver, who plays Susie’s younger sister Lindsey, is marvelous, alternately distracted, grieving, furious, terrified, and passionate.  I hope she gets more work out of this, because she richly deserves it.

In the end, I wonder if The Lovely Bones ever could have been a great movie.  It’s one that people feel extremely passionate about; Jackson apparently bought the film rights to the novel with his own money rather than getting financing for it, he felt so strongly about.  I know I had an extremely specific vision of many elements of the book in my head, and wept over it as I haven’t cried over a book in a long time.  The movie made me cry too (but then, I’m an enormous sap), but I wasn’t captivated by it in the same way I loved the novel.  A book about a personal vision of heaven may not bet translatable for the masses.

Given my Zodiac obsession, and my general fondness for chasing down books and movies referenced in books and movies that I love, it’s a little embarrassing that I haven’t seen Dirty Harry yet.  I watched it over the weekend on my Netflix binge.  Neither the embrace of vigilantism, nor the “Take that, hippie!” politics of the movie age particularly well.  But it’s got a number of a great shots: the opening sequence with the murder in the swimming pool, Clint Eastwood standing on top of a train trestle in a sharp suit and dark sunglasses, looking like the incarnation of vengeance.  It’s too bad he never played the Devil.  He’d have been marvelous in it.


Really, I think Eastwood is the only reason to watch the movie, which seems to function as an uncomfortable bridge between an earlier era of action flicks and a later one.  Watching him take a bite of a hot dog, shoot up a crew of bank robbers, and then finish chewing is a marvelous couple of moments of acting.  As is him shucking off his pants to save $30 after getting shot.  The guy just knew his range and lived in it better than almost anyone else I know.  Someone like Meryl Streep can do more, for sure, but not always as deeply or intensely.  And I couldn’t watch Eastwood all the time, but there’s something invigorating about that kind of intensity, like good coffee or really cold air.

I’ve been meaning to say how much I like this post by PostBourgie’s slb about how folks of color are popping up more on television of late, in part because it made me think about what my ideal vision of representative television would be.  For example, one of the reasons I like Men of a Certain age is because Andre Braugher isn’t the other two main characters’ Black Friend.  He’s just their friend.  It’s one of the things that sounds appealing about Undercovers, which slb highlights: it’s going to be a spy drama where the spies happen to be black, but it’s not a Black Spy Comedy.  I think that’s a fine line to walk.  I like that, among the families represented on Modern Family is not just a gay couple, but a multi-ethnic one.  At the same time, I think it’s really problematic that Gloria’s Colombianness frequently is played as a joke, rather than as something that enriches her husband’s life (her hotness apparently does well enough for that), although the Christmas episode, where the family adopted some Colombia tranditions, was a step in the right direction.

It’s not that I want television to be colorblind.  In fact, I think a lot of shows would be better if they weaved elements of characters’ cultures, be they African, African-American, Asian, Caribbean, Jewish, Zoroastiran, whatever into their shows.  Our practices, our assumptions, our slang, help define who we are, even if they aren’t the only framework that we’re defined by.  Throwing a Simchat Torah reference into a Glee episode, and not explaining it, was a great example.  Characters shouldn’t have to be ambassadors or translators for whatever race or cultural tradition they represent on screen.  In the real world, we all have to explain ourselves and our traditions sometimes, and we do that, and move on, and I don’t see why this can’t happen more often on television.  Our national conversation is a lot richer and more diverse than television frequently gives us credit for, and our television would be improved if it spoke in the same vernacular, and gave the same diversity of people the right to speak it.

I can’t imagine it would surprise any remotely regular readers of this blog to learn that among the genres that I love, the reinterpreted fairy tale is high up there.  It may be that I was a young teenager when Ever After and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet came out, or that I was lucky enough to grow up with Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest novels.  But the riff on the fairy story, the girl who goes into the woods, or the big city, and comes out transformed, is one of my favorite types of books to read or movies to watch. It’s for that reason that Penelope, the first movie out of Reese Witherspoon’s production company, starring Christina Ricci as a girl born with a pig’s nose who is secluded by her parents who hope to marry her off to break the curse that gave her the nose in the first place, has long been on my list of things to catch up on that I missed*.

It’s certainly not a great movie.  There are too many Big Speeches and Fortuitous Metaphors.  The first part of the movie is desperately twee, though it gets points back for being a fairy tale.  Reese Witherspoon shows up as a somewhat unfortunate Deus Ex Machina with funky hair in a role that feels more like an attempt to add a little edge to her career than to play any actual logical role in the movie.  The Big Woods, in this case, the Big City, is a little too quick to warm up to Penelope; there aren’t enough real obstacles in her path.  The paparazzi metaphor is a little dopey and a little obvious.  As is the magical ending.

That said, there’s a lot that’s extremely charming about it.  Christina Ricci’s big eyes are perfect for expressing the wonder of someone who’s seeing a fountain, or a street vendor for the first time.  The rest of the cast is chock full of fine British actors including James McAvoy towards the end of his wan and dissolute period; Michael Feast, so cutting and perceptive as Andrew Wilson, the Cabinet flack in State of Play; Russell Brand in one of those small roles he had before he got pyrotechnically famous over here in the States; and Nick Frost showing up in a twist part.  Then, of course, there’s Peter Dinklage.

But honestly, what I liked best about the movie is that even though it’s a fairy tale, the movie treats the lovers it portrays like actual adults when it counts.  One of the ways McAvoy’s character points out Ricci’s isolation to her is to extoll the virtues of draft beer, which she’s never had.  When she gets out in the world, it’s one of the first things she goes after, but drinking beer is just something she does, it’s not used as a signifier that she’s some kind of frattish good-time girl.  They flirt over books, and chess, and the most hilarious rendition of “You Are My Sunshine” outside of the several that appear Primary Colors.  They are real people getting to know each other, even though they live in a fairy tale.

*Since I got my new Blu-Ray player, I’ve been streaming things on Netflix like crazy in an effort to make up for some huge gaps in my movie- and television-watching history.  If you have recommendations for classics I might not have seen that are Netflix-streamable, please let me know in comments or by email.

Neil Patrick Harris to appear as a guest on Glee in an episode directed by Joss Whedon.  I have died and gone to heaven.