Cinema Hype

Whoever told us that ignorance is bliss was on to something.

I’ve read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince twice, but I suffer from what I suspect is a fairly common (made-up-on-the-spot) affliction: Rowling’s Amnesia, where I completely forget the details of Harry Potter’s life while still remaining totally conversant with his universe. Really: Ask me anything. Floo powder? Time-turners? Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavor Beans? I’ve got your back. On the other hand, what exactly happened to Dumbledore’s wand? Fuzzy. What was the deal, exactly, with Cornelius Fudge in Goblet of Fire? Couldn’t tell you. What’s going on with Dobby right now? Not a clue.

When I saw Half Blood Prince, I thanked my lucky stars for impending senility.

I loved it. Director David Yates is working hard at refining the series’s visual style, and, free of the bitterness that comes with actually remembering the events of the novel, I was free to enjoy the show. Yates is a fantastic visual storyteller–his economy with words and his generousness with the camera are perfect for Rowling’s expansive sense of place (known in some circles as overdescription), and even the well-placed CGI adds lushness and decisiveness to the picture. I loved the horror-show feel of the cave scene and the (apparently non-canon, not that I would remember this) burning of the Burrow; I loved the obsession with Scottish scenery; I loved Half Blood Prince as the Sweet Valley High of the Potter series. I remember Harry and Ginny being different in the book, but I didn’t mind the change. I know there were other detours away from the novel, but I didn’t notice them much—I was too wrapped up in what Yates was doing to obsess over what he wasn’t doing, plot-wise. If nothing else, we know he’s also directing both installments of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—yes, it’s split into two films—and can hope that the continuity of the series remains intact.

So maybe if I didn’t have a brain like a sieve, I’d be shaking my fist right now, and writing angry compare-and-contrast papers, just like my seventh-grade English teacher taught me. Instead, I’m enjoying the starry-eyed thrill that comes with not really remembering the details, and seeing it as if for the very first time.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Harry Potter, Half Blood Prince, HBP, David Yates, movie reviews, Harry Potter reviews

Well, I had to win sometime, right? You readers have been on a roll lately, but I’ve been looking for the lines—the boundaries of “too hard” and “too easy”—and it looks like I found one. Check!

Nobody guessed that this quotation:

“‘What do you think, man? You think it makes me look tough?’
‘I think it makes you look different.’
‘What’d you mean, “different”?’
‘Well, you got a hole in your mouth.’”

…was from The Outsiders, the 1983 brat-pack take on S.E. Hinton’s classic 1967 gang novel. Who has two thumbs and doesn’t have to write a cheer this week? This girl!

So let’s move on, shall we?

The Rules

I will post a quotation from a movie. The first person to comment with the character, actor, and film that contains this quotation gets a special eyelash batting and a tailor-made Cinema Hype cheer, which might actually rhyme, even if it doesn’t make any sense.

The Deadline

If somebody guesses correctly, the prize cheer goes up as soon as possible. If nobody gets it right, I’m off the hook cheer-wise, and the next quotation is posted on Friday (…or not, like this week, but Friday is the norm) (Actually, this is proving to be the case less and less often. We’ll say I’ll shoot for sometime around the weekend. Friday, Sunday, Monday…something around there.)

The Quotation

“‘I crashed into electrical towers, and my star charts were erased. I need the ones in your head to complete my mission.’
‘So you need ME and my INFERIOR brain to fly that thing?’
‘Correction, I need the SUPERIOR information in your INFERIOR brain to fly this… thing.’”

Think you know the answer? Leave it in the comments.

Quotation Sensation, movie quote game, movie quotes, The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton, brat pack

The first trailers for the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movie are out, and…hmmm. Either Ritchie and Co. don’t get it, or the trailer guys want us to think they don’t.

It’s not that I have a problem with action movies, or with action comedies, or with literary characters being nudged in the action-ish direction*. Heaven knows I love a good horse-and-buggy chase as much as the next girl, and even Holmes’s boxing badassery comes straight out of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Anything Holmes should be a bit of a nail-biter—the man eventually gets pushed off a waterfall and then mysteriously re-animates, for goodness’ sake!

But it just seems like what we see here misses the point, a bit. Not that Robert Downey, Jr. can’t pull off thrilling heroics—see: Iron Man, etc.—but his particular skill set lines up with the role of Holmes in so many other brilliant ways that running and jumping out of (or into?) harm’s way doesn’t seem like the best use of his time. Turn up the sardonic dialogue! Let us see the deep-seated pain lingering behind the constant stream of sarcasm! Don’t they know him at ALL?

I think—I hope—that Ritchie and the writers know all of this. The dialogue we do hear is appropriately snarky; some of the details of the trailer (boxing, opium use, Watson) are straight-up Doyle canon. And so I’m tentatively calling this trailer a marketing ploy, an attempt to convince us that “you’ve never seen a Holmes like this before!” (when, in fact, we’ve all seen basically all possible Holmeses before in one pop culture context or another, but whatever). Ritchie’s rendition may have more thrills and spills than your average Victorian detective story—he does have a thing for a certain kind of lo-fi action—but I tentatively expect enough content sandwiched in to make it not just exciting, but good. Or maybe I’m just naive. Hope springs eternal, right? And if not, dude, I totally know Madonna and will sic her on you. Don’t think I won’t.

*Okay, I might have a problem with literary characters being nudged in the action-ish direction. It depends on the literary character and the degree to which light sabres are involved. What can I say? I’m a purist.

Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes trailer, Sherlock Holmes Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Watson, Guy Ritchie

So, hey! Welcome to summer! Bang bang! Kiss kiss! (Or is that backwards?) Have you overloaded on shallow eye-candy fun yet (…before Memorial Day, but hey, it’s possible)? Need a little post-Apocalyptic memento mori for this fine May morning? Well, here: the first trailer for The Road is out.

I’m just going to come out and state the obvious: somebody’s stacking the Oscar deck here. Let’s see:

The novel of The Road (about a father and son [and possibly mother?] trying to survive after the wiping out of most of the human race) won the Pulitzer Prize, and the last Cormac McCarthy adaptation worked out pretty well. Viggo Mortensen, while not widely known for his clear-headed and easygoing nature, seems to make the method thing work for him (prediction: it will soon come out that he “borrowed” a small child and they lived together in his car for six months, eschewing showers, technology, and gun-control laws, all in the name of research), and his nomination for the Russian mob film Eastern Promises didn’t turn into an actual statuette. Charlize Theron’s already won Best Actress, for Monster, and may get the chance to double up, this time with her own face. The only unknown quantities here are screenwriter Joe Penhall and director John Hillcoat, both Australians relatively unknown in the States.

Of course, these things don’t always work out as planned—if there were an actual equation for popular success and/or Oscar domination, well, a whole lot of colossally bad movies would just be twinkles in various writers’ eyes. Remember Rendition? The Fountain? And those aren’t even that new. Clearly, good source material + good actors + Oscar track record does not = actual quality. And is it me, or is the post-Apocalyptic genre a little extra-susceptible to this sort of situation? Maybe the director’s vision just doesn’t jibe for us; maybe we just can’t or don’t want to see our neighborhoods reduced to piles of smoking rubble (though that seems unlikely, given the number of post-Apocalyptic movies that actually get made). Maybe the starkness of the setting just makes any residual silliness that much more evident. It’s hard to say.

Until further notice, though, I’m going to hang a little awards-show hope on this one. Bring on the rubble!

The Road, TheRoad, Road, Cormac McCarthy, Viggo Mortensen, The Road trailer, trailer, Charlize Theron, post-apocalyptic, post-apocalypse, science fiction, Pulitzer Prize

I can’t believe we haven’t talked yet about the trailer for Julie and Julia yet. It’s been out for, what, two weeks? Three weeks? Where have I been? The land of negligence, apparently. Here’s the trailer:

I really, really want to like this movie. I like the book, possibly more than it really deserves. I like the trailer, though I balk a bit at the cutesification of it, what with the pop music and the cutie husband and all (the husband in the book is what you’d probably call a mensch, but maybe not a hottie; menschhood is apparently not good enough for your everyday casting director). And I know how these things go: I’m going to chalk all of this up to the whims of the marketing department and not to writer/director Nora Ephron. Ephron’s had her share of stinkers in the past few years (Hanging Up, Bewitched), but somehow I trust her here. I have to believe that she’s working off of passion, and that we’ll see a little bit of that onscreen. (We’d better.)

I was, at one time, ambivalent about the casting of Amy Adams as Julie Powell; this trailer assuages some of my fears. To some extent, Adams will always be adorable, but here she’s not written as adorable, which is key—Powell herself is decidedly un-cutesy. The scene on the kitchen floor (”There’s STUFF ALL OVER THE FLOOR!”) indicates that all may indeed be well here; since Powell spends much of the book having freakouts of various scales and proportions, the collapsing and the moaning are pretty important. Also, the non-Disney-princess haircut doesn’t hurt.

And, to be honest, I hadn’t thought much about Meryl Streep as Julia Child; Julia is by far the lesser presence in the book (as far as direct “screentime” goes), and anyway, she’s Meryl Streep. What, you think she can’t pull of Julia Child? But now that I see her, it’s all lovely. She’s got the voice and the wonderful blowsiness of Child, but it’s more than that. From what we see here, I think she’s got a bit of Julia’s soul. I can appreciate that.

So…carry on, Julie and Julia. I’m ready when you are.

Julie and Julia, Julie/Julia, Julie Powell, Meryl Streep, Julia Child, trailers, Nora Ephron

O Readers, what a week it’s been. We started this round of Quotation Sensation with this quote:

“‘How you can sit there eating muffins when we’re in this terrible trouble, I can’t make out! It seems to me to be perfectly heartless.’
‘I can hardly eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs.’”

Being of a literary bent, Gentle Reader Heather had this one in a heartbeat: The Importance of Being Earnest, “of course!” Well done, Heather!

Somehow a garden-variety Bring It On-style cheer didn’t seem right here, so you get, instead, a vaguely Wilde-ian poem. You know, as you do.

O Heather! Who did know the quote by heart,
And anguished, languished not in time to wait
Instead fulfilled her literary fate
And likely knows the work not in some part,
But reads and loves it wholly for its art!
Wilde and Witherspoon may well coexist
But Firthy goodness tops the lov-ed list;
He shows us that he’s handsome, yes, and smart.
Perhaps you hold to Worthing by Redgrave;
We saw him that way back in fifty-two
With others now lost to time and faded fame,
Though likely at the time quite prone to rave.
And no two films are ever quite the same,
But Wilde’s comedic timing still proves true.

Thanks for playing, everybody! A new quote goes up Friday.

Quotation Sensation, movie quote game, movie quotes, Colin Firth, Reese Witherspoon, Michael Redgrave, The Importance of Being Earnest

The first trailer for Spike Jonze’s live-action adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are has my inner film geek and my inner bookworm eyeing each other warily. Will it be any good? Will it steal the magic of the book for millions of innocent/troublemaking children? I don’t know. But after seeing the trailer, I’m going with “growing optimism.”

The trailer strikes me as a little long—maybe lacking a certain edge?—but with Jonze and his uncompromising weirdness at the helm, I think we can hope for some of the glorious wildness of the book, unsullied by too much studio-born contextualizing/nice-ifying (Max in school makes me nervous). And hey, I have a hard time saying no to the Arcade Fire, okay?

Or maybe I just want an adult-sized wolf suit, with crown.

Where the Wild Things Are, Where the Wild Things Are trailer, Spike Jonze, kids’ movies, family movies, adaptations, trailers

Oh, Warner Brothers, you do care, after all. Tell me you care!

I was not surprised when the powers at WB delayed the release of The Time Traveler’s Wife the first time—it was, after all, on approximately the same track as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and heaven knows nobody needs dueling movies for the chronologically challenged. Hey, I read, and I can tell you that that kind of thing only ever ends in tears. Right?

But, you know, Benjamin Button has come and gone, and I can’t possibly be the only one tapping my fingers for this: The Time Traveler’s Wife is based on a tremendously popular novel (last week, author Audrey Niffenegger received a $5 million advance for her [unrelated] second book). The novel lends itself beautifully to filming. It’s got a great, if not ultra-A-list, cast. Everybody in the world should be clamoring for this movie. And, from WB…silence.

But: hark! Is that a release date we hear?

It is! The Time Traveler’s Wife is now slated for an August 14, 2009 release. It’s not a bad spot: this squeezes it in at the end of the summer movies, after the fog of shoot-em-ups (ahem, Transformers 2) but before the fall theatrical doldrums. Audiences should just be getting ready to settle in with something good and romantic. On the other hand, if a certain hedging of bets wasn’t apparent from the delay, it may be now: the adaptation of a novel as popular as this one could easily have earned, if not a summer release, a Christmas/pre-Oscar date. Does the non-blockbuster, non-awards-season release date indicate a lack of confidence? I’m hoping not. But I’m not crossing my fingers, either.

Via Cinematical.

The Time Traveler’s Wife, Time Traveler’s Wife, Time Traveler’s Wife movie

Confessions of a Shopaholic, which comes out today, is a movie that’s likely to get a lot of crap from a lot of people. It’s adapted from a novel, for one thing. It’s adapted from a chick-lit novel, for another. It’s about publishing and fashion in New York, but it doesn’t have Meryl Streep. It stars Isla Fisher, who looks uncannily like Amy Adams, but isn’t. It’s about shopping, and about how much is too much, and maybe it could go a little farther in the credit-education department. All of these things are true, but let’s be clear: all of those points also add up to the stingiest possible view of a sweet, generous, funny film.

Shopaholic is, above all, a genre movie—it’s a chick-lit adaptation, a New-York-for-single-girls movie. This is an important point, and one that’s sometimes (unfairly, in this blog’s opinion) cast aside when it comes to chick flicks: people who wouldn’t expect a western to give good advice about gun violence, for example, get all prickly when a chick flick ends with shopping and cute boys. Like any other family of films, there are certain requirements here, and in the terms of those requirements, Shopaholic is very good—like The Devil Wears Prada, only funnier and more likable.

Keeping Shopaholic afloat with impressive energy is Fisher, who’s likely to become incredibly famous if she can just survive all of the inevitable Adams comparisons (incidentally, she has our sympathy: if there’s anybody to compete with in Hollywood these days, Adams probably isn’t a great choice). She’s adorable, which is key here; even more importantly, she goes all out in her portrayal of the sunny, vivacious, quick-thinking Rebecca Bloomwood. Not everybody can identify with Rebecca’s overwhelming passion for retail, or with her four- and five-figure credit-card debt, but most of us can get on board with her desperation and her willingness to wing it. And that’s where Shopaholic wins out over some of its competitors (ahem, Prada): even when she’s behaving badly, or wading through the occasional corny moment (and they do exist), we root for her. We may want her to wise up and figure some things out, but she’s a winning heroine played by a winning actor, and that counts 100% in the chick-lit adaptation game. Fisher is supported ably by Hugh Dancy, Love Interest—whose extreme British cuteness renders his performance moot; we love him no matter what—and Krysten Ritter, Best Friend. And then there’s the one area where Shopaholic demands to be compared with Prada, and also where it inevitably fails: the fashion matriarch. Somebody should have known better than to include a Miranda Priestley character without Streep around; instead we get Kristin Scott Thomas as Alette, and she does what she can, but the comparison is automatic and doesn’t end in her favor.

If you’re looking for the harsh realities of the capitalist system, Shopaholic may not be the film for you (or maybe it is—credit card debt, and all). If you’re looking for extreme seriousness, you’ve got one more week to check out those Oscar nominees. If you just don’t understand why the cute single girl always gets the cute single guy…well, that’s another issue entirely. But if you’ve ever enjoyed a little retail therapy, or if you’ve ever had a best friend or been a best friend, or if you’ve ever gone a little overboard and had to pull back, you and Shopaholic will probably get along just fine.

Confessions of a Shopaholic, Shopaholic, Isla Fisher, Kristin Scott Thomas, Hugh Dancy, Krysten Ritter, chick flicks, shopping movies, The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep

We’re taking a break from our road-crunching, gas-guzzling CH America! tour—nobody knows more than I the value of a rest day than I, let me tell you, and thank you to Chicago for all the times we had—to talk about an important issue facing our nation. It’s a legal juggernaut, something that potentially affects every person in this country in a profound and fundamental way. It’s difficult, but we’re going to have to discuss it some day. I’m talking about John Grisham.

That guy? Is he still…doing whatever it was he did? (Personally, I’ve moved on to Kevin.)

Apparently so. Shia LaBoeuf, he of the remarkably smooth post-child-actor transition, has signed on for The Associate, which—get this—hasn’t even come out in print yet. The novel is due out in January, but Paramount is so sure it’ll be a hit (??) that the movie’s all greenlit. Maybe if they’re really slick, they can release it before the book! It’s a whole new world of marketing!

The thing is, I can never rag on LaBoeuf in quite the way I mean to. What am I going to say? “Kids these days—so good-looking and talented! In my day, they all stank up the screen. Get your natural abilities off my lawn!”? I may have skipped a good number of his movies lately (Disturbia, Eagle Eye), but that doesn’t mean I don’t think the kid’s worth the price of admission. He even charmed me into submission Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Alien vs. Predator, where his role was, apparently, originally called “Despisable Guy #3.” What can I say? He’s got the gift.

And it’s not like doing Grisham movies is exactly a career-killer. Or should we ask Matthew, Tom, Julia, Denzel, and Matt?

Yeah. That’s what I thought. It’s a done deal.

Found via Cinematical

Shia LaBoeuf, John Grisham, The Associate, Paramount Pictures, thrillers, Kevin Grisham, The Rural Juror

Now here’s a question for the ages: Would you rather sit through an incredibly long movie, or pay to see the same incredibly long movie in two sittings? Movie studios seem to be discovering the benefit of the latter—approximately the same financial output for everything except marketing, and double the ticket sales—and it seems we may be seeing more two-part films soon. In an interview with the MTV Movies Blog, director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) says that the Hobbit film will be split into two halves and released separately. Note the specificity of his language there: He doesn’t say The Hobbit will be two movies. He says it’ll be one movie split in half.

It’s not the only one. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has also been proclaimed too long, too detailed, and too important to viewers (not to mention studio execs) to be confined to one sitting, and will be released in two segments six months apart.

The split-film option is a risky one. One one hand, viewers (and probably filmmakers) love the little things: the details and the small moments of a favorite story committed to film. A filmmaker with twice as much time on his or her hands is, in theory, able to go twice as deep. Multiple-installment films are good for the fans, and may attract new fans along the way, what with their tendency to suck people in.

On the other hand, split movies drive some people crazy. Case in point: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End, which fit together as one very long and very convoluted narrative, but which pissed a lot of people off by throwing off their sense of “ending.” Maybe a known quantity—a movie where everybody knows what’s coming and at what point in the story the break occurs—lends itself better to splitting up, just because the audience doesn’t feel so abandoned. Or maybe it’s just drawing a familiar story out too long for the sake of making twice the profit.

Readers, what do you think? Two-in-one, or just…two?

The Hobbit, Guillermo del Toro, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, two-part movies, prequels, sequels

I have already made fun of the title, and rightly so, but I refuse to mock the trailer for the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace:

What I really, really love (as, obviously, do the trailer editors) is that long shot of Daniel Craig appearing over the horizon: he’s walking, he’s walking, he’s looking good in that suit, and oh wow that’s a big gun, just as (Dame) Judi Dench starts talking about friends, enemies, and revenge. I love a pretty trailer, and if that’s not pretty (in a bloodlusty, masculine way), I don’t know what is.

I think what intrigues me the most about Quantum of Solace thus far (I mean, besides Craig in that suit) is that it’s an immediate continuation of Casino Royale, but it’s entirely original—a departure from the original Ian Fleming canon emerging from the very roots of that canon. (As a side note, this reminds me of people who write companion novels to Pride and Prejudice, or Gone With the Wind; what moxy, to add on to Fleming!) The continuation of the Vesper Lynd story gives us a couple of interesting insights into the possible future of the Bond series, or at least the ways in which the present installments are falling in line with current movie trends. For example, continuity is in: this Bond remembers what happened in the last movie, and reacts accordingly. Audiences are increasingly keen to hear the whole, coherent story, and that’s what writer Paul Haggis is apparently trying to provide, even making a whole movie out of the fallout from the first installment. When was the last time cause and effect took on such starring roles in the overall Bond franchise?

On a similar note, we have a Bond girl—or at least her memory—sticking around for awhile. Vesper, the original Bond Girl, may be dead, but I think we’re supposed to believe poor young James really loved her. Somehow this translates to him licking some other chick’s back (?!), but the novelty of non-disposable women is nice while it lasts.

And finally, are we supposed to infer that Bond is going to lose this particular venture? Apparently there’s some kind of terrorist plot to feed our hunger for thrilling heroics, but the trailer’s emphasis is on Bond as a rogue agent, eluding MI-6—and it’s not like we don’t know what happens there. James Bond may be the world’s best spy, but is it possible that M is the world’s best spy-wrangler?

Where all of this fits into the timeline of the rest of the Bond movies isn’t clear, but for now, it doesn’t matter: just bring on the Solace.

Everything I know, I learned from Gone With the Wind:

- The Sound of Music TOTALLY STOLE the whole making-clothes-from-curtains motif! It was apparently Scarlett O’Hara, and not Maria (soon-to-be) von Trapp, who pioneered roaming around [Atlanta] in nothing but some old drapes…only to have it stolen in wonderful fashion (ha, pun semi-intended) by Carol Burnett:

- If you can’t have what you want, marry somebody you don’t love. They’ll die a conveniently rapid death, leaving you to repeat the process until you decide you don’t want what you wanted anymore. Works every time!

- Horseback riding—and jumping in particular—is baaaaad.

- Radishes are disgusting.

- Clark Gable must have had the biggest (male) butt in old Hollywood. (Not actually new news—Project 501 has already covered It Happened One Night and Mutiny on the Bounty (click for reviews!), after all—but the way he wears his pants up to his armpits is not helping. Whether the pants are a cause or an effect of the size of his rear end is unknown.)

- When you find yourself in trouble, consult your local Hooker with a Heart of Gold. What she lacks in stature in the (above-board) community, she makes up for in practical advice and financial know-how.

- A wonderfully flawed character can carry a four-hour movie, no sweat.

- A pair of wonderfully flawed characters can constitute one of the greatest love stories of their century, regardless of how badly they need professional help.

In summary: Delightful in its willingness to go big or go home. Silly, dated, and not super-sensitive to the needs of anybody not white and male, but still awesome enough to be compelling 70 years after its release.

Next: Rebecca (1940), the only Hitchcock to win Best Picture.

For the origins of Project 501, click here; for other Project 501 Best Picture reviews, click here.

Project 501, Academy Awards, Best Picture winners, Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, Clark Gable

Once, years ago, I heard a critic (now lost to time and memory) questioning the wisdom of casting Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath. Paltrow, he said, wasn’t exactly a bad choice, but she wasn’t the best choice, either. There was something about rage, about finding an actor who could embody the spark of angry madness that drove Plath to her tragic ending. And this I remember: this critic said there was simply one actor in all of Hollywood who could make a convincing Sylvia Plath, and that actor was Julia Stiles.

Well, fast-forward five years, and this guy’s got his wish, kind of. Stiles’s next project is an adaptation of Plath’s semi-to-mostly-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, about a Smith College student who undergoes a mental breakdown while interning at a Manhattan fashion magazine. Despite her rather bland presence in the Bourne Whatever movies, Stiles is a pretty good choice–she’s smart and she’s a reasonably good actor, and odds are she’s actually read The Bell Jar at some point, or at least heard of it. Thumbs up from CHHQ.

It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on with the movie itself—IMDB lists a 2008 release date, but there’s no other cast listed, and I’m fairly certain Esther Greenwood isn’t the only character we’re going to meet (or, at least, I hope not). And, not to be a Debbie Downer, or anything, but writer Tristine Skyler’s filmography frankly doesn’t inspire much confidence. But hey, everybody’s gotta have a breaking-in story, right? It’s not like I’ve written any published episodes of Law and Order: Trial by Jury. So maybe I should just shut my stupid mouth now. What I’m trying to say is: dark-horse writer, no cast except for Stiles…but let’s keep up hope, shall we?

Or am I overstepping my bounds? Does hoping go against the Plath way? We can at least look on with expectation, or something. Prove us wrong, Bell Jar. We dare you.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Julia Stiles, Gwyneth Paltrow, Esther Greenwood, Tristine Skyler

Remember 2005, when Amber Tamblyn was talking to God, America Ferrara was somehow not famous, Blake Lively was Gossip-free, and Alexis Bledel got the “…and Alexis Bledel” treatment? How these girls have grown. Suddenly, Tamblyn’s flirting with Lifetime Movie territory (but we love her and her politics anyway), Ferrara gets awards practically for waking up in the morning, Lively’s super-hot, and, well, Bledel still gets the final-name perk. The second Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movie seems to take all of this into account—these girls are actors now, apparently, and this go-round treats them like actual adults with actual skills, and (surprise!) it’s a better movie for it.

The series has grown up with the actors, and it’s just as well. This second movie is more even-tempered than the first, with less intense highs (nothing to match Ferrara’s pitch-perfect phone freak-out from the first one) but, more importantly, a corresponding drop in the number of cringey moments. Elizabeth Chandler’s script picks and chooses storylines from each of the last three novels and provides each girl with a reasonably thoughtful (though meandering) arc—it’s like a best-of reel for girly coming-of-age stories, but in a way that doesn’t feel preachy or even all that predictable. Onscreen, everybody has something to do, and nobody is obviously overburdened—Lively, in particular, gets the award for Most Improved, and Ferrara works her usual magic in giving definition to an overly subtle arc. Bledel gets to play shy—a lock for her, after seven seasons as Rory Gilmore, occasional Queen of the Awkward—and Tamblyn is delightfully sardonic, which is just as she should be (plus, she pulls off some fairly risky costumes, including a Rosalind Russell wig). It’s all good fun and, if we’re being all girlfriendly-honest, it’s the kind of movie you might enjoy with some girlfriends without drinking something mildly alcoholic beforehand. So, a step up from last time.

The difficulty of addressing four separate characters’ solo arcs is a little apparent, but it’s hard to tell whether the chop factor is due to careless writing or directing. Our four heroines spend most of the movie apart, and each girl’s got plenty of story to get through; in places, the succession of short scenes and lack of logical transitions gets tiresome. On the other hand, the scenes where the Sisterhood are together have a real rapport (far more so than in the first movie)—somewhere along the line, these girls learned to like each other, or at least to look like they do, and they easily provide the kind of girlfriendly wish fulfillment the movie’s producers are hoping for. The ending is lovely (thoughtfully provided by the source material; thanks, Ann Brashares!)—unexpected and bittersweet, and just what you’d hope for the end of the series. It all comes out in the wash, as the characters and their stories combine, and the heart is there, even when the finesse isn’t. And in the end, isn’t it the heart that matters?

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Alexis Bledel, America Ferrara, Amber Tamblyn, Blake Lively, Ann Brashares, movie reviews, young-adult movies, chick flicks, Elizabeth Chandler