Persuasion was the last book Jane Austen wrote before she died. It’s about losing love and finding it again and defying your awful family, etc, like some classic literature shit. Anne’s delusional family told her to reject the marriage proposal of the sailor she was in love with because he was poor and they weren’t. Ten years later, when she’s almost 30 and pretty much an old maid, her family’s still delusional but now not as rich, Anne has lead a very sad lonely life, the sailor is now a captain and has tons of money, and Anne has to watch him rub it in her face about what she missed out on as her sister’s in-laws fall all over themselves trying to get him to marry one of them. He realizes, of course, that revenge is pointless because he still loves her, and she still loves him, and omg her family is essentially abusive so no wonder she’s so effed, and he asks her to marry him, the end.

Persuasion, the tv-movie adaptation from 2007 is about the woman from Happy-Go-Lucky

attempting to look sad

- probably due to her extremely painful hairdo -

and running a whole lot

after her former almost fiancee

who’s stopped over from his frat house to invite Anne’s awful sister

Mary’s sister-in-law Conan O’Brien

and her suicidal sister Louisa

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to help him rub it in that Anne is a loser

before finally deciding to get back together with her after she goes blind.

I mean, approximately.

Actually, they did totally eff up the story in the following three ways.

1. The Casting

Happy-Go-Lucky was a great movie. Sally Hawkins was great in Happy-Go-Lucky. I don’t think actors should be pigeon-holed into roles, but SH is so much better suited to someone who sees the joy in life as opposed to someone who’s been lonely and sad and treated like crap by her entire awful family for the past ten years, whose only glimmer of hope came and went quickly, and came back again only to taunt her.

Plus, Capt. Wentworth up there is supposed to be bitter, hardened, angry, out for a little bit of revenge, and has been on a boat for the past ten years. What kind of sunscreen did this guy have? He looks great.

But, Mary. Oh, Mary. Mary, Anne’s younger and only married sister, is conceited and constantly disappointed with her life. Her in-laws don’t like her because she’s annoying, but she thinks they owe her a lot more respect, and her husband ignores her because she’s a shrew. She pretends to be ill in order to get attention and is conniving when it comes to who her young sisters-in-law should marry, though it’s really none of her business since both their parents are alive.

Once upon a time, I got a BS in special education. This is true. So I spent a lot of this movie trying to figure out what special needs Mary has.

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My conclusion is that she’s just generally deranged. There is no help I can give her.

2. The Letter

At the end of the story, Capt. Wentworth overhears a conversation between Anne and a mutual friend where she’s all, “I’m still obvs in love with someone from my past,” and Wentworth writes a letter that’s all, “Serious? ‘Cause if I heard you right, you’re in love with me, and I’m in love with you AWESOME,” and then he makes sure she gets the letter before he leaves and she reads it and goes down to tell her brother-in-law to find Wentworth and tell him that she wants him to come back to her house later for a party, “make sure you wink at him a lot, dude, it’ll get the point I’m trying to make across,” but her brother-in-law is, like, “I have errands to run, and Wentworth has been hanging around outside the front door of your house for the past ten minutes, so why don’t you just tell him yourself?” and then they get married.

In this movie, Anne has the conversation (which is the only solid indication that Wentworth has that Anne really didn’t want to give him up ten years ago, and still wants him back) but Wentworth isn’t there to hear it. And Anne gets the letter (which contains the phrasing from the book, including the part about how he overheard her, but he didn’t overhear anything) while she’s already on some weird jog through the town to find him, but without ever having read the letter, she never would have known that he wanted her back. I’m not one of those people who thinks that movie adaptations can’t take artistic license, but it’s kind of the climax. Which is kind of the important part of the story. Kind of.

3. The Kiss

There are some truly bad movie kisses. This might be the worst. Anne runs through Bath searching for Capt. Wentworth, running into about thirty people on the way who keep sending her in different directions like she’s playing some kind of poorly designed board game. When she finally finds him, it takes them about three hours to just kiss each other already, because I guess the person who directed this movie reeeeally liked Dawson’s Creek.

The description on YouTube says that the actor playing Wentworth thought it was the steamiest kiss he ever did on screen. Ew. Even with the spittle?

But what do I know? There are currently fan videos for Persuasion on YouTube set to I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing, Moonlight Sonata (?), Right Here Waiting, Wait for You, Back for Good, Chasing Cars, When You Say Nothing At All, I’ll Never Get Over You (Getting Over Me), Light Up My Life, What About Love, How to Save a Life,  It’s All Coming Back to Me Now, My Immortal, What About Now, Because You Loved Me, and I Will Remember You, so I’m obviously missing something.

I’m almost convinced, but not quite. When a fan vid is made using the Heart song All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You, then I’ll concede: best period piece ever.

I unfortunately missed the last viewing of the movie A Town Without Christmas today, so I was unable to get any screen caps. And apparently, the only thing about this movie that pictorially exists on the internets is this tiny picture of the two stars:

And also, the cover of the DVD, which is available in the Netherlands, in case you’re looking for a last minute xmas gift.

This movie is about this little boy named Chris who writes a pre-suicide note disguised as a letter to Santa describing how he will go into the woods on Christmas Eve and do what needs to be done if Santa doesn’t bring his mom and dad jobs for Christmas. And then some nosy parker at the post office opens his letter and turns it into a national tragedy/hunt for a suicidal nine-year-old.

Patricia Heaton is a reporter living in Seattle who, I guess, works for the equivalent of New York City’s Pix News. It’s cheap ass, is what I’m saying. She’s sent off to the little fishing town Chris lives in to cover the search for him, alive or dead, and ends up meeting this total weirdo in the train station who’s also headed to the fishing town.

This guy is some kind of failed writer who’s been trying unsuccessfully for, like, twenty years to get this memoir about his boyhood supernatural experience in the woods published. He’s like Joey Potter in that he doesn’t get that fiction writers don’t have to write stories entirely based upon real events from their lives. His story includes something about leaving his foster house on a cold Christmas Eve night to go out into the woods and find the door to the netherworld, and then falling asleep on the ground and almost freezing to death, until a magical lumberjack shows up to light a match – A match – which somehow warms him up enough to survive. So… It’s supposed to be a children’s book, btw, so his publisher is like, “PLEASE write a new story that’s not so creepy and mind-effing and depressing,” and the guy is all, “THIS is MY LIFE and it HAPPENED and it’s REAL!” because he just doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get it at all.

Anyway, did I mention he writes for a greeting card company? His poems include things along the lines of, “Welcome to middle age. Next stop: death.” So, he gets fired right before the Christmas party. Which he actually can’t believe, because he was just sent an anonymous package filled with Thomas Kincaid-esque paintings, and he would have thought that this find – these slightly depressing scenes of a run-down town at Christmas time – would be the next big thing in Christmas cards. The firing doesn’t bother him in the least, because he becomes obsessed with finding the artist, and ends up on his way to the old fishing town, on the same train as Patricia Heaton.

I mean, the rest of the story doesn’t make any sense, so it’s gonna be hard to explain. Like, PH and Dumb Guy go to the same B&B, which overbooked, and end up having to share this basement room together, and decide they’re into each other, but in this way where they’re sort of grossed out by the thought that they can’t do any better but willing to put up with it. And it turns out that the paintings weren’t just paintings but premonitions and every scene in the paintings eventually comes true, but they’re not freaked out by it AT ALL! And Peter Falk plays this angel, Max, who’s actually a real dick, who keeps popping up and acting like he’s a different person each time, and the Dumb Guy is always, twenty seconds in, all, “Waaaaaaaait a minute, you’re that guy from the motel/bar/painting/general store!!”

Anyway, it turns out that the kid who was gonna commit suicide didn’t exist, and was a creation of this little girl whose parents were planning on getting a divorce. PH and Dumb Guy find her out and tell her that she has to let everyone know so they stop wasting time looking for a dead boy’s body in the woods, and when she goes to tell her parents, her father’s like, “Honey, what are you trying to say?” and her mother screams, “Let me HANDLE THIS!!” Assholes. No wonder this kid is making up suicide notes, you know?

Anyway, the best part of the movie is about the last ten minutes. There was supposed to be a Christmas pageant for the town which the mayor (the little girl’s father) cut from the budget because there wasn’t enough money for all the lights to be lit up. So, his wife tells the townsfolk that they’ll have the Christmas pageant without the lights and then everybody wins. And then they hook up lights anyway, and light them all, like, a million of them, and then the whole town loses power, and the woman goes tearing outside accusing her husband of having deliberately cut off the town’s power on a cold Christmas Eve night because he was annoyed that the Christmas pageant was going on, and I told you this movie is confusing.

But, Dumb Guy? He goes to the general store where he encounters Max who tells him that he over-ordered candles and candle holders, like, thousands of them. Dumb Guy grabs a box – A box – goes to his car, and then drives into the crowd of ppl standing in the dark outside of the defunct Christmas pageant, beeping his horn, and screaming like a maniac, “GET BACK INSIDE! EVERYONE BACK INSIDE! I HAVE CANDLES!!!” The one box turns into fifty and everyone grabs a big taper and places a plastic drinking cup around it, which quickly melts and deforms around the candles. Then a bunch of carolers sing Deck the Halls, but half of the carolers just sing, seriously, just sing, “Don! Gay!”

And then Max shows up in the woods in a tuxedo, Dumb Guy and PH stop making out so Dumb Guy can go talk to him, he discovers that Max was the lumberjack, and Max intimates that he may or may not actually be Santa Claus (?) and then disappears in front of them and Patricia Heaton goes, “Hey, who was that?” Like, HOMEBOY JUST DISAPPEARED! Lunatics.

If someone in the Netherlands has the dvd, please send it to me. Thx and Merry Xmas.

I like Jane Austen. I think her writing was funny, and I think it translates well to modern life (when interpreted, of course). And I think that her writing had a lot of heart to it. I still get anxious butterfly-ish every time I read Emma and get to the part with Emma and Mr. Knightley’s walk around the garden.

The point is, I like Jane Austen.

I did not like Becoming Jane.

There is nothing redeeming about the movie save for the scene in the beginning where James McAvoy’s character goes to a party and has to sit and listen to Jane read a long, boring, pointless story about her sister and fiancee to her sister and fiancee (and acted all, like, I’ll read it because everyone twisted my arm, like she didn’t write the story, come down with the story, and sit with it in her lap all afternoon waiting for someone to tell her to go read it), and he falls asleep. The movie is over-long and turns what historians have decided was basically nothing into the greatest romance ever. Jane is obnoxious and gawky and awk and embarrassing. Tom seems mildly grossed out by her and then mildly amused by her and then mildly interested in her, while she gets mad at the slightest mention of his name, and then suddenly they’re in love, but there seems to be a huge leap from how they felt to how they felt and I don’t like it.

The movie actually is guilty of a much bigger offense, though, and it has to do with James McAvoy. Because, I don’t understand how, in all of his other movies, he went from, like,

Bleached Hair Hot (no, seriously)

to Nerdy Hot

to Kinda Dirty Hot

to 1930s Hot

to Brandishing a Gun Hot

to… Creepy Old Leprechaun?

I mean… what kind of … what??

And I don’t even want to get into the alternate universe where, 20 years later, Jane’s older brother and MUCH older sister-in-law look like this:

but, Jane and Tom manage to look like this:

Were the stylists just effing with everyone? Seriously?

Oh, and one more thing. I promise.

Is that supposed to be hyperbole? Because, way to overstate, writers. Jane Austen wrote two great novels (Pride & Prejudice and Emma), two entertaining novels (Northanger Abbey and Persuasion), and two craptacularly boring novels (Mansfield Park and Sense & Sensibility). Even if you disagree about which novels fit into which of those categories, I think we can all agree: six of the greatest novels of the English language? That’s some bullshit.

Yeah, yeah, I know I’ve written about Pretty in Pink before. That was just about the prom dress, though. Sally and I were watching it last night and discussing how annoying Andie is, so I had to outline it. Btw, as lame as I find the idea of Andie and Blaine even wanting to have gone out in the first place, I’m totally not an Andie and Duckie shipper. I think that the idea of putting them together is kind of ridiculous, seeing how the entire movie was about a burgeoning relationship between two people and, between the other two, an unrequited love on one side and an entitled sense of indifference on the other. Why would you WANT Duckie to end up with Andie? She’s kind of a jerk. She treats him like crap, acts like she’s never seen him do something ridiculous to get a laugh before, and constantly plays like she can’t understand him. After 8 years of a very solid friendship.

The whole movie is so awkward, and it’s almost entirely because of Andie. And not because she’s poor or because she’s picked on or because she’s supposed to be a little awkward because it’s high school and she’s supposedly having some kind of Romeo + Juliet moment and you can relate because you’ve been there and you know how it is to feel like you’re on the outside looking in and everyone is talking about you behind their hands and you don’t know if you can stick it out to be with this person, but because Andie is a creep and a half.

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This is how I dance when I’m alone:

This is how I dance after a few drinks:

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Sally and I watched The Other Boleyn Girl last night with very high expectations of it being terrible. And it was. Awesomely so. But, that’s not really the point of this post. I’m not gonna get into what a weirdo hypocrite Mary was (seriously, what was up with her wanting absolutely nothing to do with the King and being terrified to have to go to his room and then all he does is say, “Hey, I was a younger sibling also,” and she’s immediately in love with him??) or how creepy and useless their father was, or how Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman’s accents made them sound like they grew up in completely different parts of England even though they were sisters, oh, OR the fact that they used the WORD “sister” about 200,000 times throughout the movie, or the fact that Mary would have taken Elizabeth and raised her, like, wtf was that anyway, or the fact that we’re supposed to believe that Henry was still pining after MARY for years which is so untrue, like, I SAW the first couple of episodes of the Tudors, okay?

I’m not gonna talk about it at all. I do, however, want to bring up a very important subject that was raised in this movie: stalker cam.

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I want you to have a point of reference, so the following pictures are of Josh Lucas and Patrick Dempsey:

Okay?

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Sally and I watched a Lifetime movie last night called Don’t Cry Now. I won’t even bother going into the entirety of the plot, since it wasn’t anything too exciting (a woman finds out her stepdaughter is trying to kill her because she’s nuts and wants her father back all to herself, basically). But, there were these two things that happened in the movie that were just too incredible to let go.

Jason Priestly played the woman’s brother. There was some bad blood between them (he had been in jail for three years for conspiracy to commit murder, and he also was tight with their father who she had some unresolved issues with – issues which, incidentally, had nothing to do with her, quite frankly) and after her husband’s ex-wife is murdered (by the stepdaughter herself, it turns out – explained in a reveal that wasn’t ever really revealed and had to basically just be guessed at by us) she’s convinced that JPriest did it. I don’t really know why, since it doesn’t seem that he would have known this woman at all, and clearly would have no motive to kill her.

Anyway, the woman is pretty heinous to her brother and is suspicious of him and nasty and basically trying to catch him in any lie or criminal act that could give her cause to call the police and have him arrested again. (It turns out that he’s actually a cop, and the whole jail thing was a fake out so that he could become undercover vice without anyone knowing.) So, she goes to his house and sneaks into his bedroom and starts rifling through his drawers. She eventually finds a gun, but before that, she pulls out a box of something called Interceptors. The box is ginormous, and she sort of stares at it for about ten seconds before putting it back. There were a lot of scenes of this woman just having long, pointed reaction shots to things that weren’t in any way related to the plot. And these Interceptors? So not related to the plot.

Maybe she was surprised that he had a box of condoms in his room since he only recently got out of jail, but it didn’t seem that strange to me even before the “I was never in jail” reveal, considering this house belongs to him and did before he left for “prison.” And, he’s a guy. Condoms in his bedroom? Weird, right??? No, that’s what I thought.

The fact that he had a 48-pack was kind of bizarre, true, but honestly, that wasn’t the strangest thing about the Interceptors. The weird part was (and I don’t know if this is why the reaction shot was so long, because if it is, this movie instantly became awesome) that the economy sized box of Interceptors proudly displayed the phrase “Extra-Large.”

…

And the second thing about this movie that was weird: the woman was being poisoned by her stepdaughter unbeknownst to her and, since she had been feeling a little flu-ish and had seen a bit of blood in her saliva one day, she decided to stop by the doctor’s office. She had also, unfortunately, just realized her husband (Joe from 90210! what would Donna think?) might be having an affair with his co-anchor at the tv station (incidentally, he was having an affair, but it was with her best friend – surprise!). Her husband and this anchor woman, btw, both being in perfectly normal-seeming health. And the woman having only had a little bit of acheyness and some nausea one night and a little bit of blood in her spit when she brushed her teeth in the PAST WEEK (symptoms the stepdaughter also displayed herself in the past week), asks the doctor to perform an AIDS test.

An AIDS test! And then she brings it up again when she talks to her best friend about her suspicions about her husband’s cheating on her. An AIDS test! And THEN, when the doctor calls to tell her she’s being poisoned, the first thing she asks is, “Are the AIDS test results back?” The doctor, of course, quickly dismisses the negative result because she’s being POISONED!

And it’s not like she didn’t know that someone was out to get her. She had received an ominous warning from the husband’s ex-wife just before she was killed, so she knew she was in danger. But, of AIDS???

There was also a pretty great scene where she walks in on her husband and her best friend in bed, but without being able to capture her husband’s totally stoked face pre-noticing his wife in the room and subsequent “who is this woman on top of me?” face post-noticing his wife in the room, it just wouldn’t be fair to tease you. Sorry for doing it anyway.

In the bonus section on the dvd for The Skulls is one of those on-the-set documentaries about the movie where they interviewed Josh Jackson and Paul Walker and the director about how this was one of the most important movies of the 20th century (or something to that affect). Of course, in the interviews with JJack and Leslie Bibb and Hill Harper, they’re very serious about their Craft and the Script and the Direction and how it was important to them to Dive into their Characters. The director also goes into a lot of detail about how the movie is so important because it gives a good message to young people (no lie: he thinks that the movie’s message is that you can risk everything to get back your soul and he goes into this whole Faust analogy which included a lot of nervous giggling… point being that he at least thought that this movie was better quality than the average teen movie, and I’m not gonna argue with him, because I don’t enjoy arguing with people who are delusional). Anyway, Paul Walker’s interviews are, of course, a little more Paul Walker, where he gives off his typical Paul Walker impression of, “This is… the movie… I can’t remember the name of it, does anyone remember? I did this movie, is the thing. And I played a character.” He just seems very uninvolved.
But, as deep as my love for Josh Jackson runs, I have to say that the thing about The Skulls that keeps me watching it over and over is PWalk’s Caleb Mandrake. I mean, there’s nothing better in this movie, I’m sorry. Did you want a list? That can be arranged: The 15 Reasons Paul Walker’s Performance Makes the Movie

15. He Has an Amazing Shooting Face

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