BEFORE: Lucy Punch carries over from "Take Me Home Tonight". Today's film linked to a LOT of other films in this year's romance chain, like "Their Finest" and "Carrington" and also a couple others with Chris O'Dowd that didn't make the cut - so it really wasn't a question of WHETHER I was going to fit this one in, it was just a question of WHERE to fit it in - and of course I spun this whole chain on its end a few times before I found the starting point I wanted, the ending point I wanted, and the "right" film to land on February 14, even if that didn't really turn out to be the best choice. I make the best decisions I can, given the films that I have available to work with, and then I keep moving forward.
March is also Women's History Month, and if I haven't done enough yet to showcase women as part of the romance chain, I'll try to do better in the coming days. Silly rom-coms just aren't going to cut it, but at least there was something of a focus last month on women writers, like Jane Austen and Emily Bronte and, umm, Terry McMillan? But also "Carrie Pilby" was based on a novel written by a woman, as was "The Diary of a Teenage Girl", and so was "Passing". Hey, so was "Their Finest". There are women authors all over the place this year.
While I'm at it, tomorrow's TCM line-up in their "31 Days of Oscar" programming also celebrates women, the Best Supporting Actress winners who won for these films:
6:15 am "None But the Lonely Heart" (1944)
8:15 am "Anthony Adverse" (1936)
10:45 am "The V.I.P.s" (1963)
1:00 pm "Elmer Gantry" (1960)
3:45 pm "The Year of Living Dangerously" (1982)
3:45 pm "The Year of Living Dangerously" (1982)
6:00 pm "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967)
and these Oscar-winning films from the 1990s and 2000s:
8:00 pm "Sense and Sensibility" (1995)
10:30 pm "Good Will Hunting" (1997)
12:45 am "Cold Mountain" (2003)
And hey, "Sense and Sensibility" won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Emma Thompson, who's also in "How to Build a Girl" tonight, how's that for some synergy. Umm, today's film with tomorrow's TCM schedule, but that's OK. Believe it or not, I've seen 7 out of these 9 films, all except the first two. Now I've seen 59 out of 139, which gets me up over 42% seen. Doing well, but Monday they'll be back on the 1930's films again.
THE PLOT: A teenager living with her working-class family on a council estate in Wolverhampton, England, grows up to become a popular but conflicted music journalist.
AFTER: Well, at first glance this appears to be a take on the film "Almost Famous", with a teen becoming a music journalist and getting too close to their interview subject - they just gender-flipped it and set it in the modern era (umm, I think?) but otherwise it feels very much like a Cameron Crowe knock-off, only different.
I had a lot of trouble with this one, because of the thick British accents - I was watching the film on a DVD I made, so no subtitles - but those might have been a big help. Yes, I sometimes need help understanding people who are speaking ENGLISH, only it's British English. You'd think all my years spent watching "Monty Python" and "Benny Hill" would come in handy, but that's no help. What's weird, though, is that I could have sworn Beanie Feldstein was American (she is) so that means she's fronting here, putting on a fake accent. This, I think, is now known as a "reverse Bel Powley" - Bel had an authentic British accent in "Carrie Pilby" but then spoke like an American teen in "The Diary of a Teenage Girl". Why not just have the American actress play the American character and the British girl play the British character, would that make too much sense or something? The only people getting rich here are the dialogue coaches...
Anyway, somehow-British Beanie plays Johanna Morrigan, who's probably a stand-in character for Caitlin Moran, who wrote the book this film is based on. Yes, I believe I'm correct, Caitlin Moran grew up in Wolverhampton, her father was a rock drummer in the 1960's, and as a young girl she believed she would grow up to become a writer, so the parallels between the writer and her created character are all there. By the age of 16 she was working as a journalist for Melody Maker magazine, before writing for television and then crafting her autobiographical novel.
Johanna Morrigan, the character, wins some kind of poetry contest, then applies for a job at a music magazine, with an essay about the infamous song "Tomorrow" from the musical "Annie". The magazine editors thought it was a joke, but they hire her anyway and send her out to review bands and records they don't want to listen to. The joke's on them, because Johanna starts making enough money to get her family's TV back. (They don't buy TVs in the U.K., they rent them, it's all very weird.). Johanna writes under a pseudonym, Dolly Wylde. Too subtle?
There's a little bit of romance here as Johanna is attracted to one of her interview subjects, a young singer named John Kite. But the editors don't like her review because she damned him with not-faint-enough praise, and part of being a music CRITIC is, you know, criticizing things. So she turns to the dark side and starts trashing everything and everybody in print, egged on by her magazine editors, who can't get enough of her new "burn everything" style. She's even forced to shoot down her father's attempt at making a record (under the stage name "Mayonnaise") - I mean, literally shoot it down, her editors tell her to use it as target practice.
All this is happening as she's transitioning from awkward teen to young adult, and becoming sexually active. Again, it's her editors encouraging her, but then when she eavesdrops on them, she finds out they're all making fun of her, and none of them are particularly attracted to her. At least, I think that's what happened, again there are so many thick British accents here that it's impossible to be sure. Johanna wins an industry award, but unfortunately it turns out to be for "Arsehole of the Year" (They spell "asshole" differently in the U.K., it's all very weird.)
So she quits school, quits the magazine and then tries to quit life, but her suicide attempt goes all pear-shaped and she recovers in hospital, then calls everyone she ever wrote about to apologize. Against all rational odds, she soon gets another magazine column about being a woman and trying to become a better person in the future. Yeah, right.
Watch for a number of famous and semi-famous people making cameos as a number of historical figures and literary types on Johanna's "vision board", which features Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, a couple of the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Taylor, Sylvia Plath, Cleopatra, Donna Summer and Julie Andrews as Maria Von Trapp. Johanna imagines that they talk to her and give her advice - this is a very British thing, apparently, but it's all very weird.
Also starring Beanie Feldstein (last seen in "The Female Brain"), Alfie Allen (last seen in "Jojo Rabbit"), Paddy Considine (last seen in "In America"), Sarah Solemani (last seen in "Greed"), Laurie Kynaston, Joanna Scanlan (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Patsy Ferran (ditto), Arinzé Kene (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Frank Dillane (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea"), Tadhg Murphy, Ziggy Heath, Emma Thompson (last seen in "An Education"), Chris O'Dowd (last seen in "The Cloverfield Paradox"), Donal Finn, Edward Bluemel, Stellan Powell, Ralph Prosser, Bobby Schofield (last seen in "Locked Down"), Bob Mortimer, with cameos from Michael Sheen (last seen in "Dolittle"), Sharon Horgan (last seen in "The Borrowers" (2011)), Gemma Arterton (last seen in "Their Finest"), Lily Allen (last seen in "Elizabeth"), Alexei Sayle, Andi Oliver, Mel Giedroyc, Sue Perkins, Jameela Jamil,
RATING: 5 out of 10 off-the-record comments
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