Before it begins!
Posted by Lizzie on 06/13/10
I know, I know, I just drafted a massive complaint of those bitches of the MSM yanking my pony. I didn’t say I didn’t enjoy the drama, though! Here’s some recent work:
At the behest of Salon, I Kindle’d Stephenie Meyer’s latest and concluded that, by the third novel-to-movie, the bubble’s off the champagne:
Mega-popular writers today have a hard row to hoe. Fame that, in the old days, would have crested with a spot on morning television has morphed into a sort of media free-for-all. Hollywood and TV attack fresh young authors like tasty kill. Fans treat their works and the authors themselves like some massive World of Storycraft, spinning off reams of their own fan fiction and commentary and pestering the author for updates. It’s not surprising that even the most gracious scribe might do the narrative equivalent of heading off to a cabin in the woods...
It drives me nuts that people don’t get that SATC is kitsch. I’m also interested in how, though we have a zillion shows about marriage, no men are allowed to be in them. This is being interpreted by commenters as some reactionary critique of womankind, which it is not — but vale! Here’s my piece for Politics Daily, my favorite place to commentararize:
Yes, you critics mildly confused by the dramatic headgear, vast apartments and frequent jettings-about of the ladies of the “Sex and the City” franchise can put down your poison pens. It’s an hommage to “The Women” — not an embrace of the fruits of Wall Street. Still, what passed for a witty take on marriage in 1939 makes slightly less sense nowadays. While the gay community is scrambling to get the state benefits that are supposed to accompany a lifelong commitment, heedless beneficiaries of them are fleeing the institution in droves. If that two-year run of sex scandals didn’t make the point, Al and Tipper’s breakup, and now their eldest daughter Karenna’s, too, should have prepared us at last to revisit the idea of till death do us part. The problem is, the husband still doesn’t seem to be part of the equation…
Also, this month I am in O! I love O. I can’t tell you how much I love O; I am a subscriber and everything; I gain vast knowledge from that advice column; I skip Suzy because I’m scared to think about my money. I love O!
And the one thing I do not love about O is that they do not make an effort to be online any more than my Grandma Sally. Actually, if I had a Grandma Sally, even she would be way more online, O. Click here for my contribution. This is illegal but you can subscribe and should, too.
Also, when you subscribe, you’ll see on the facing page an interview with Mary Murphy, who’s collected a passel of reactions to “To Kill a Mockingbird” entitled “Scout, Atticus and Boo: A Celebration of 50 Years of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I am in this book! It will be a documentary! It’s so weird. Dan Rather is in it too, and many others. By which I mean: OPRAH IS IN THIS BOOK.
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Did you see the remake of The Women? I was SO embarrassed to have dragged a friend off to see it – should have known – not the world’s biggest Nicole Kidman fan at the best of times. As penance I will watch the old version AND reread the novel.
Comment by Ruth Seeley — 6/13/2010 @ 12:45 pm
I am ashamed to say I have seen it, but only when it was running late at night and I had half a pizza to tackle. I was so annoyed at how it refused to, for lack of a better analogy, transpose the ideas of that culture to the key of OUR culture. There are so many clans and hypocrisies and idiocies to enjoy! Instead they were like, Oooo, bad fashion show, friend fight. Movies so often seem like those strange student run-through senior theses projects to me.
Comment by altehaggen — 6/13/2010 @ 2:46 pm
[...] via Written on June 14, 2010 by Bryan Formhals in Media « Previous Post [...]
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