Search Results for: Nick Hornby

Rewritten History: Affecting in ‘Brooklyn’, Not So Much in ‘Suffragette’

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made ‘Brooklyn’ is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group.

Academy Awards 2015 Theme Week Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our Academy Awards 2015 Theme Week here.

The Internal Monologue of ‘Wild’: Lone Woman Walking, Lone Woman Writing

In a film, as in real life, with no language to defend herself, the lone woman is a suspect. She gets stared at and scowled at and catcalled and often told that she’s making herself vulnerable, or taking unnecessary risks. In short, our culture says she’s asking for what she gets. A woman alone is unloved, uncared for and written off. In ‘Wild,’ the film based on Strayed’s memoir of her months solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she has several uncomfortable and frankly terrifying encounters.

A ‘Wild’ Woman Alone

The filmmakers (director Jean-Marc Vallée and screenwriter Nick Hornby) profess to be fans of Strayed’s work, but they were apparently so busy patting themselves on the back for not making this story of a woman alone into some kind of boy-meets-girl rom-com that they forgot to include everything else that makes the book distinctive.

Seed & Spark: Writing Women

So, where does that leave us? There are the dismal numbers, all laid out, Hollywood’s claims that it can’t take risks, that women are a financial liability (though they buy the majority of movie tickets), or that the few female execs that climb to the top can’t or won’t pull other women up with them. But on the micro-level, this is about individual decisions each woman makes when she allows a story she wrote to be usurped as it transfers to the screen, or takes a part, no matter how fantastic, that is written and directed by a man.

A ‘Wild’ Woman Alone

The filmmakers (director Jean-Marc Vallée and screenwriter Nick Hornby) profess to be fans of Strayed’s work, but they were apparently so busy patting themselves on the back for not making this story of a woman alone into some kind of boy-meets-girl rom-com that they forgot to include everything else that makes the book distinctive.

When Can You Laugh at Suicide?: ‘A Long Way Down’

Suicide is no laughing matter, but we try. If it’s not a heavy drama or inspirational story telling you to stop and watch the sunset, stop and smell the roses, and the like, making a film about suicide requires a light touch and buckets of understanding and sensitivity. As a comedy plot, it only seems to work when sensitivity is disposed of completely. Suicide has been a successful plot for dark comedies, most notably ‘Heathers’ and ‘Harold and Maude’, which are full of irony, satire, insight and meditation. But ‘A Long Way Down’, a British film based on the bestselling novel by Nick Hornby, is not a dark comedy

Movie Review: An Education

*This is a guest post from Jesseca Cornelson. An Education is a perfectly fine film. The performances are pleasant enough to watch, but much of the plot and characterization seemed to me to be yet another retelling of the popular “how to make a proper woman” story, complete with yee olde stereotypes of the necessary … Continue reading “Movie Review: An Education”