movie: Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day

Am I terribly old fashioned?
Indeed you are.  And all the better for it. 

Set in London shortly before WWII, Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day is about Guenevere Pettigrew, a frumpy vicar's daughter who is a governess.  Except, she's not a very good governess.  Fired by her last employer and thrown out without a penny, she spends the night on the streets, only to be told by her employment agency that she is now considered to be unemployable the next morning.  In desperation, she snatches a card off the manager's desk while no one is looking, and presents herself at the door of Delysia Lafosse, a night club singer who dreams of going to Hollywood.  Except that Delysia doesn't need a governess, she needs a social secretary.  Mostly to manage her love life.

First, there's Phil, the son of a producer who is about to produce his first play himself.  Delysia sees him as a sweet boy, but one whose main purpose is to get her a starring role.  Phil is a sweet boy who has very little upstairs and needs to fill up that space before some aspiring actress notices the "for rent" sign and uses him for all he's worth.  Then there's Nick.  Nick runs the nightclub Delysia sings at and keeps her as his mistress.  Nick is obviously not a Nice Man, but very much the kind of man a girl like Delysia can't resist, no matter how much she may want to.  Finally, there's Michael, who has loved Delysia for years (even to the point of being in jail for a year over it) and stood by her, but is tired of waiting  for her to get through playing games, and gives her the ultimatum of going to New York with him or saying good bye forever.  The choice Delysia should make is obvious, it's just whether or not she'll make the right choice.

Navigating her way through Delysia's tangled love life (and saving her from exposure) Guenevere finds herself drawn into Delysia's glamorous world, despite the fact that it challenges every one of her Victorian beliefs, and befriending her fluffheaded employer, who is her opposite in every way.  Meanwhile, Guenevere herself finds herself falling for Joe, and undergarments designer who is on the outs with his snide designer fiance.  I forgot the character's name, so we'll just call her Shirley, as she's played by Shirley Henderson.  Where everything is going is obvious from the start, it's just getting there that's the fun.

Though Frances McDormand as Guenevere and Shirley Henderson and all the various love interests all do great jobs, it's not really surprising that Amy Adams steals the show as Delysia.  In general, I tend to think it isn't hard to play characters who aren't that bright, be they sweet or offensive.  But to play a seemingly empty-headed girl who is carrying on with three men and keeping two in the dark about it, and to be completely flighty, yet to play the character as complex, loveable, and sympathetic?  That takes skill.  It is, I think almost impossible to dislike Delysia.  The movie is clear from the start that the way she's living her life is wrong.  Not in the moral sense (though there is that), but in that it's a bad life for her that is unfair to her, Phil, and Michael.  I'd include Nick, but he's your typical domineering boyfriend (in this type of thing) who treats her like property.  And yet, she's so helpless and in need of something real that you can see why Guenevere, who is opposed to everything she represents, instinctively helps her.  In complete honesty, I think that denying Delysia when she needs help would be rather like picking up a puppy or kitty staring at you with begging eyes, and literally throwing them in the rain and slamming the door.

That, ultimately, is what the movie is really about, despite the (quite good) romantic trappings:  two women who are opposites in every possible way coming to terms with what they want and getting the strength to go after it through their friendship.  Because of Guenevere, Delysia is able to realize that what she really wants isn't what she thinks she wants, and because of Delysia, Guenevere is able to experience a side of life she never had before, and to realize her own shortcomings, and come to terms with part of her past.

I'm curious, though, about whether or not the air raids are a part of the original book.  Especially so given that, when written, there's an element to the end that, from our modern perspective, knowing what happens after this, may not have been in the original work.

( minor spoilers )

And now to acquire a copy of the book for myself.

My Savage Sausage

Recently it was mentioned in the comments somewhere that the titles of Cassie Edwards's books might be improved if you replaced Savage with Sausage. I have decided to test this theory.

For those who are not familiar with what I'm talking about, Cassie Edwards is a romance novelist who was caught plagiarizing earlier this year. When confronted, she stated that she didn't realize she was supposed to credit her sources. While the absolute wrongness should already be apparent, it's made even worse by the fact that her books are, well, absolutely terrible. Click here for more details, as well as my enduring absolute pain as I read and liveblogged one of her books to see if the plagiarism was as obvious as reports made it sound. (Oh, how it was...)

BTW, as far as legal action goes, as far as I know, the only thing that's happened is that one of her publishers is no longer publishing her books. Somehow, I suspect the people she stole from are too dumbfounded by someone using the text for their serious research articles as post-coital conversation fodder to do anything else.

ON TO THE FUN! I was going to poke at some of them, but it was just too easy.  I'll let you do that.

( cut for innuendo )

Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles: Season 1, ep 1

Note:  I'm not considering what Summer Glau's character is to be a spoiler.  If you don't know that, then you've probably never seen an ad or promo picture.  Or, for that matter, heard anyone talk about the series, and they also made it clear what role she would at least claim to take.  Also, the only thing beyond that that I'm going in spoiled for is the identity of a mid-season character.  And all I know is their identity.  No spoilers, please.  (It's 9 eps, you won't have to hold it in for long.)

Uhm, I'm going to assume everyone is at least passingly familiar with the first two Terminator movies (we and the show both ignore the third.)  If not, here's what happens.  

( I case someone hasn't but plans to... )

Sarah Connor Chronicles starts off in 1999.  Sarah has put her mind back together as much as one can after Judgement Day, and, though she and John are still in hiding, has even found herself a fiance.  She knows, however, that it still isn't safe, so she packs John up and moves on, ending up in New Mexico.  No sooner are they settled in, though, than they're found by a terminator.  Fortunately, John's cute new classmate, Cameron, is a terminator who (so she claims) was sent back by his future self to save him, saying that someone else eventually creates the machines. 

You know, John Connor has to be the only guy in the world for whom a slim young woman as the badass protector makes much more sense than the muscular male.  I mean, let's face it, according to his parentage and childhood, men who go into battle die.  Women who go into battle walk away when it's over.  Also, for him, yelling "Mommy!" when in trouble isn't cowardice, it's common sense.

While Judgement Day (and the original Terminator itself)  focused on what it's like to know your child will grow up hunted because he'll eventually save humanity from before he was born, neither really has the time to show what that's like when people aren't trying to kill you at the moment.  Even before people are trying to kill them in Judgement Day, Sarah's mental state then is at least partly due to six months of people telling her she's insane while she knows that he's out there with no one protecting him, and I don't think there's a lot of difference.  (This is why Sarah's together-ness here doesn't really bother me, though I suspect it might others:  a lot of the extremes in her behavior struck me as being a result of her current situation.)  As this aspect is the part of the movies that was always the most interesting to me (they become rather generic once you remove their being about the hero's mother who has to prepare him) I highly approve of it's being one of the main focuses of the series.

( spoilers )

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

A thief who was jailed after stealing the king’s seal and bragging about it, Gen is sitting around in the prison of Sounis, waiting for a chance to escape, when he’s approached by the magus he originally stole the seal from for a job. If he will travel with the magus and three others to steal something-he isn’t told what for some time-his prison sentence will, at the least, be shortened. Knowing a good thing when he sees it, Gen agrees.

Much of the book is a Road Trip, with the five characters (all men…nothing resembling a female shows up until near the end, aside from a waitress in a bit part-they are cool when they do show up, though) discussing the history and mythology of their world, which is very like if ancient Greece had continued through to what seems to be about the Renaissance era, without the introduction of monotheism. In complete honesty, while the world and mythology are interesting and Gen an engaging narrator (though, to be really interesting, he needs more appealing characters to interact with than he has for most of the book) the book itself isn’t overly compelling until the last leg. Mostly, it’s setting up the promise of something really good, which it starts to deliver on in the end, and presumably will completely in the sequels. 

( BOOK BREAKING SPOILERS! )

Angel Sanctuary Vol 8

( Spoilers gnaw on the severed arms of vampiric demons. )

 
Note on spoiler cut:  It's manga.  Neither loss of limbs nor vampiric demons count as spoilers in manga.

And people wonder why I let my comics languish and focus on manga?

 This list of the "50 Greatest Comic Book Characters"?  Is a load of bull.

Note what there's a distinct lack of.  Note that, of the two most recognizable ones, the entries are basically "she's a good character because she looks good in lingerie" and "actually, she isn't a good character, but we're supposed to include her."  And half of it?  Isn't based on quality, but on name recognition.  Actually, more than half.  So many better characters out there.  For that matter, the top 2?  One's sidekicks and rivals are better characrers, and the other's wife ad parents are more interesting.  But they're Icons.  Forget whether they're actually good characters or have been remotely original, interesting, or even well written in decades, a massive chunk of them are Icons, and so must be the greatest.

And if they were going the iconic route, where the *bleep* is Captain America?  Even discounting the fact that he's had better writing and characterization in the last few years than some of those characters can dream of, he was a better character than a lot of them even when I didn't care about him.  ETA:  My bad, #21.  Should be ranked higher than most of the ones above him, though.

*goes off to be grumpy*