Short version: …Hold on, let me remove this Raider armor and melee weapon made out of a bat and various spiky bits… there! OK. Yeah, LITTLE WOMEN was great. Mind you, I read Louisa May Alcott as a child, so I am biased about this movie and I don’t care.
Slightly longer version: good flick, faithful but not slavish attention to the text, full of details provided for the benefit of those of us who enjoyed the book series. Also: Saoirse Ronan is so good in the role as Jo March I find it difficult to believe that they bothered trying casting anybody else. Or at least they abruptly stopped after she auditioned for them.
As to any themes: :drily: It’s a book where one daughter claws her way to a writer’s career, another decides that a husband and children is what she really wants, a third pursues an advantageous marriage with a remarkably clear head and no apologies, and the fourth dies after a long illness. As you might expect, it’s highly appropriate for everyone involved to address what it’s like to be a woman in 19th Century Western culture. I mean, you kind of knew that going in. It wasn’t tedious about it, or anything. If you like the books, you’ll like this.
Moe Lane
Well Good. At least we did not hear a news story ‘Local Man Lays Waste to Movie Theater.’ First line of story: ‘You thought burning something down and then sowing salt where it stood was just a historical remedy?’
Film at 11
On your advice, I shall suggest it to Mrs. Cat, who insists on watching the 1994 adaptation every so often.
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Mew
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p.s. I did not read Alcott, I find the whole thing a tad tedious, but I do enjoy the soda-and-popcorn aspect of theaters, as well as Mrs. Cat’s company, so ..
If she likes the 1994 version, she should be fine with this one.
It’s kind of like Jane Austen; one is left wondering which silverware item is most socially appropriate for gouging out one’s eyes.
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De gustibus non est disputandum. (Shrug) Some people find Moby Dick boring and Tolkien tedious.
Come now, sir. Sensible matrons by now instruct their staff to lay out a brain-tong at each guest’s setting, should it occur that a dinner party is troubled by a sudden incursion of the unmentionables. Brain-tongs really are quite useful: some clever chap combined a spoon (for moving the eye away from its cavity with a minimum of fuss and leakage) with a fork’s tines (for mashing the unmentionable’s putrid brain matter directly) and put the whole thing on the end of a thin steel spike.
One hears that those in the colonies have something similar, only about twice as wide and they call it a ‘Dire Spork.’ How wonderfully *exciting* the New World must be! And so full of colorful figures.
So .. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N1FGQZD ?
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Mew
I should also point out that The Dinner Party from Bujold’s “A Civil Campaign” is .. quite an example of awfulness ..
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https://www.amazon.com/Civil-Campaign-Comedy-Biology-Manners/dp/0671578278
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.. and those who have not read it are scolded and encouraged to pick up a copy at once.
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Mew
Would that be the dinner party where the butter bugs get free, the dinner party where everything is made of bug butter, or the dinner party where Miles makes a drunken faux pas and possibly ruins all chance he ever had of being happy?
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Or is there just one dinner party that slowly builds to a complete rollicking disaster? I do like that the deciding factor of how Miles resolves the plot is that his cook got paid for her work in stock, not cash. Good cooks are hard to come by.