Little Women (1994)

Director: Gillian Armstrong

Cast: Winona Ryder, Kirsten Dunst, Claire Danes, Christian Bale

Have I Seen it Before: Any joke here would feel off, so I’ll just say no.

Did I Like It: Sure! What’s not to like.

Obviously, any adaptation of Louisa May Alcott will be light on plot. To add plot to the proceedings would be either unsettling or profane. And so, the film must rely on the chemistry between the actresses to fuel the movie that surrounds them.

And they do. They are helped by the fact that their characters are intelligent where they might have been irritating. Plenty of smart, self-possessed women have been inspired by any mixture of the March girls, and those are the kind of people around which I would want to spend time.

That moment near the end where Jo stares with nervous, nearly despairing anticipation at her just-completed first novel, and the bubbling ecstasy when the book comes back printed are feelings both  I and many of my friends have surely felt. The movie is filled with these moments of true emotion. It’s a tall order for a movie to function with only these moments to elevate it. In lesser hands, it would have been frightfully dull. Here, it is vibrant. I wish I could make something one day that didn’t need bells and whistles. 

The score is jaunty, although the blaring trumpets did leave me wondering which scenes were taking place at Christmas and which were taking place when Kirsten Dunst metamorphosed into Samantha Mathis. The photography is sumptuous without being needlessly showy, and the sets and locations feel like what one would imagine the 19th century to be. Maybe that one element is actually draped in Hollywood fakery, but it displays this with such confidence that the spirit of the March girls comes forth in the film.

Stardust (2007)

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Cast: Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer

Have I Seen it Before: I really was pretty sure that I had, but as I watched the movie on this screening, it became pretty clear that I’ve only ever seen bits of it. My wife loves it, and so I must have, over the course of ten years, seen about half an hour of it.

Did I Like It: The fact that just half an hour feels like a more than complete experience of the movie, should tell you something. Ultimately, its unfair to expect me to like it, but here we go.

Something about the fantasy genre usually bugs me. J.R.R. Tolkien may be a master wordsmith, but the legacy of having to excruciatingly detail your world building in fantasy is often mind-numbingly boring and stops any forward momentum in the story when in the hands of lesser writers.

Now, Neil Gaiman is not a lesser writer. In fact, he is one of the greats. That only makes me expect more from him, and maybe the book from which the film springs is different, but this is entirely too much run-of-the-mill fantasy material for me to recommend it in any way. The first ten minutes are weighed down by a lead balloon of VO narration by the admittedly pleasant Ian McKellen and wandering plot lines that never quite pay off.

The rest of the film is pleasant enough, I suppose, but never quite outgrows the turgid first half an hour. Maybe the big performances of Pfeiffer and De Niro are meant to be fun, but in the context of this film she feels too kitschy for her own good, and it’s been years since De Niro has approached a film role with more focus than I make a left-hand turn.