May 30th, 2008, 3 Comments »
I’m unlikely to see the movie, but I was curious how a potentially huge summer hit was reviewed. I perused four reviews:
They’re all middling to bad reviews (reflective, I guess, of the growing critical consensus). What’s interesting to me is that the first three reviews I mention are structured very similarly, and pretty much emphasize the same things: the writer’s feelings for the TV series, the crappy script, the haute-couture fashion, how Charlotte gets diarrhea and how the men are mute window-dressing.
I guess movie reviews, like so much of journalism, have a kind of formula, and veteran reviewers tend to look for the same things. Dana Stevens from Slate stands out for a more original and possibly overly-serious review. Here’s a sample:
Samantha disappears entirely for stretches, and her story arc contains some of the movie’s most painfully unfeminist jokes (in which we learn, for example, that vigilant pubic grooming and toned abs are essential to female self-esteem). And an attempt to address the series’ endemic whiteness by adding a subaltern black character—Jennifer Hudson as Carrie’s designer-bag-toting Girl Friday—is a major misfire that only underscores our heroine’s oblivious entitlement.
Regardless, I’m sure the movie will have a rompin’, stompin’ weekend at the box office.
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December 4th, 2007, 22 Comments »
Over at YPulse, Anastasia links to a story about the declining popularity of the communal shower after high school gym classes:
Longtime physical education teachers say the decline began more than a decade ago and may have started when schools cut back on laundering towels to save money. Kids forgot to bring towels, and it spiraled from there to become optional. Nobody complained, and gym teachers found better things to do than monitor the showers.
This is my favourite quote from the article:
“The only person I saw take a shower this year was a Canadian kid that moved here,” said Jack Taylor, a Wilsonville High sophomore.
We Canadians are very clean.
When I was in high school in the late eighties, we almost never showered after gym class. There really wasn’t time in the schedule for it, and the school certainly didn’t provide towels. There was only a shower room, but we mostly used it for soaking our clothed friends on their birthdays. Good times.
Communal showers remind me of the movie Carrie (not safe for work) more than anything. They seem to regularly feature as a backdrop for high school cruelty, actually. I also remember a hokey-more-than-scary scene in Stephen King’s It. Which, speaking of my high school years, featured a scene shot at one of my classmate’s houses in West Vancouver. I remember it as one of the first films I was aware of that was (partially) shot in Vancouver.
Did you take showers after gym class in high school?
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