Daniels clearly has a knack for the colorful, emotionally expressive interview, and his recent chats with The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times' awards blogs are no exception. One strange revelation: The producer of Academy Award-nominated Monster's Ball is not himself a member of the Academy.

A spokeswoman for the committee that inducts Academy voters told The New York Times, "Typically they are looking for those that they feel are the most outstanding in any given year. That doesn't mean there wasn't an appreciation for their work. For whatever reason and underlying circumstances, they didn't rise to the top of that group that year." Ouch. Daniels goes on to say that none of Precious cast and crew are members of the Academy — a possible handicap given that people are said to vote for their friends. It's hard not to cringe, his brave face aside:

Still, Mr. Daniels didn't take the Academy's choices personally, he said. "I'm gonna keep trying. It's happened to other friends too, who are not of color." He paused. "It is what it is."

Now about that barbershop. While getting his hair cut at a "local" (Los Angeles?) barbershop, the following took place, according to Daniels:

"So this one guy's in a chair at the end of the shop, he says, 'Did you see that movie "Precious"? I got my bootleg copy. And I don't know how they was depicting African Americans."...He gets worked up even now, in an empty Malibu cinema while his film screens next door, relating how he got out of his chair, sweating, identifying himself and calling out his fellow patrons for criticizing the looks of his actresses and watching bootlegs rather than supporting black filmmakers: " 'You probably have a mother, a sister, a cousin, a friend; you're probably having sex with someone who looks like Precious. How dare you say that you want to see some skinny ta-ta with a weave and shakin' her thing as opposed to the truth. What you're basically saying is you'd like to see a white girl starring in the movie, or some version of what Hollywood thinks is fabulous. Sorry. No. Precious is fabulous.' So it got to be this really deep debate about telling the truth.

Maybe it's just the retelling (Daniels' or the reporter's), but the anecdote is pretty confusing — were the men objecting to Precious's looks or to the film as an overall representation of the African-American community? In any case, there is plenty of room to critique Daniels' film (I for one agreed with the critics who found his choices as a director to be cheesy and distracting) without wanting to see "some version of what Hollywood thinks is fabulous." In fact, so far the films' actresses have largely overshadowed the director in nominations and wins (although best picture awards abound). We'll see if the academy agrees.

Lee Daniels, Director of Precious [The Envelope/LAT]
Stress And The Oscar Seeking Director [Carpetbagger/NYT]

Related: Sorry, I Didn't Like Precious [Slate]
Earlier: Awards Season

Sex and the City is a major cultural touchstone, which guarantees that impressions of the series will be deeply polarized. For every person who loves the SATC franchise, there's someone who hates everything SATC stands for. Wolf, however, appears to be firmly in the love camp. While it may be puzzling to consider a noted feminist being firmly pro-Bradshaw, looking at her frame of analysis, it only makes sense.

Wolf argues:

I have written before about how radical it was that the narrative of Sex and the City centered not around a couple — let alone the traditional formula of hero-plus-beautiful-secondary-love-interest. Rather, the core of the tale was always the life-sustaining friendship among four women, as the men in their lives came and went. This break from narrative norms was remarkable not just because Bushnell was insisting that four women — no longer in their first youth – were renewably compelling on their own terms; it was also radical because, in a very un-PC but admirable flouting of feminist norms, Bushnell was brave enough to lay bare the secret – that for many women the search for love is the same urgent, central, archetypal quest story that for men is played out in war narratives and adventure tales. Bushnell was gutsy enough to disclose that even we serious, accomplished, feminist women spend a lot of time, when we are alone with our female friends, telling stories centered on the men with whom we are romantically entangled, exploring the quality of the love and attraction, the romance and the sex. And we are often just that graphic and hopeful and vulnerable and slutty as those four characters.

Wolf is calling out some tropes in pop culture that appear so often, they are considered normal and rarely receive critical analysis. I'm not sure how many episodes of Sex and the City pass the Bechdel test - clearly, conversations about work, money and breast cancer do, but much of the plot is discussing relationships. However, the overall narrative of female bonding cannot be ignored, particularly when so many popular series revolve around a solo girl within a sea of men, or women who are generally appendages/comic relief for the men who carry the series.

There is one line in particular that is critically important: "This break from narrative norms was remarkable not just because Bushnell was insisting that four women – no longer in their first youth – were renewably compelling on their own terms."

In those respects, Sex and the City is revolutionary. Beyond focusing on the lives of women, it focuses on older women, in an industry that tells women that are over the age of thirty that their only role is to be the hot wife or the hot mother. The character who has the most sex also happens to be the oldest character — Samantha is still as fabulous and fly at 50 as she was when she strolled on screen a decade ago. And the fact that four older women carried a television show that focused on their lives is also amazing. Jennifer Kesler, over at the Hathor Legacy, talks about some of the lessons she learned during her time taking film classes at UCLA:

There was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men. That, they explained nervously, was not okay. I asked why. Well, it would be more accurate to say I politely demanded a thorough, logical explanation that made sense for a change (I'd found the "audience won't watch women!" argument pretty questionable, with its ever-shifting reasons and parameters).

At first I got several tentative murmurings about how it distracted from the flow or point of the story. I went through this with more than one professor, more than one industry professional. Finally, I got one blessedly telling explanation: "The audience doesn't want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about."

In this type of environment, any media that challenges the dominant narrative around who is worth watching is worthwhile.

Wolf also continues to make a deeper point - in addition to showing women and their exteriors, Carrie Bradshaw was also given an interior life:

After the shallow or deeper sagas of hot sex or social slights, of hungover breakfasts with the girls or Cosmopolitans and hookups at night, every episode saw the letters unscrolling — often forming quite existential questions — across Carrie's computer screen. Teenage girls watching each episode were taking in a clear message. Not only can I dress up and flirt, seduce and consume, overcome challenges, yield to temptations, take risks, fail, try again – I can think about it all, and what I think will matter.

However, Wolf makes a common assumption that begins to reveal the flaws in her analysis:

It may seem ironic that the first female thinker in pop culture (not in books — books have had them since Doris Lessing) came to us with corkscrew curls and wacky cloth flowers in her hair, teetering on Manolos worn over Japanese-schoolgirl socks. But really, can you name a TV show or film prior to this that centered around a woman reflecting about her life and the world? Carrie, for better or worse, was our first pop-culture philosopher.

I actually can, which speaks to one of Wolf's limitations in argument, and one of the larger criticisms of Sex and the City — often, the analysis around the series speaks for "women" as a collective group, not bothering to realize that there are often other narratives flowing at the same time. For some women, Sex and the City is their cultural touchstone — for others, it's the fabulous foursome in Girlfriends, or before that, Living Single. And many people can relate to all of the series I've named. At the beginning of Sex and the City's heyday, I was still in high school — our Carrie Bradshaw might have been Angela Chase of My So-Called Life, or even the animated character Daria. And I am sure there are some I am forgetting.

Sex and the City is many different things, to many different people. And while it does subvert some paradigms in the pop culture landscape, it does much to uphold others. Sex and the City's issues with diversity are well known and discussed — hell, even the cast of the series started petitioning to see more color on set. But even with that base level of awareness, SATC couldn't help but replicate existing tropes that people of color are generally servants or sex objects. And, while Carrie Bradshaw may have rocked a name plate necklace as an acknowledgment to the types of women who don't have the idealized Manhattan lifestyle, SATC reinforced that well-off, white narratives are the stories worth telling. In some ways, SATC also represents the worst of our consumerist culture, where happiness is counted in Jimmy Choos and Birkin Bags, instead of values and quality of life.

But to only focus on those messages is to ignore why SATC became so popular in the first place — there are universal narratives to this story. Heartbreak is heartbreak, whether it's found in the pained expression of Carrie Bradshaw appraising herself in a mirror after three days of crying, or whether it's Nana Komatsu tearfully turning her back on the boyfriend who betrayed her in the manga series NANA. And friendship is friendship, whether it takes place in an unnamed cafe over breakfast or in the living room of a friend's house.

And that — the humanity rather than the iconography of Carrie Bradshaw — is why so many women are still watching.

Carrie Bradshaw: Icons of the decade [The Guardian]
The Bechdel Test [Wikipedia]
Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test [The Hathor Legacy]
'Sex And The City' Diversifies [CBS News]
NANA [Wikipedia]
Nameplate Necklace [Time]

A particular idea of New York City is still pushed as a character itself — "Empire State of Mind," Carrie comfortably ensconced as Park Avenue princess. There are giggles over the restaurant table, a shot of that famed closet. Charlotte is surrounded by pink cupcakes. Samantha shoots a practiced flirtatious look at a guy. Big is on his cell phone in his towncar. Miranda... walks purposefully.

But just as the first movie took the New York City-centric girls to Mexico (not that it added much, narratively speaking); this one takes them to the desert, filmed in Morocco. Possibly it managed to wring out the last New York truisms. One hopes that they'll be more inventive with their inevitable camel jokes than the Montezuma's Revenge plotline of the first movie.

One of the best essays on that movie, I think, came out before anyone even saw it. Emily Nussbaum wrote in New York in 2007, "The sitcom terraformed the city in its image, turning Manolos and Cosmos and those damned floppy flowers into icons, then something so clichéd as to be oppressive, almost regimented. Three years later, the Zeitgeist, having writ, has moved on: to milfs and grups, among other things. And Brooklyn."

But it turned out there were still plenty of women, in New York and elsewhere, who were happy to fall in line with the SATC regimen, Zeitgeist be damned. I saw them nearly cut each other to get a seat at an advanced screening, dressed in their best approximations of what it meant to be a successfully glamorous woman in New York. And it made $415 million.

"God, how we need this movie and need it to be good," Nussbaum wrote in her pre-release piece. By its end, the show had lost its early idiosyncrasy — the characters became more caricatured and almost kitschy, the fashion became more self-conscious and brittle, and everything became slicker. It became less light social commentary, more prescription for a particular sort of femininity. The first movie did that trend one better. It wasn't good, really — not at all as it turns out. But I wouldn't mind if this one were.

Sex And The City Official Trailer [YouTube]

Related: What Is The Point, Exactly, Of A Sex And The City Movie? [New York Magazine]

Earlier: I Like Sex, I Like This City. I Hated Sex And The City

Of Sex and the City's supposed enduring relevance, Cattrall tells the WSJ, "Post-feminism has been really confusing. It influenced so many women to leave a lot of their feminine qualities behind and assume the business suit." She says SATC offered something different, which is why "it's captured so many women's imaginations. It's truthful and it's real and it's now; it's not dated, and it keeps evolving. These four women really make up one complete woman." That one woman would, of course, be very very rich, and what with Carrie's shoe obsession and Charlotte's fetish for housewares, she'd need a pretty huge home to hold all her stuff. A home that could be designed by Nancy Meyers.

Daphne Merkin noted Meyers' focus on immaculate interiors in her recent Times Magazine profile (which we wrote about last week), but Nicole LaPorte's Daily Beast essay pays even more attention to Meyers's "decorator porn." LaPorte writes,

[T]he sumptuous details in Meyers' films-the gazillion-thread-count sheets; the Park Regent suites; the glintingly new Porsches (none of which seem solely to be there because of product-placement deals)-are so unrelentingly omnipresent in every, single frame that they actually become distracting. During a screening of It's Complicated, Meyers' latest installment of decorator porn, I became so consumed with the outlandish dimensions of Meryl Streep's (a.k.a. Jane, the film's protagonist) Santa Barbara kitchen and all of its Martha Stewart accoutrements-cake plates with perfectly frosted cakes on them; vases stuffed with plump basil-that I missed whole sequences of dialogue.

But that might be just fine — Meyers's films may be just as much about what the characters sleep on as about what they say. Meyers tells Merkin that her lavish interior decorating "softens the message" of her films, but really it only amplifies that message — that women can have everything they want in bed (a man; good sheets) and out. Merkin thinks the point of Meyers's linen fixation is that "your character is attested to by the quality of your bed linens and where good taste stands not only for itself but for all that it exudes in the way of fast cars, moral turpitude, kinky eroticism and political scandal." But the beauty of Jane's home in It's Complicated may speak less to her character per se than to her independence, even her happiness. Merkin writes that Jane is "a professionally successful divorced mother of three who runs a flourishing Santa Barbara bakery and seems content to be on her own when romance sticks its big foot back in the doorway to her life" — and the beautiful house she paid for with her own money may be the filmic symbol of this contentment.

Cattrall's words (uttered, interestingly enough, at a party hosted by a linen company) point to a similar stuff=happiness equation in SATC. The women of that show did "assume the business suit" metaphorically — they all had high-powered careers. But they chose to exercise their economic independence by purchasing very "feminine" accoutrements, like vertiginous heels. Post-feminism is indeed confusing, and the answer both SATC and the Meyers oeuvre seem to offer is to become the sugar daddy you want to marry, and then give yourself lots of expensive presents.

While being able to afford Manolos and chintz without a man around does have a certain "Independent Woman" appeal, neither Meyers nor Sex and the City totally jettisons the Prince Charming narrative — viewers of the first SATC movie will surely remember the giant closet Big buys Carrie. More significantly, portraying independence through buying power is dated, no matter what Cattrall says, and it's also kind of depressing. LaPorte described Meyers's aesthetic as "aspirational," which is exactly the word that women's magazines use when they depict the ideal life as a collection of stuff outside the price range of their readers. Women's happiness has long been defined by restrictive standards of marriage and child-rearing, and the new standard of expensive-shit-buying is no less limiting, even though the tastemakers who promulgate it are often women themselves.

Of course, what many SATC fans loved about the show was not its glitzy shoes or unrealistic real estate (Carrie had a good job, but not that good), but its depiction of enduring female friendship. And Merkin's depiction of Meyers's movies as pleasant wish-fulfillment for women over 55 implies that nobody actually considers such women desirable — a perception movies like It's Complicated may actually counteract. What women of all ages could use are complex roles that focus on all aspects of their lives — not just what they look like to men. Both Meyers and SATC have taken a step towards this — it's just a shame they had to do it in such expensive shoes.

Nancy Meyers' Decorator Porn [Daily Beast]
Can Anybody Make A Movie For Women? [NYT Magazine]
"Sex and the City 2's" Kim Cattrall On The Franchise's Enduring Appeal [Wall Street Journal Speakeasy Blog]

Non-Spoilery Factoid #1: It's Beautiful The plot may be somewhat predictable and the story problematic in several ways, but all of the hype you've heard about the technical brilliance of the film is true: it's an absolutely gorgeous movie, and I've never seen anything quite like it.


Non-Spoilery Factoid #2: "I Hate Manure!" The main villain of the film (this becomes clear quite early and is even somewhat showcased in the trailer, so I don't consider it a spoiler) is eerily reminiscent of Biff Tannen from Back to the Future and the Dip guy from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He's insane and overblown and unintentionally hilarious at times, if only because he's so evil and insane that you expect him to start yelling "What's wrong, McFly? Chicken?" before flying away on his pitbull hoverboard.


Non-Spoilery Factoid #3: Someone You Know Will Fall In Love With Sam Worthington: He's brooding and intense and very easy on the eyes. Whether or not this film will propel him to Team Jacob/Team Edward national Tiger Beat heartthrob status remains to be seen, but I can guarantee that at least one person you know will have a crush on this dude as soon as they see the film. Maybe even an editor of a blog you read!


Non-Spoilery Factoid #4: Monsters Galore: If you're scared of creepy creatures, you might want to steer clear. There are plenty of amazing and horrifying beasts running around in the forests of Pandora. It's a bit like taking a trip to Jurassic Park, only this time you don't get the Jello-shaking warning before something attacks.


Non-Spoilery Factoid #5: It's Worth Seeing In The Theater: I was very skeptical going into the film (and I still have my issues with it, but we'll talk about that when everyone has seen it) and had a hard time mustering up any excitement. To me, it just looked like FernGully: To The Extreme!!! and I was prepared to be bored about 20 minutes in. However, once the film started, I was instantly hooked. For all its flaws (and there are many), it's truly a beautiful and awe-inspiring cinematic experience. I went into the film wary and sick of all the hype, but I left a believer, at least in terms of the technical aspects of the movie. It's not a perfect film, but it's an important one, and definitely worth a viewing.

Earlier: Is Avatar's James Cameron A Feminist Ally?

Nine (which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, and everywhere on December 25) was adapted from the 1982 musical of the same name, so the movie is actually a film based on a musical based on a film. All three are set in Italy in the 1960s and follow director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he tries to come up with an idea for his next project and deal with his messy personal life. He reflects on the women in his life, including his wife, (Marion Cotillard), mistress (Penelope Cruz), best friend (Judi Dench), muse (Nicole Kidman), mother (Sophia Loren), a prostitute (Fergie), and (in a role invented for the film) an American Vogue reporter (Kate Hudson).

All the lead actors have won an Oscars (except Kate Hudson, who was nominated), but reviewers say their musical theater abilities are lacking. They criticize the way director Rob Marshall, who previously directed the Oscar-winning musical Chicago, handles the dance numbers, calling the staging unimaginative and that Marshall and his editors use quick cuts meant to obscure the fact that many of the actresses simply cannot dance. Critics also trash the film's pacing: each actress is given a scene or two and a musical number, then it's onto the next star.

Other complaints: The songs, which were written for the musical, aren't particularly catchy, don't move the plot forward, and aren't integrated well into the film's narrative. Fergie and Marion Cotillard escape the critics' wrath for the most part, but Nicole Kidman "looks parched, stretched, and uncomfortable," Penelope Cruz is "alarmingly unsensual," Kate Hudson "may never recover from gyrating her way through the atrocious 'Cinema Italiano,'" and Daniel Day-Lewis "sounds strangely like the Count from Sesame Street" when he sings. The New York Times calls the whole thing a "travesty," and though the basic theme is the same in Nine and Fellini's original, the New Yorker says, "One is forced to ask: who wants to make, or watch, a major Hollywood musical about mental block?" Below, the reviews.

Reel Views

Nine represents director Rob Marshall's second big-screen musical spectacle. His previous effort, Chicago, won an Oscar; although Nine is likely to win its share of praise, it probably won't come close to achieving the same level of acclaim. Although the production numbers are equally impressive, this film is neither as inspired nor as rousing. Part of the problem may be that there are too many high profile actresses vying for the spotlight and each has to be given her moment to shine. Also, despite following its stage inspiration and bringing structure to Fellini's 8 1/2 (the ultimate source material), Nine still suffers at times from a lack of narrative drive and it doesn't have the surreal, dreamlike quality of 8 1/2 to fall back upon.

The New York Daily News

Unfortunately, each interaction feels like the quickest of flings, allowing us a brief flirtation with a superstar before we move on to the next affair. Everybody gets one or two big scenes, interrupted by an awkwardly-inserted musical number. Some of the actresses are more successful than others - Cruz is playfully sexy, Cotillard soulful, and Fergie impressively earthy - but for the most part, neither the songs nor the choreography are especially memorable. And because the music isn't integrated into the drama, the staging often feels not just theatrical but false.

The Wall Street Journal

The film's most remarkable performance is given by Marion Cotillard as Luisa, Guido's long-suffering wife. Her musical number, "My Husband Makes Movies," has more range than any of the others, from coiled calm to unchained ferocity. And Ms. Cotillard's gift for mystery-the art of doing much while seeming to do almost nothing-serves her brilliantly in the movie's best scene, which couples humiliation with insight.

Rolling Stone

By my score card, Marshall hits more than he misses. Those who hated his music-video editing in Chicago will hate it here. He errs by cutting three great songs ("Getting Tall," "Be On Your Own," "The Bells of St. Sebastian") for three inferior ones. "Cinema Italiano," sung by Hudson, is a tacky, overproduced misfire. He also shortchanges the influence of Catholicism on this man-child, and keeps Guido's nine-year-old alter ego too much in the shadows. Otherwise, his work is visionary and electric. And the script, by Michael Tolkin and the late, much missed Anthony Minghella, is uncommonly witty. Guido begins the film at a press conference telling reporters that to talk about a movie is to spoil its mystery. So I won't intrude except to say that Day-Lewis (who replaced an exhausted Javier Bardem) handles his two songs in high style and acts the role like the maestro he is, even if he looks as Italian as Big Ben.

Salon

Kidman — so appealing in Moulin Rouge, despite her hardly being a perfect fit for musicals — just looks parched, stretched and uncomfortable. There's no sensuousness about her; the best she can muster is a kind of shellacked glamour. Cotillard and Fergie give the finest performances here. Cotillard, done up as an Audrey Hepburn-style minx in bangs, makes demureness sexy, and although her musical number may not be the smoothest of the lot, she still brings the right amount of fire to it. Fergie, on the other hand, practically stops the movie. She's fortunate enough to have the show's finest and catchiest number, Be Italian, and after I watched her slink her way through it, I wished — even though I'm an adamant nonsmoker — there was a bed around so I could flop back on it and have a cigarette. Fergie, who gained some weight for this role, is a voluptuous, purely sexual presence, and a deliciously lethal-looking one: She looks as if she could crush boulders between those thighs. Imagine what she could do to Day-Lewis!

USA Today

The cast members' musical talents are markedly uneven. Day-Lewis' Italian accent works in speech, but when he sings, he sounds strangely like the Count from Sesame Street. The best performers are Cotillard (who won an Oscar portraying Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose) and Stacy Ferguson (aka Fergie ), whose powerful voice works well in a small but distinctive part as sensuous Saraghina. Judi Dench, as Contini's costume designer, sings capably in a French accent in her Folies Bergere-inspired number. Cruz does a steamy song and dance, but her acting is strangely caricatured. Kate Hudson appears in over her head in her extravagant musical sequence, and Sophia Loren talk-sings her role.

The A.V. Club

True, Fellini provides a tough point of comparison for anyone, but maybe Nine should have stayed on the stage, where it could benefit from having a medium all to itself. In Nine, director Rob Marshall, who fared much better with Chicago, does a pretty good job of aping the look and feel of the film's inspiration in the non-musical sequences, but comes up curiously short in the largely imaginative musical numbers. No scene in which Penélope Cruz writhes around in her underwear can be called unsexy, but Cruz's big number remains alarmingly unsensual in spite of all the flesh on display. That Maury Yeston's songs simply aren't that memorable doesn't help.

The New Yorker

To follow in the footsteps of Mastroianni is no enviable task, and Daniel Day-Lewis, adroit as ever, approaches it by changing the steps. Where his predecessor lounged and strolled, or dipped into a clownish stagger, we find Day-Lewis, leaner in physique, forever on the fast and wolfish prowl-hands in pockets, shoulders forward, not pushing his sunglasses cutely up and down his nose, as Mastroianni did, but keeping them on full beam, like the Devil's headlights. He belongs, however, in a more focussed movie; this one feels too sluggish for his predations...

Entertainment Weekly

The women, however, are spirited and sexy. Cruz performs a mock bump-and-grind with real heat, and Fergie, as an oh-so-Fellini-esque beach drifter, turns herself into a wild electric siren. If only the lyrics weren't so awful! Cotillard, a lovely presence, is martyred by having to sing such gems as ''My husband makes movies/To make them he lives a kind of dream/In which his actions aren't always what they seem!'' No wonder Day-Lewis looks like he's having stomach trouble. He spends most of Nine as a haunted spectator, and you want to tell the guy to lighten up. The 
movie Guido is trying to dream doesn't look like much fun, and neither is Nine.

Hollywood Reporter

Nicole Kidman as Guido's "muse" and Kate Hudson as an on-the-make American journalist get to do little. Judi Dench is wonderful and wise as Guido's costume designer-cum-therapist and, fortunately, is not asked to do much in terms of singing and dancing. Fergie is kind of fun as a childhood fantasy of sexuality — in the original film, the whore is fat and slovenly. Cruz and Cotillard get real characters to play, but they're the stuff of bad soap opera. Then there's Day-Lewis. He is an incredibly sexy man and performs all the right moves. The problem is, he keeps performing those same moves over and over, so one experiences not so much artistic angst but a guy trying to sober up from a two-week binge. Sporting a scruffy beard and running a hand through long hair only goes so far.

The Los Angeles Times

And while we're filling the suggestion box. . . . Because Nine is a musical, it would help if your leading man could sing, and I don't mean carry a tune, but actually flex some vocal muscle. Again, love Daniel Day-Lewis, excellent racing shirtless through the forest, but a song-and-dance man he is not.

Nine is one of those films that couldn't look better on paper — so many Oscar, Tony and Grammy winners involved that the production should have literally glittered with all that gold. But in the end, nothing adds up. Perhaps "Zero" would have been a better name.

The Village Voice

Nine might at least have been a guiltily pleasurable burlesque, were Marshall not so intent on turning all his grande dames into vamped-up grotesques. While Fergie emerges relatively unscathed, in part because her role-the feral prostitute Saraghina, from whom the chaste young Guido learns the facts of life-is meant to be a vamped-up grotesque, poor Hudson (as an enterprising Vogue reporter, dumbed down from the play's Cahiers du cinéma film critic) may never recover from gyrating her way through the atrocious "Cinema Italiano," a number that Marshall stages as something like Night of the Living Versace Runway Show. Wisely keeping her distance, Cotillard mostly lurks along the sidelines projecting a wounded visage, before finally stepping into the spotlight for the movie's single moment of emotional sincerity.

The New York Post

Penelope Cruz wriggling around in her underwear - the heavily edited result cannot quite be called dancing - in the best number, "A Call From the Vatican," is about as good as it's going to get in this faux-Fosse eyesore. Maury Yeston's mediocre, imitation-Kander-and-Ebb 1982 Broadway musical has been further edited and updated to suit the vocal limitations of its Weinstein-gerrymandered cast. Or, in the case of Kate Hudson as a journalist for American Vogue who vaguely tries to seduce our hero, the character and her awful number "Cinema Italiano" (in badly lit black-and-white) are interpolations that could be cut without changing the movie one whit.

The New York Times

Stacy Ferguson, known to pop-music fans as Fergie, is Saraghina, the village prostitute who provides the boy Guido with a glimpse of forbidden pleasures. Nice for him. The rest of us watch Ms. Ferguson stomp and gyrate through a number called "Be Italian," which, like so much else in Nine, resembles a spread in a Victoria's Secret catalog, only less tasteful. Ms. Hudson, for her part, struts through an embarrassing hymn to "Cinema Italiano" - with inane lyrics about "hip coffee bars" and Guido's "neo-realism" - that recalls not Visconti or Antonioni (or even the Italian sex farces of the 1970s) but rather those lubricious Berlusconi-esque variety shows that baffle and titillate visitors from other countries who turn on their hotel-room television sets. Those spectacles at least come by their sleaze honestly. "Nine" dresses up its coarseness in bogus prestige, which both kills the fun and exposes an emptiness at the project's heart - a fatal lack of inspiration. The fear of such a void is what animates the Guido character played by Marcello Mastroianni in 8 ½, a man whose vanity, tenderness and narcissism mirrored Fellini's own, and whose anxiety at the prospect of failing as an artist and a man made him a vivid and credible hero. That psychological dimension is missing from Nine, which never finds a way to communicate either the romantic ardor or the artistic passion that would make Mr. Day-Lewis's Guido interesting.

1. Hardcore Career Woman Whose Heart Melts: Pity the loveless, career-driven shrew — that is, until the right man comes along. Best-laid plans, etc. As seen in The Proposal, No Reservations, What Happens In Vegas, Raising Helen, and New In Town, these hard-hearted women learn what really matters through a series of highly convoluted circumstances.

2. Falling In Love With The Help : It's a genre at least as old as Jane Eyre, but the last decade saw no sign of upstairs-downstairs eroticism abating. Often with the service-industry job in the title — Maid in Manhattan, The Wedding Planner, The Nanny Diaries, even Secretary, these movies were mostly Cinderella fantasies, spiced up with power differentials. Love Actually actually managed to fit several such romances into one movie (with Colin Firth, Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman's plotlines).

3. Quirky Girl Brings Adventure: It's good news that eighties-style makeover flicks were in short supply in the last decade. And maybe we can also be happy that in the place of the ugly duckling came the nominally indie, self-consciously quirky girl with the adventurous streak — see Natalie Portman in Garden State, (500) Days Of Summer (actually, this genre is essentially owned by Zooey Deschanel), Nick & Nora's Infinite Playlist, Juno, and even Serendipity and Along Came Polly.

4. Journalist On Assignment (Often Secretly): The traditional media may be in crisis, but on the silver screen, being a journalist remains glamorous, exciting, and the best way to meet a man. How else does one get into romance-ready scrapes? See: How To Lose A Guy in Ten Days, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Rumor Has It, Down With Love, The Ugly Truth, and even wedged into dual audience comedies like Mr. Deeds (an unconvincing Winona Ryder as a tabloid reporter) and Zoolander (Christine Taylor as an investigatory journalist.)

5. The Reformed Bad Boy. This genre allows both male actors and the audience to have it both ways: first, caddish masculinity and assurance that our hero is a guy's guy, then, the right woman to come along and transform him, unwillingly, into a softy. See, for example, Wedding Crashers, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Hitch, Two Weeks Notice, About a Boy, and What Women Want. Who said you can't change a man?

6. My Best Friend's Wedding (Stretched Over Another Decade). There is a strong correlation between the ballad of the overlooked best friend (or sometimes sibling) and the frantic drama of the wedding. Maybe we can blame Julia Roberts — if her character in the 1997 hit didn't get the guy at the end, well, we've spent the oughts making up for it. Movies like Made of Honor, My Best Friend's Girl, 27 Dresses, Definitely Maybe, Just Friends, and In Her Shoes make it clear from the trailer that the buddy will come to his or her senses in 90 minutes or less.

7. Dealing With The Hardass Parents: In-law jokes are a worn genre in and of themselves, but films like Monster in Law, Meet The Parents, Guess Who, You Me & Dupree, and Just Married took it to the next level with slapstick gags about overbearing parents jealously protecting their offspring. An implicit reaction to the new overparenting?

8. Male Lead, Stammering Charm: Whether you preferred him British (Hugh Grant) or Yiddish (Ben Stiller), it was all about the klutzy je ne sais quoi. Grant in particular owned this genre, starting in the 90s and persisting throughout the oughts with the wretched Music & Lyrics, the Bridget Jones' Diary movies, and now Did You Hear About The Morgans?, among others.

9. Fish Out Of Water: Nothing's hotter than being new in town and needing to be initiated by an attractive stranger. See: Save The Last Dance, The Holiday, The Prince & Me, New In Town, and Under The Tuscan Sun.

10. Time Travel: romantic comedies are all about putting road blocks between hero and heroine. And what's a better impediment than living in different ages? In movies like Kate and Leopold, 13 going on 30, 17 Again, and The Time Traveler's Wife, love proved it could triumph over the time-space continuum.

Flying Cars

As my friend used to say when he amused himself by winding his watch backward during history class, "Forward, forward, into the past!" First stop: flying cars. obviously, this mode of transportation was a mainstay of The Jetsons' vision of the future, a vision that revolved around everything being really angular and having lots of buttons. This vision continues to influence us today, in the form of superfluous stupid buttons and dials on what should be simple devices (does my microwave need a "popcorn" button?). You could argue that the simple, streamlined iPod heralded the end of Jetsonian hegemony over consumer technology — or maybe it was the recession and the decreasing popularity of the private jet, an actual flying car for rich people. Then again, we do have robot maids. And robot girlfriends, aka horrible mechanized dough-wads that crawl into bed with you.

The Clean Future

The clean future, best exemplified in Star Trek: The Next Generation and, to a lesser extent, Star Trek: Voyager is a place where clothes never tear, metal never rusts, and people only get sick if it means they'll go crazy and want to fuck their crewmates. Of course, the Star Trek universe has its problems (Borg), but somehow at least those aboard the Enterprise have achieved a kind of cleanliness utopia in which nothing ever looks cruddy for even a second. This is best exemplified by the replicator, which creates food or drink already in a dish so you don't have to boil or chop or otherwise disarray anything in your perfectly ordered living space. The Star Trek universe is basically an obsessive-compulsive's dream. And judging from the fact that even my OCD ass is currently living on top of a squalid pile of old magazines, shoes, and Werther's Original wrappers, I'd say we are pretty far from this vision of the future.

The Dirty Future

Both the clean future and the flying-cars future take a fundamentally optimistic view of technology. But proponents of the dirty future know the truth — shit is always fucking breaking. In the clean future, machines are pretty — in the dirty future, they are ugly and covered in tubing. A good example of the dirty future is the film Brazil, in which the ever-present machinery only makes people's live more dangerous and annoying. The dirty future can also be represented by actual dirt — cf. Mad Max — but its truest message is the constant breakdown of systems humans invent to do their bidding. If anything, the dirty future is the flying-cars future gone horribly awry — and its symbol is not the iPod, but the New York subway system.

The Branded Future

In the branded future, everything is sponsored and there are advertisements everywhere. Blade Runner kind of kicked off this idea with its building-high ads, and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest picked it up with the idea of calendar years sponsored by brands like Depends. The branded future is basically the logical extension of mid-twentieth century corporate culture, the kind that subsidized Little League teams and cute stuff like that. But the branded future is sinister because it implies that no square inch of space in unspoken for – there is no rest for the eye amid the chaos of commercial imagery. And yeah, we are totally there. Downtown LA already has enormous ads on its buildings. If you watch pro baseball, you'll be familiar with shit like the AFLAC Seventh Inning Stretch — time has been subsidized. This future is, sadly for Infinite Jest, now out of date, because it's already here.

The Dystopian Future

As you may have noticed, these categories have some overlap, and a dystopian future can also be dirty (Children of Men), branded (the aforementioned Blade Runner), or clean (Gattaca). But what it must have is a constant feeling of impending doom. This doom comes from one of two sources — the total breakdown of human society (The Road), or an extraneous threat to the planet Earth (the seriously underrated Sunshine, pictured). Of the two scenarios, you really want to get stuck in the latter, because you're less likely to get eaten alive.

The Future's Future
Of course, we seem to have drawn so close to our own doom that even this to be in scenarios don't quite look like the future anymore. So what is the future of tomorrow? What can we look forward to with dread and anticipation at 12:01 AM on January 1, 2010, when everything will obviously be totally different? Well, forward, forward, into the past! The future's new black, if I may speculate, looks like a scene near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey — a bizarre and beautiful room full of Louis XVI furniture in which we drink from the teacup of death. The fact that this scene is eerily similar to the only cool part of The Matrix Reloaded — the appearance of the weird Frenchified Merovingian (pictured) — just confirms for me that this is our inevitable destiny. I know many people have explained the significance of the weird French bedroom scene in 2001, but I have resisted even reading these explanations. The future's future cannot be understood in the terms of today, and it exists outside the technology that makes the clean future clean and the dirty one dirty. There are no buttons; there is no world to end or not end. There is only a bizarrely well-decorated waiting room in which we anticipate our ultimate fate.

Bring It On (2000): The decade kicked off with a spin on the bitchy-cheerleader cliche in teen movies by presenting us with cheerleaders as both heroines and villains in the ridiculously silly Bring It On. Not only did the film poke fun at the world of competitive cheerleading, but it also presented cheerleaders, perhaps for the first time in the teen movie world, as legitimate athletes with serious skills.
Important Life Lesson To Remember: "This is not a democracy, it's a cheerocracy."



Save The Last Dance (2001): I'm using Save The Last Dance to represent every dance-will-save-you movie of the decade, a theme that seemed to run through the past 10 years the way extreme makeovers dominated the teen movies of the 90s. If you could dance in a teen film of the 00s, you could pretty much do anything. As long as you wore a "slammin'" outfit, of course.
Important Life Lesson To Remember: That outfit you're wearing from the Gap is "country, and you look country in it."



Saved, 2004: The dark comedy tale of an uber-religious teenager who becomes pregnant centers not only on the issues surrounding teen pregnancy, but on religion (and the hypocrisy within), abortion, sexuality, disability, love, and the difficulties of finding yourself in high school and breaking away from the worldview that is often imposed upon you by authority figures. It also taught us that it's a good idea to avoid crashing your van into Jesus.
Important Life Lesson To Remember: "So everything that doesn't fit into some stupid idea of what you think God wants you just try to hide or fix or get rid of? It's just all too much to live up to. No one fits in one hundred percent of the time. Not even you."



Mean Girls, 2004: The true heir to the great teen films of the 80s and 90s, Mean Girls stands out for its Tina Fey-penned script and stellar cast, including a top-of-her-game Lindsay Lohan and the always-excellent Rachel McAdams. And while the film is often name-checked and referenced due to its catchphrases, the true importance of the film lies in the exploration of bullying amongst girls in high school, a very real and difficult issue that still needs addressing. The film is already dated in the world of social networking (can you imagine what Regina George would have done with sexting and Facebook?), but the overall message of the film still rings true: high school, and the girls in it, can be a real bitch.
Important Life Lesson To Remember: "Calling somebody else fat won't make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn't make you any smarter. And ruining Regina George's life definitely didn't make me any happier. All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you."



Juno, 2007: Diablo Cody won an Oscar for her screenplay about a 16-year-old girl who discovers she's pregnant, briefly considers abortion, and eventually decides to carry the child to term in order to give it up for adoption. Focusing on Juno's quirks, fears, and frustrations while attempting to navigate both high school and pregnancy, the film attempts to create a character who is much more than an afterschool special cliche. Whether it succeeds or not depends on who you talk to—in our comments, anyway, the film is always fairly divisive. In any case, for all the pop culture posturing and quippy dialogue, there is something quietly honest about Juno; she is depicted in moments of absurdity, weakness, strength, sadness, and acceptance; all elements of growing up and trying to figure out how to make sense of the world when it doesn't seem to make any sense at all.
Important Life Lesson To Remember: "Look, in my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person is still going to think the sun shines out your ass. That's the kind of person that's worth sticking with."

Did I miss any? Feel free to leave your favorite moments from the past 10 years in teen movies in the comments.

Earlier: Important Life Lessons Learned From B-List Teen Movies Of The 90s

The Lovely Bones is the story of Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), who is murdered in 1973 by her neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), after he lures her into his underground den. After her death, Susie, stuck in "the InBetween," watches as her father (Mark Wahlberg), mother (Rachel Weisz), grandmother (Susan Sarandon), sister (Rose McIver), brother (Christian Thomas Ashdale), and a detective (Michael Imperioli), cope with her death and try to solve her murder.

Reviewers say director Peter Jackson, who wrote the film adaptation along with Lord of the Rings screenwriters Fran Walsh (also Jackson's wife) and Philippa Boyens, doesn't do the book justice. While the novel allows readers to create their own image of the afterlife Susie creates for herself, critics dislike Jackson's tacky, overly-saturated CGI vision of heaven. Most of the performances are strong, especially Ronan's, but frequent interruptions by Jackson's fantasy world and a preachy, "Oprah-esque tone" undermine the emotional story of how each family member deals with their grief.

Though the film tones down the more disturbing aspects of the book by having Susie murdered off screen and only hinting at her rape, critics are still offended by how Susie's story is handled. While Jackson's early horror films and Lord of the Rings' work demonstrated that he's fascinated by gory details and Heavenly Creatures revealed an ability to tell a more delicate story, in The Lovely Bones critics say there is too much fantasy and horror, and Jackson shies away from the heart of his source material. Below, the reviews:

NPR

Sitting through Peter Jackson's film of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is an ordeal. I'm not talking about the subject. The book opens with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl, so even a good adaptation would be an ordeal. But Jackson's adolescent New Age computer-generated fantasyland is an excruciating fusion of the novel's primal trauma and his own sensibility, which is more at home with juvenile, male-dominated Lord of the Rings epics. There isn't a second that rings true - on any level.

Rolling Stone

The novel never flinched, the movie does. But Jackson, who builds jolting suspense when Susie's sister enters the killer's lair, is drawn to a spiritual dimension. He may oversaturate the Claritin-ad colors in Susie's in-between place, but he infuses the film with a sense that what lies beyond may have the power to heal. All this is conveyed in the remarkable performance of Ronan, an Oscar nominee for Atonement. She and Tucci - magnificent as a man of uncontrollable impulses - help Jackson cut a path to a humanity that supersedes life and death.

Time

Tucci plays the killer not with a madman's sneers and cackles but with a quiet malevolence; he's never more ice-shivery than when he's pretending to be normal. Such a performance could have upset the movie's balance if Wahlberg hadn't provided the solid foundation of parental devotion. The center, of course, is Ronan, the Irish teen best remembered as the girl whose lie set lives tumbling in Atonement. As the dead girl hovering over her family like a guardian angel, Ronan makes Susie seem an ordinary child whom catastrophe has made otherworldly-wise. Through Jackson's art and Ronan's magic, the obscenity of child murder has been invested with immense gravity and grace. Like the story of Susie's life after death, that's a miracle.

The Los Angeles Times

Other elements, including The Lovely Bones' imaginative notion of what Susie's afterlife looks like, are strong, but everything that's good is undermined by an overemphasis on one part of the story that is essential but has been allowed to overflow its boundaries. That would be the film's decision to foreground its weirdest, creepiest, most shocking elements, starting with the decision to give a much more prominent role to murderer George Harvey. Expertly played by Stanley Tucci, so transformed by makeup as to be almost unrecognizable, Harvey is such an unsettling, toxic individual that the actor says he came close to turning down the role. It's not only Harvey that we see in sometimes grotesque detail, it's the bizarre decorations of the underground murder site that we watch him ever so carefully plan and build, as well as the realistic bodies of his previous victims. And there is of course the chilling time the family spends trying to solve Susie's murder.

Entertainment Weekly

Jackson reduces his Lovely Bones, in the end, to the dramatic contrast between the menace of a hateful killer (will he be caught?) and the grief of a loving father (can he avenge his daughter's death?). Sebold's Lovely Bones, on the other hand, is fleshed out with the perilous, irresistible power of sex - the author acknowledges a real world of extramarital sex and sex between young lovers in addition to the heinous rape from which moviegoers are shielded. The filmmaker handled the sexual power of girls beautifully in 1994's Heavenly Creatures. But here he shies from the challenge, shortchanging a story that isn't only about the lightness of souls in heaven but also about the urges of bodies on earth. Jackson forfeits depth for safe, surface loveliness.

The A.V. Club

The Lovely Bones is often moving, almost in spite of itself. Jackson draws excruciating tension out of scenes where the audience knows exactly what's coming but the characters don't, and his dreamlike, allusive handling of Ronan's murder is stunning. The afterlife scenes are gorgeous, even though they often seem to be ultra-glossy updates of sequences he managed with more heart back in 1994 with Heavenly Creatures. And Ronan remains a tender, touching performer, though Wahlberg edges perilously close to his bug-eyed sincerity mode from The Happening. But for all its successes, Bones remains more crafted than sincere, more meant to look achingly pretty on the screen than to resonate in the heart.

The New Yorker

The book was brought off with considerable delicacy-it's really an affectionately detailed portrait of a suburban girl's life. Literalized in the movie, the material is closer to a high-toned ghost story. Jackson intermingles family goings on with Susie's gossamer interventions, and some of the brushed-with-ether imagery verges on the uncanny. Yet Jackson has become an undisciplined fabulist: the movie is redundant and undramatic. Heaven is notoriously harder to make interesting than Hell, but Jackson has outdone other artists in cotton candy-there are luscious hills and dales, and gleaming lakes and fields of waving grain, and sugarplum fairies with music by Brian Eno rather than by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Lovely Bones has been fashioned as a holiday family movie about murder and grief; it's a thoroughly queasy experience. The lesson that Susie has to learn is that she must "let go" of her past life. Meanwhile, skilled, opportunistic artificers like Alice Sebold and Peter Jackson won't let go of a chance to mingle life and death.

Newsweek

Onscreen, however, The Lovely Bones is a hybrid of unmatching parts-shuffling between thriller, police procedural, family melodrama, and mystical fantasy. There's even a section-when Susie's madcap grandmother (Susan Sarandon) shows up to help the grieving family-during which the movie verges on becoming Auntie Mame. How do you literalize heaven? It's a problem moviemakers have struggled with forever, and Jackson hasn't solved it. Sebold's notion was that everyone creates a heaven to fit her fantasies and wishes. Jackson creates the afterlife of a 14-year-old raised on '70s teen life and pop culture-a kitsch universe of greeting-card imagery and Renaissance Faire clothes. The tackiness, intentional or not, is jarring. Even worse is the vision of Susie and the other murdered girls as a happy, gamboling clan of free spirits. At such moments, the story's willful wish fulfillment seems downright cuckoo.

The New York Times

We all like children, and - at least in our capacity as moviegoers, book-club members and consumers of true-life melodrama - we seem to like them best when they're abused, endangered or dead. Nothing else is quite so potent a symbol of violated innocence, a spur to pious sentiment or a goad to revenge as a child in peril.

[Susie] is, in any case, obsessed with the lives that go on without her, in particular with the ways her siblings and friends and father (Mark Wahlberg, agonized) and mother (Rachel Weisz, narcotized) deal with losing her, something the audience never has to endure. We are always in Susie's company, soothed by her voice-over narration and tickled by her coltish high spirits. This puts a curious distance between us and most of the characters in the film - it makes us, in effect, Susie's fellow ghosts - a detachment that Mr. Jackson's stylish, busy technique makes more acute. His young heroine, played with unnerving self-assurance and winning vivacity by Saoirse Ronan, cares desperately about the poor living souls left in her wake, but it is not clear that Mr. Jackson shares her concern.... the problem with this Lovely Bones is that it dithers over hard choices, unsure of which aspects of Ms. Sebold's densely populated, intricately themed novel should be emphasized and which might be winnowed or condensed.

Slate

The Lovely Bones also exists in the in-between, located somewhere in the interstices between thriller, fantasy, crime procedural (Michael Imperioli, The Sopranos' Christopher, plays the detective who tries to catch Susie's killer), and family-in-dissolution drama. Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz play Susie's grief-addled parents (they also have two younger children, played by Rose McIver and Christian Thomas Ashdale). There are moments that remind you what a master craftsman Jackson can be, like a pulse-pounding suspense scene in which Susie's sister ransacks the killer's house for evidence. But as Susie learns that avenging her death may matter less than giving her family a chance to heal, the movie takes on a weirdly Oprah-esque tone, as if determined to turn child murder into an occasion for personal growth. Scene by scene, the movie alternates between prurient violence and sentimental uplift. If it weren't for the luminous performance of Saoirse Ronan (who, I've said it before and I'll say it again, is going to be a huge star), this would be the kind of movie you'd give up on halfway through.

Variety

With reddish hair, brilliantly alive eyes and a seemingly irrepressible impulse for movement and activity, Ronan represents a heavenly creature indeed, a figure of surging, eager, anticipatory life cut off just as it is budding. Less quicksilver and more solidly built, McIver's Lindsey properly begins in her live-wire sister's shadow only to grow gradually into an impressive figure. Chain-smoking and depleting the liquor cabinet, Sarandon camps it up for a few welcome laughs, while Ritchie seems a likely candidate for teen idolhood. Mainly, it's Wahlberg and Weisz who are shortchanged by the film's divided attention between earthly agony and astral accommodation. Both thesps are OK as far as things go, but that's not nearly far enough.

The Wall Street Journal

And at this point in his working life he can use the prodigious digital resources of Weta, his production facility, to conjure up infinite worlds of special effects. Which, heaven help us, is exactly what he's done to visualize the Inbetween. The result is dumbfounding and ludicrous in equal measure, a too-muchness that makes the excesses of What Dreams May Come seem downright spartan. If Reader's Digest did music videos they might look like this. The screen pulses with bathos and swirls with surreal images, some of them shamelessly intercut with the life of Susie's bereaved family on earth-giant ships in giant bottles, fields of daisies, butterflies, cute dogs, cherry blossoms, baobab trees out of The Little Prince, a hot-air balloon, ice sculptures, snow-covered mountains, a gazebo in a lake, the same gazebo in a corn field, the same field lighted by a lighthouse. By the time Susie finally ascended to the highest realm, I was not only aghast but so exhausted by her surfeit of experience that I heard, as if touched by magic myself, those deathless lyrics from Talking Heads: "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens...."

The Village Voice

In Jackson's hands, The Lovely Bones is doubly appalling. Part Disney's Alice in Wonderland, part Fritz Lang's M, the movie is horrific yet cloying, alternately distended and abrupt, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous... As the novel suggests a form of talk therapy, Jackson's adaptation is a misguided tribute to the magic of the movies-which have always specialized in reanimating the dead. But there is something to be said for representing the actual world and there are some things that can only be visualized in the mind's eye. What heaven could have been more radiant than a child's view of her suburban neighborhood-what spectacle more divine than Susan Sarandon's wig?

Salon

The Lovely Bones is a fiercely delicate and often funny piece of writing, a work of fantasy with a solid footing in reality, and it wouldn't be an easy book for any filmmaker to adapt. Jackson (aided and abetted by frequent collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote the screenplay with him) has reinvented Sebold's story in the most facile and heedless way imaginable: He's turned it into a supernatural thriller.

The Lovely Bones is a perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material. David Byrne once sang, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." There's way too much going on in Peter Jackson's heaven — and yet it isn't nearly enough.

Women & Hollywood's Melissa Silverstein took a look at two pieces: the Actress Salary Report by The Hollywood Reporter and Box Office Of the '00s: The Top Grossing Female Films on IndieWire. Here's what she found:

• Of the 241 films in the last decade that have grossed over $100 million, only five of them are directed by women. (Twilight, What Women Want, The Proposal, Mamma Mia, Something's Gotta Give. Julie & Julia made just under $100 million with $94,125,426.)
• "Only 31 films directed or co-directed by women grossed over $20 million.  Over 1,000 films directed by men did the same."
• The list of the top earning actresses? All white, and (mostly) the same old faces: Julia Roberts, Katharine Heigl, Cameron Diaz, Reese Witherspoon, Kate Hudson, Sandra Bullock, Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Rachel McAdams and, of course, Jennifer Aniston. (Silverstein writes, "I expect to see more boring romantic comedies from her for another 10 years.")

Some of the women on this list are great; many of the women on this list have made flicks (marketed to women) that looked terrible (The Ugly Truth? All About Steve?). But since we know that women buy 50% of all movie tickets, how do we get better product — or at least, quality, profitable product out there?

Keeping the list of successes and the actresses in mind, expect to see, very shortly: A musical romantic comedy about a vampire chef who can't decide if she wants to propose to her werewolf boyfriend. Starring Meryl Streep as the demanding restaurant owner; Julia Roberts as the FBI agent who suspects too much; Sandra Bullock as the Vampire Queen, Cameron Diaz as the health inspector, suspicious of the "special ingredient" in the vampire chef's delectable meals; Jennifer Aniston as the food critic; Reese Witherspoon, Amy Adams and Rachel McAdams as the chef's bffs/potential bridesmaids. With any luck, [insert your favorite vastly underused actress here] could play the chef, in the role of a lifetime.

Women, Hollywood and Money [Women & Hollywood]
Actress Salary Report [The Hollywood Reporter]
B.O. of the ‘00s: The Top Grossing Female Helmed Films [IndieWire]

The film, opening today, is very similar to writer and director Susan Bier's 2004 film Brodre, but critics say that in its American adaptation screenwriter David Benioff (who wrote 25th Hour... and X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and director Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father, In America), fail to capture the psychological intensity of the original. Both films focus on what happens to a soldier's family when they are mistakenly told he died in combat. (Sadly, the war in Afghanistan has gone on for so long that five years later, the new version didn't even have to change the war the main character is fighting in.)

In Brothers, Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire), a Captain in the Marines, returns to Afghanistan for his fourth tour of duty and is presumed dead when his Black Hawk helicopter is shot down. While Sam got good grades in high school, married Grace (Natalie Portman), his cheerleader girlfriend after high school, and had two adorable daughters (Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare), his brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) has always been the black sheep of the family. When the film begins, Tommy has just been released from a three year prison sentence for armed bank robbery; his Vietnam vet father Hank (Sam Shepard) makes it clear that he wishes Tommy could be more like his older brother and, when the family gets the news that Sam is dead, Tommy tries to become a better man and take care of his brother's family. His acts of kindness, unfortunately, backfire: Sam's a different man when he returns from being tortured by the Taliban, and he begins to suspect that Grace and Tommy had an affair while he was gone.

The reviews for the film are mixed. While one critic calls it "the most successful remake of a foreign film since Martin Scorsese reworked Infernal Affairs into The Departed," others say the story takes too long to set up and never really comes together. Natalie Portman manages to create a nuanced character, even though her role as the stereotypical grieving wife is underwritten. Like many recent films about Iraq and Afghanistan, the movie doesn't take a political stance on armed conflict, hoping to simply focus on the impact that war has on soldiers and their families. Brothers however, may not be complex or compelling enough to accomplish that task. Below, the reviews:

Reel Views

Brothersis arguably the most successful remake of a foreign film since Martin Scorsese reworked Infernal Affairs into The Departed and won the Oscar. By remaining rigorously faithful to Susanne Bier's 2004 Danish feature, Brodre, screenwriter David Benioff and director Jim Sheridan manage to retain the themes and psychological nuances of the original while opening it up to a wider English-speaking audience. Subtle differences in the way the actors interpret the characters and small omissions, additions, and changes allow Brothersto stand on its own. This is a powerful, disturbing film that explores common cinematic territory - the ability of war to destroy the individual - without seeming clichéd or familiar.

Reel Views

Brothershas no political axe to grind and, unlike many films that have used the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a backdrop, it has no agenda to pursue beyond the basic one of depicting the dehumanizing consequences of conflict (any conflict, not just today's). The film is antiwar in a general sense, not because it disagrees with the underlying reasons for the war but because it sees a human toll that often goes unreported and unnoticed. News reports would see Sam's story as miraculous - a brave hero originally thought dead being recovered and returned to the bosom of his loving wife and daughters. The reality is grim. Sam's psyche has been shredded; nowhere is this more profoundly obvious than when he finds himself unable to reconnect with Isabelle and Maggie and haunted by a belief that Grace and Tommy are having an affair. He is a broken, dangerous man - the kind of person who has been shaped into a weapon but no longer has a clear focus. By rising above politics and simplistic notions about whether the current war is "right" or "wrong," Brothersis able to offer honest, compelling drama. The film is not unremittingly bleak; in fact, impulses of love and caring define all of the characters in one way or another. The situation is heartbreaking but Sheridan does not flinch in depicting the events that break and remake Sam from the loving man he was into the cold shell who returns. The film ends not mired in bleakness but on a well-earned note of hope.

The New York Times

Reviewing Ms. Bier's Brothers in this newspaper, Stephen Holden referred to the ideas of the psychoanalyst R. D. Laing, who studied shifting roles and identities within family systems. The difference between that film and the remake may be that while Ms. Bier's movie evokes psychological theories, Mr. Sheridan's seems to be applying them... Mr. Gyllenhaal and Ms. Portman, whose role is frustratingly if unsurprisingly underwritten, draw nuances out of the charged air between them. But the characters in Brothers are more shadows and ideas than flesh and blood. They lack specific gravity, a sense of rootedness in family and social reality that would give ballast to the film's intense emotions.

New York Magazine

At times, Brothersis like a less-mythical (and -pretentious) The Deer Hunter, with Maguire even managing to suggest something of Robert De Niro when he was young and thin and wired-when you could see his every cell react. As to the other two leads, Sheridan has gotten the best performances of their young lives. As much as I like Gyllenhaal, I've often found him fuzzy, as if he's wary of losing control. Is that why he's so affecting here? The dissolute Tommy turns out to be as tightly wound as his older brother, only too scared to focus. He looks pitifully vulnerable as he the supposedly dead Sam's family and becomes protective. Portman has the kind of role that turns actresses into dullards: the wife who stands and looks stricken at her man (or men) in paroxysms of rage and grief. But she's so grounded that as the others carry on, your eyes keep drifting to her. Yes, she's almost unbearably pretty, but it's her immediacy that keeps you glued to her face.

The Chicago Sun-Times

Sheridan and his screenplay sources make Brothers much more than a drama about war and marriage. It is about what we can forgive ourselves for - and that, too, has been a theme running through Sheridan's films. As an Irish Catholic of 60, he was raised to feel a great deal about guilt. This becomes Tobey Maguire's film to dominate, and I've never seen these dark depths in him before. Actors possess a great gift to surprise us, if they find the right material in their hands.

USA Today

Maguire reveals a coiled ferocity and a convincingly unhinged, haunted quality. It's a little tougher to buy Gyllenhaal's sweet-natured Tommy as an armed robber. His transformation into a responsible good guy happens swiftly. Still, the two actors bear a resemblance, and their chemistry is evident. Portman is subdued and reactive in a part that doesn't call for her to do much else.

Salon

Of the three leads, Gyllenhaal gives the finest performance. He's jittery and charismatic — his eyes shift uncomfortably, as if he were constantly looking for escape... When [Sam] Shepard and Gyllenhaal appear in a scene together, the air around them is charged — it's as if the searching, vulnerable quality in Tommy's eyes registers as a taunt in the manly-man world of his father. The chemistry is a lot less charged, unfortunately, between Gyllenhaal and Portman... She holds back too much here, as if she has more invested in playing a dutiful wife and mother than she does in playing a human, sexual being. That may not be wholly her fault. My biggest reservation about Brothers is the way it downplays, and too readily smooths over, the sexual attraction between Tommy and Grace. I'm not suggesting that this Hollywood version of Brothers needs graphic sex. (The original didn't have that, either.) But I worry that Sheridan, intentionally or otherwise, may have muted the characters' attraction to one another out of fear that American audiences expect more virtuous behavior from their war-torn families.

The Hollywood Reporter

In a parallel story, the film shows the appalling experiences of Sam and a fellow soldier (Patrick Flueger), who survived the crash but fell into the hands of the Taliban. Unfortunately, this is the weakest section of the film. Bier depicted the real horror in Sam's mental and physical challenges as well as his subtle relationship with his fellow soldier, so you believe the officer would snap and commit a soul-killing act in order to survive. This event is never convincing in the remake.

Variety

Portman has rarely been more movingly subdued as a wife and mother who refuses to let grief overpower her sense of responsibility, while Gyllenhaal is effortlessly believable as a drifter who finds, to his delight and ours, that fatherhood suits him well. Sheridan's empathetic touch with tyke actresses, so evident in 2003's In America, pays off beautifully in his work with young Madison, who's heartbreaking as the older and wiser of the two Cahill girls. With his crew cut and stiff posture (in contrast to Gyllenhaal's looser stance), Maguire is downright scary as a guy who seems to be headed the way of Pvt. Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. But he still looks a tad boyish for the part (Ulrich Thomsen was in his 40s when he played the role for Bier), and his decision to go explosively over-the-top at moments only exposes Sam as a psychological construct — more walking antiwar statement than full-blooded human being.

Time Out New York

So much of the preceding is goo-laden with mopey guitars and adorable kid shots, Jim Sheridan's dual faults as a director. Still, shouldn't we expect fireworks when an emaciated, paranoid Sam confronts the family he can no longer connect to? There's an unwillingness to deliver the payoff; Brothers feels less like the Oscar-bait cinema we expect this time of year as much as an ersatz version that requires you to fill in the gaps. (The nearness of the recent The Messenger doesn't help.) We're supposed to creep up to the idea that war can steal more from a person than life and limb. That can't be conveyed in a few simple scenes of kitchen histrionics. Sheridan brings on U2's chords of healing way too soon.

The A.V. Club

With all these elements in place - brother against brother, intimations of adultery, and post-traumatic stress disorder at the top, not to mention alcoholism, crushing guilt, a cruel father, and assorted other crises - Brothersseems like a powder keg ready to go off. And though someone clearly lit the fuse on the normally mild-mannered Maguire, the film takes a leisurely hour to get to its dramatic core, with scenes from Afghanistan on loan from The Deer Hunter. Still, the intrinsically powerful material occasionally pierces through, with Gyllenhaal especially strong as a reformed yahoo who suddenly takes on more responsibility than he seems capable of handling. Brotherssupplies him and the other actors with a slew of big dramatic moments, but the emotions ring louder than any truths.

The New York Post

Having seen the trailer for Brothers and now the finished film, I feel as though I just watched the trailer twice. A thin script written by David Benioff and directed by Jim Sheridan (who based his film on a Danish one) is merely a promising first draft, a vague drama that is sort of a soapy love triangle ("I thought you were dead!" etc.) and sort of an inquiry into the post-battle trauma afflicting a Marine captain burdened by a gruesome secret about his captivity in Afghanistan... The movie is reasonably compelling and decently acted, but at no point is it convincing. It skips past essential plot points (why would the military report the Marine dead instead of MIA if his body was never found?), as well as deeper emotional quandaries.

The Washington Post

Is it a movie you'll enjoy? Not enjoy, so much as appreciate. Or maybe recognize. Adapted by writer David Benioff and director Jim Sheridan from a 2004 Danish film of the same name, Brothers is depressing as hell. And, like most war movies these days, it ends on a note that's far from hopeful. But it's good, and wise, and it feels true. Meaning, it hurts... Though the term post-traumatic stress disorder is never mentioned, the film is one harrowing case study in PTSD, with a long, lingering emphasis on the P. As Sam notes, in voice-over, at the film's bleak and wrenching conclusion, "only the dead have seen the end of war."

Divided into sections titled "Reading," "Being," "Seeing," "Feeling," and "Remembering," Changing My Mind is a book of "occasional essays," which Smith describes as "written for particular occasions, particular editors." Because of this structure, the collection doesn't feel particularly unified, but that isn't necessarily a weakness. Different readers will likely find different essays to love, but even those that don't grab the heart tend to engage the brain. Not having read any George Eliot, I found "Middlemarch and Everybody" hard going at first, and all the essays in "Reading" are pretty unapologetic about the specialized knowledge they require for full enjoyment. On the other hand, Smith's writing usually had the effect of making me really want to read the book she was talking about, especially Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Smith writes,

This is a beautiful novel about soulfulness. That it should be so is a tribute to Hurston's skill. She makes "culture" — that slow and particular and artificial accretion of habit and circumstance — seem as natural and organic and beautiful as the sunrise. She allows me to indulge in what Philip Roth once called "the romance of oneself," a literary value I dislike and yet, confronted with this beguiling book, cannot resist. She makes "black woman-ness" appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals across centuries and continents and languages and religions...

Almost — but not quite. That is to say, when I'm reading this book, I believe it, with my whole soul. It allows me to say things I wouldn't normally. Things like "She is my sister and I love her."

A more evocative description of literary identification I've never read, and Smith's examination of the ways her blackness does and doesn't influence the way she reads Hurston will resonate with anyone who's ever found a "sister" on the page, of any race. It also provides a corrective to the opposite but equally restrictive notions that we can only enjoy books whose writers we identify with culturally, and that cultural identification has no place in the literary experience.

There was a strain of nastiness in Smith's novel On Beauty — characters who lacked physical self-confidence sometimes seemed like the novel's whipping boys (or girls) — and that nastiness occasionally resurges in Changing My Mind. In "Two Directions for the Novel," it's pretty clear that Smith thinks writer Joseph O'Neill has chosen the wrong direction. Of a passage from his novel Netherland, she writes, "an interesting thought is trying to reach us here, but the ghost of the literary burns it away, leaving only its remainder: a nicely constructed sentence, rich in sound and syntax, signifying (almost) nothing." "Two Directions" makes an interesting argument for Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder as a model for fiction that gains new flexibility by breaking through the restrictions not just of attractive language but of human psychology. But can't fiction writers learn to praise one kind of writing without denigrating another? Is literature really a zero-sum game?

In a way, though, Smith's meanness just added to the growing conviction I had as I read Changing My Mind: that I was being granted a peek into the idiosyncratic brain of a very, very interesting person. This conviction reached its apex with Smith's film reviews. Smith claims in the very moving "Dead Man Laughing" that at her audition for a comedy troupe at Cambridge, "I wasn't funny. Not even slightly." She appears to have rectified this. Here she is on Get Rich or Die Tryin', addressing Fiddy directly:

I love that there are more naked men in this movie than in Brokeback. I love that you keep getting your fellow gangsters to admit that they love you. Really loudly. In the middle of robberies. I love the Beckettian dialogue: "I'm in it for the money." "For what?" "Sneakers." "Anything else?" "A gun." "What you need that for?" "I don't know." I love that you watched GoodFellas and Scarface, like, a million times and decided to ditch all that narrative arc crap and get straight to the point with a minimalist voiceover: "Crack meant money. Money meant power. Power meant war." I love how your acting style makes Bogart look animated. I love that the boss of your gang is dressed like Brando and is doing the voice from The Godfather. And then there is this: "So that was the crew. Four niggas dedicated to one thing and one thing only: getting paid and getting laid."

And sometimes Smith is just bizarre. In her review of The Weather Man, she writes,

I think I found the film palatable because I read it perversely. As I see it, the film's central concept is the aversion most right thinking people have to the actor Nicolas Cage. And he accepts this mantle so honorably and humbly in the film that I think maybe now I quite like him. It's an honest and comic performance and seems filled with all the genuine humiliations that one imagine Cage himself has suffered in the past 10 years. I don't want to tell you any more about it — it's best stumbled upon without expectations but with my reading kept in mind.

This is basically an anti-review, and Smith's general approach to film reviewing is so funny and ad hoc and fucking weird — yet so frequently spot on — that it made mean wish she hadn't quit doing it in 2006. More than that, it made me wish I still wrote film reviews. Changing My Mind may be most inspiring to other writers — I don't know of anyone else who actually likes essays on writing, even ones as smart as Smith's "That Crafty Feeling." But anybody who appreciates frank and well-informed and slightly off-center thinking will likely find what I did — that Smith makes one want to read more, think more, and generally be smarter, which is about the best thing a writer can do.

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays [Amazon]

About midway through watching New Moon with two friends, I realized I was having a lightbulb moment. I got it. Suddenly, in the theater, I realized why this series is so popular, why all the criticisms of Meyer's work slide off like it is made of teflon, how the story of a somewhat codependent teenager torn between two increasingly controlling objects of affection is enticing enough to spend weeks on best-seller lists and to break box office records. To condescend toward this type of fandom is a mistake (even if said snarking is both hilarious and on point). In order to unlock the saga's chokehold on teens, we must use its own conventions. In other words - we need to learn how to reach teens from Twilight.

This may seem like a strange admission to make. After all, feminists and fans of young adult literature alike have been warning against Stephanie Meyer's siren song for years now. Newser points out how many of the headlines surrounding the massive success of the franchise focus on the sexism inherent in the series. Grady Hendrix, writing for Slate, notes:

Just as America's young men are being given deeply erroneous ideas about sex by what they watch on the Web, so, too, are America's young women receiving troubling misinformation about the male of the species from Twilight. These women are going to be shocked when the sensitive, emotionally available, poetry-writing boys of their dreams expect a bit more from a sleepover than dew-eyed gazes and chaste hugs. The young man, having been schooled in love online, will be expecting extreme bondage and a lesbian three-way.

Even Ms. Magazine, which has remained somewhat indifferent to pop culture, gets in on the action, with Carmen D. Siering explaining:

Fans of the books, and now a movie version, often break into "teams," aligning them- selves with the swain they hope Bella will choose in the end: Team Edward or Team Jacob. But few young readers ask, "Why not Team Bella?" perhaps because the answer is quite clear: There can be no Team Bella. Even though Bella is ostensibly a hero, in truth she is merely an object in the Twilight world. Bella is a prize, not a person, someone to whom things happen, not an active participant in the unfolding story. [...]

Maybe it's difficult for Edward to see Bella as an equal because Bella has almost no personality. Meyer writes on her website that she "left out a detailed description of Bella in the book so that the reader could more easily step into her shoes." But Meyer fails to give Bella much of an interior life as well; Bella is a blank slate, with few thoughts or actions that don't center on Edward. Outside of him and occasional outings with werewolf Jacob, Bella doesn't do anything more than go to school, cook and clean for her dad, write to her mother, read and romanticize over Victorian literature and find fault with her clothing. She has no other interests, no goals, few friends: Bella does nothing that suggests she is a person in her own right. If Meyer hopes that readers see themselves as Bella, what is it she is suggesting to them about the significance of their own lives?

And indeed, there is much to hate about the series. Hell, I even put forth an analysis of racism within the series.

So how can I suddenly advocate to understand Twilight, instead of destroying it?

I speak not to disprove what others spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.

To be a teenager is a difficult thing. Desires war against common sense, ephemeral things (like boy bands) take on deep, long lasting meaning, and you are devoted to friends, peers, and lovers. Everyone seems to want to separate you from what you want. And, even with the best intentions, those of us who hate Twilight are just feeding the mania. We bludgeon them with reason and forget two key things:

• 1. Fandom doesn't run on logic, and
• 2. A large part of exploring the boundaries of growing up is choosing things for ourselves - whether we make the wrong decisions or somehow stumble upon the right ones.

Sitting in the dark space I shared with another 40 or so people to watch the film last night, it dawned on me. I listened to the cheers that went up when Jacob Black removes his shirt for the first time, the laughter that erupted when Bella cracks her head while trying to cliff dive her way to Edward, and the radio silence when Edward confesses his undying commitment to Bella. I realized that Twilight does not represent a failure of feminism, but rather a golden opportunity to evaluate where we can focus on outreach.

How often do we get a non-personal opportunity to talk about issues with obsessive relationships? Promoting the idea of passive femininity and promoting an idea of controlling and all-powerful masculinity. While we may wince at the portrayals of Bella, Edward, and Jacob in the context of their relationships, it would be foolish to pretend that Meyer isn't just tapping into societal ideas surrounding heterosexual relationships and power dynamics that already exist. The documentary Micky Mouse Monopoly explores the messages portrayed in Disney films:

By exploring these themes with teen and preteen girls in a questioning, not a confrontational tone, adults can help them to discover for themselves why the things that Edward and Jacob do in the name of "love" are not okay. Conversely, teenage and pre-teen boys are also paying attention to the cues they are learning from Twilight. I was shocked last year to learn that my younger brother, whose sole ambition at the age of 11 is to sag his pants as low as possible, and to be as cool as possible by knowing every popular rap lyric on the radio, pulled out a Twilight DVD when I came to visit and offered to put it on "because this is what girls like." Apparently, his "girlfriend" - a term he defines as a female who gives him her phone number - and most of the other girls he knows love Edward or Jacob.

What are young boys learning about how to behave in relationships when they are exposed to Twilight?

A very similar message as to what they learn through Disney:

Just as Jacob started out as a genuinely nice kid who switched over to being a Nice Guy, when he realized Edward's tactics of being forceful and controlling were working on Bella, there are potentially thousands of boys who could decide that the way to win a girl's admiration is by emulating Jacob and Edward's controlling behaviors.

Only by understanding and critically engaging with the Twilight saga can parents and other adults start looking at what aspects of this series appeal to teens and where else they can channel their attention.

After all, the Twilight mania won't rule the world forever. The teenagers now will get older, a new crop of teen idols will arise. What will endure from Twilight won't necessarily be the messages of sexism - those are reinforced in thousands of different ways every day, and Stephanie Meyer will not be the last author to tap into them. What adults and pop culture critics should pay attention to is how Twilight breaks with many different conventions that have come to be accepted as normal. As Neesha writes on Racialicious, how often do girls get a chance to explore their budding sexuality in a safe (fantasy) space? I'm sure many of the young women who watch Twilight will have also seen the Transformers franchise, featuring Megan Fox as hyper-sexualized eye candy. How often do they see a movie geared at teens and young adults that allows for the main heroine to wear double layer shirts and oversized jackets? And how often do studios discount budding adolescent desire, and fail to consider that perhaps, girls would also like to see attractive, shirtless men parade around on screen?

Indeed, the mania resulting from New Moon and other parts of Twilight saga allows more than just an easy feminist critique - it also allows the opportunity for adults to influence the great Twilight-after. Eventually, all of the books will be read, and all of the movies will be left. What could be next? Can they help to exert small variations in the narrative by encouraging teens to write their own fan fiction (and guide Bella in their own ways)? Can they recommend other books to fill the aching gap left by the end of the Twilight saga with similar content but more progressive leanings? (Try Kelley Armstrong's The Summoning, Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness quartet, The Silver Kiss and Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause, The Uglies Series, by Scott Westerfeld, and Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier, for starters.)

There is so much possibility within the world that Meyer has created to reach out to teens. And the way to do it isn't by dismissing their fandom, but engaging within their world, on their terms. As Nancy Gibbs writes in Time magazine, "Kids, like adults, resist force-feeding."

We can't force anyone to take their medicine. But what adults can do is allow teens the space to explore, grow, and come to their own conclusions on their own time. All they need to do is be ready, and willing.

O judgment! thou teens art fled to both brutish beasts (vamp and were),
And women have lost their reason. Bear with me;
Their hearts are in the coffin there with Edward (or in the forest, with Jacob),
And I must pause till they are ready to hear me.

New Moon' Breaks Midnight Record [Box Office Mojo]
LDS Sparkledammerung IS HERE! [Stoney321's LiveJournal]
New Moon Sexist, Say Critics [Newser]
Vampires Suck [Slate]
Talking Back to Twilight (Partial Article, Full in Print Only) [Ms.]
Running With the Wolves – A Racialicious Reading of the Twilight Saga [Racialicious]
Mickey Mouse Monopoly: Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power [Media Education Foundation]
Friends [XKCD]
Disney, Twilight and Bollywood: Reinforcing the Purity Myth or Fantasy of Safe Sexual Exploration for Young Girls (and Their Mothers)? [Racialicious]
The Gospel of Glee [Time]