Did you see Atonement over the weekend? Uncharacteristically enough, I did. For the uninitiated it's a wrenching love story about Keira Knightley and James McEoy, and Keira is good and James McEvoy is devastatingly hot, but neither of whom are anywhere near as interesting as the other couple portrayed in the movie, red headed cousin Juno Temple and the Benedict Cumberbatch (whoa names!!), who depict the 15-year old Lola and chocolate factory tycoon who loves her so much he sexually assaults her, Paul Marshall. I saw this movie with approximately five other people, four of whom thought Lola was totally, definitively, without a doubt full-on raped by the chocolate guy. I thought the situation was a little more complex than that — that there was an element of consent to what went down between them or things wouldn't have turned out the way they did. Unless I was supposed to believe there were, like, roofies in that chocolate bar or something. Does this make me a bad person? I consulted the internets...
And lo, it turns out one kid in every A-level lit class agrees with me, albeit they seem to have actually read the book, which is the sort of practice in which I don't generally partake. But anyway, even though she was 15, it was hard to look at Lola as a helpless victim trying to make things right by marrying her rapist a la the victims of Jeffrey Marsalis. I thought the whole thing was the desperate — but ultimately rational — response to her parents' divorce.
I could be wrong!
Anyhow in other news the actress who played Lola has really weird hair in real life.