Movie Mom

Long before they starred in this week’s “Star Trek: Into Darkness,” Benedict Cumberbatch and Alice Eve appeared in the sweet indie romantic comedy “Starter for 10,” also featuring James McAvoy (“X-Men First Class”) and Rebecca Hall (“Iron Man 3″).

One of my favorite television series for kids is the wonderful PBS show “Word Girl,” and this new release is one of the best: Wordgirl vs the Energy Monster.

WORDGIRL and her sidekick CAPTAIN HUGGY FACE fight the good fight against dastardly villains and bad vocabulary in this thrilling collection!

Dinner Or Consequences (Parts 1 & 2): Dr. Two Brains and the Energy Monster want to turn the whole city into cheese! It’s up to WordGirl to stop them even if it means missing her family feast and facing the consequences.

Best Fan Club Meeting Ever: TJ plans to divulge a secret about WordGirl to International WordGirl Fan Club members, until Tobey threatens to destroy the clubhouse. Will WordGirl save the clubhouse and her fans?

Day at the Museum: Scoops takes Becky, Bob, and Violet to the museum to find inspiration for his next news story. When they go in search of a haunted treasure, The Butcher follows right behind! WordGirl enriches vocabulary skills, fosters better reading comprehension and instills a love of language in all children.

And what great words will she learn?

I have a copy to give away!  Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with WordGirl in the subject line and tell me one of your favorite long words.  Don’t forget your address!  I’ll pick a winner on May 20.  (US addresses only)

Did the folks at Disney even watch “Brave?”  One of the great strengths of Pixar’s first movie starring a female character (and its first originally written by a woman, Brenda Chapman, though she was replaced by a male director) was that its feisty heroine, Merida, looked like a real girl and not a wasp-waisted “princess.”  But Disney released art showing that she had been given what she would never have put up with in the film — a makeover.  The drawing on the Disney Princess website had a Merida who was more slender, bustier, and had eye make-up.

After protests by Chapman, bloggers, and a Change.org petition, Disney has backed down and Merida is back to the way we love her.

I’m interested in James Franco’s take on “The Great Gatsby” because of what this polymath who attended two grad schools at once has to say about the challenges of adapting great writing to the screen and the differing goals and audience expectations of a book now viewed as a classic and a movie.

The critics who’ve ravaged the film for not being loyal to the book are hypocrites. These people make their living doing readings and critiques of texts in order to generate theories of varying levels of competency, or simply to make a living. Luhrmann’s film is his reading and adaptation of a text—his critique, if you will. Would anyone object to a production of Hamlet in outer space? Not as much as they object to the Gatsby adaptation, apparently. Maybe that’s because Gatsby is so much about a time and a place, while Shakespeare, in my mind, is more about universal ideas, ideals, and feelings. Luhrmann needed to breathe life into the ephemera and aura of the 20s and that’s just what he succeeded at.

A film, of course, relies on an immediate tension in a fundamentally different way than a book. And barring the most cinematic of texts, films developed from literary sources must run along a tighter thread. Once Gatsby’s mission of wooing Daisy back is accomplished, some of the wind is taken out of the story. We don’t really care about their relationship as much as we care about Gatsby’s overblown efforts to rise in social and economic status to get her back. And this is a universal and rarely accomplished goal that is still relevant today, made even more so by the director’s use of modern window dressing. Gatsby’s desire is revealed to be that of a 16-year-old boy: not only does he want to win Daisy, he wants to control her affections. It reminds me of my high school relationships, where I tortured girlfriends for getting fingered by other boys when they were freshmen. Just move on, dude. We are obsessed by his obsession but aren’t significantly moved by his accomplishment of the goal.