Let's have a fangirl freakout over Greta Gerwig's LITTLE WOMEN (Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, Timothée Chalamet)

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So did I! Found the comment iffy because I loathed the film, I guess.

XP best bit was the negotiations for better conditions/deal for her book in the end lol.

xyzzzz__, Saturday, 28 December 2019 07:57 (four years ago) link

From that review:

"Gerwig imitates Alain Resnais through time-shift edits connecting the publication of Jo’s first book to memories of her family’s history. She gets away with this odd sophisticated device by maintaining emphasis on feminist resentment."

The time shifts are incredibly light and are pretty standard fare now - not even worth putting that reference in, and even so the technical achievement very rarely carries a film by itself.

Can't even competently hate.

xyzzzz__, Saturday, 28 December 2019 08:16 (four years ago) link

only a publication as irredeemable as national review would still run a writer as vile as armond white has become

(The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Saturday, 28 December 2019 08:46 (four years ago) link

Lol aren't the "memories" at the end mostly fiction? All that golden pap simply Jo's cynical imagination? Of the last scenes only the ones in the great light of the new York publishing house are "real.'

plax (ico), Saturday, 28 December 2019 11:18 (four years ago) link

Loved every minute of this. Of course the acting is excellent across the board, but I particularly enjoyed Pugh (a tricky role) and Dern. Though my wife and I did turn to each other after to confirm that as much as we love him as an actor, it's hard to see Bob Odenkirk in period garb and not think it's a bit.

Oh, and also, one of my daughters is struggling with a really bad cold. Her medicine wore off toward the end, so she had to dramatically stifle a sneezing fit right around when Beth died ... and it came out as this hilarious squeak that sent her, me and my other daughter into a barely contained fit of hysterics at the exact wrong time. I literally had tears running down my cheeks, but for all the wrong reasons. It took the three of us maybe two minutes to get our shit together, right as the movie hit peak sad. I felt so bad.

Josh in Chicago, Sunday, 29 December 2019 03:20 (four years ago) link

Dern was such a great choice for Marmee. She is so good at carrying multiple emotions & yet she has that beautiful looseness about her... she’s the best

terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Sunday, 29 December 2019 04:17 (four years ago) link

 hard to see Bob Odenkirk in period garb and not think it's a bit.


I just now occurred to me that Odenkirk is now known to so many people who have no idea Mr. Show even existed

Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Sunday, 29 December 2019 13:52 (four years ago) link

Another Gaze dissents

Reviewers have rushed to celebrate Gerwig’s Little Women, arguing that it shows that “dreams and ambitions can be greater and more soaring than Louisa May Alcott, trapped in the 19th century and kicking against it, could ever have hoped”. Really? As an adaptation, the film enacts few interpretive and material shifts for women. Meg stays dull, Amy irritating, and Beth dead. What does this lofty praise – so keen to find feminist value and demonstrate progress – say about the current culture of feminism? For all its modern chat and sass, Gerwig’s feminist vision is nostalgic, its structural back-and-forth rose-tinted. In Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic, Belén Vidal argues that period drama relishes in the “spectacle of pastness and its intricate signs” but also notes that in period film “pastness appears disconnected from the (historical) past by an aesthetic of surfaces” and this feels true of Little Women’s most spectacular scenes. In the vast New England landscapes or within the grand house of Mr. Laurence we are disconnected from History per-se and plunged into a free-floating aesthetic of association. Christmas scenes evoke Robert Frost, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods and Thomas Kinkade, a non-specific, idealised past. This sense of spectacular familiarity is common to adaptation and Gerwig plays on this through visual references to Armstrong’s Little Women, re-assembling the March sisters and their mother, Marmee (Laura Dern), in the same fireside poses. Through this referencing, Gerwig takes us out of History and into a hyper-constructed past, a mise-en-abyme that links her Little Women back to Armstrong, to Alcott and to the Little Women culture industry, bringing the viewer, through its self-reflexive system of citation, into a temporal loop between past and present. This is paralytic. With an ironising retrospective gaze, Little Women falls in line with what Owen Hatherley calls the “ironic-authoritarian-consumerist dreamworld” of the nostalgia industry which simplifies, limits and depoliticises the past for easy consumption in the modern marketplace. Little Women is marketed and will likely appeal to young people – young women. It’s sad, then, that this is a version without real consistent anger, that gives occasional voice to the rage of Jo and Marmee but which wraps up their fury in a linen shawl by the close of each scene, the bright scenery and music propelling them inexorably towards happiness. Sarah Ahmed’s Killjoy Manifesto highlights the “political utility of happiness” that is used to “justify social norms and social goods”, suggesting we should celebrate the figure of the feminist killjoy who disturbs normative happiness to assert herself. Is Jo a killjoy? Was Alcott? In the original book their rage pushes against their world, but Gerwig’s character’s anger, although articulated verbally, barely builds beyond each scene, dissipating into the spectacle, given no object or oxygen to keep it alive.

In an interview with Film Comment, Gerwig describes how she took material from Alcott’s other work and added her own flourishes. A line from a different monologue that went “Women have minds, as well as just heart; ambition and talent, as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying love is all a woman is fit for” is embellished with the additional clause: But I’m so lonely. In Gerwig’s Little Women, Jo says this to her mother in a monologue following Beth’s death. For Gerwig, this was a modern tweak that served to highlight the hardships of living ahead of your time, which she links to her own feelings of loneliness as a writer – “I was alone.” Yet far from instilling a sense of sisterly solidarity across time, her tinkering injects a sense of isolation and atomisation: anger becomes sadness, individuality becomes loneliness. The opening title of Gerwig’s film is also an edited quote from Alcott, “I’ve had lots of troubles, so I write jolly tales”, taken from an entry in her diaries where she discusses novel writing with a fellow female author. The rest of the quote, cut by Gerwig, continues, “and we wondered why we each did so” – a crucial clause that reframes individual feeling as a structural cultural issue, undermining the twee naivety of the first pronouncement. Gerwig’s editing of Alcott’s writing incises the radical doubt and nuance that characterised Alcott’s approach – it is a misrepresentation, a false justification for the jollity that follows. Lauded for taking the original “to new feminist heights”, Gerwig’s Little Women in fact fails to engage with the proto-feminist spirit of the original, let alone the radical potential for which a modern adaptation might allow. Instead, the film imbricates a knowing irony, a self-aware stylisation, into the fabric of the original text, but leaves the central tropes of the novel intact. The commitment to re-shaping, rather than re-writing the narrative and ideology of the original means that Gerwig’s Little Women remains a celebration of compromise, rather than radical fulfilment.
https://www.anothergaze.com/little-women-little-change/

bold caucasian eroticism (Simon H.), Sunday, 29 December 2019 14:17 (four years ago) link

This sense of spectacular familiarity is common to adaptation and Gerwig plays on this through visual references to Armstrong’s Little Women, re-assembling the March sisters and their mother, Marmee (Laura Dern), in the same fireside poses. Through this referencing, Gerwig takes us out of History and into a hyper-constructed past, a mise-en-abyme that links her Little Women back to Armstrong, to Alcott and to the Little Women culture industry, bringing the viewer, through its self-reflexive system of citation, into a temporal loop between past and present.

Sentences like these inspire me to write, "Whiney G. Winegarten" otm

TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 29 December 2019 14:31 (four years ago) link

Don't know Scanlen so didn't know she was Australian, but that means all four girls were played by not American actors, which is kind of neat.

Josh in Chicago, Sunday, 29 December 2019 14:48 (four years ago) link

xposts Dissents like that are so obnoxious, because at the very least the film is exceptionally well acted and directed and if not radical still very well adapted, which really is or should be enough. It's a joy, which we can always use more of, too middlebrow or whatever or not.

Josh in Chicago, Sunday, 29 December 2019 14:54 (four years ago) link

I think taking exception to ppl proclaiming it as a cutting edge feminist vision is fine.

bold caucasian eroticism (Simon H.), Sunday, 29 December 2019 15:32 (four years ago) link

Yeah I mean it seems otm, good movie tho

Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby), Sunday, 29 December 2019 15:33 (four years ago) link

I'm not sure I've read any reviews, tbh. Are there many reviews that claim it's a cutting edge radical feminist film? I mean, I believe it, but I doubt it.

Josh in Chicago, Sunday, 29 December 2019 15:43 (four years ago) link

There's one cited in the first sentence of that quote, for starters.

bold caucasian eroticism (Simon H.), Sunday, 29 December 2019 18:40 (four years ago) link

Where's the quote from?

Josh in Chicago, Sunday, 29 December 2019 18:52 (four years ago) link

I'd say the Guardian review quoted in the first line is rather poorly written, period.

TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 29 December 2019 18:53 (four years ago) link

Another Gaze review is very otm. Enjoy the look, see there is nothing much beyond that too.

Really liked how it didn't even talk about the men they marry lol.

xyzzzz__, Monday, 30 December 2019 08:14 (four years ago) link

I saw an Anthony Lane piece in The New Yorker that talked about the cast. Really boring.

xyzzzz__, Monday, 30 December 2019 08:19 (four years ago) link

armond white > anthony lane

mark s, Monday, 30 December 2019 08:49 (four years ago) link

What’s less clear, however, is whether she manages to update its vision of feminism for the 21st century.

Should she?

TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 30 December 2019 11:24 (four years ago) link

I haven't seen this version yet but going by some of the reviews I am getting confused that it's set in the present because of lines like that ^^^.

For a lot of the country, it's still entirely a radical idea that a woman doesn't desire marriage or kids or playing caretaker for the men in the family.

Yerac, Monday, 30 December 2019 12:23 (four years ago) link

I mean, how do you update an adaptation of a story from the late 1800s, set in the late 1800s, for the 21st century? Give them lasers?

Josh in Chicago, Monday, 30 December 2019 13:34 (four years ago) link

Have Letters to Cleo perform on the roof of the high school.

Yerac, Monday, 30 December 2019 13:37 (four years ago) link

I kind of lol'd at the Another Gaze bit that criticises the lack of consistent anger or rage in Little Women.

Yerac, Monday, 30 December 2019 13:39 (four years ago) link

Jo could have been a prolific tweeter.

Josh in Chicago, Monday, 30 December 2019 13:46 (four years ago) link

i am the most feminist little woman (2019) pic.twitter.com/ietTbpUAuI

— Eva Victor (@evaandheriud) August 14, 2019

Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Monday, 30 December 2019 17:17 (four years ago) link

this is neat

I love this detail from the Hollywood Reporter directors' roundtable. https://t.co/D54lDjml20 pic.twitter.com/S5q7l57XKG

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) December 24, 2019

bold caucasian eroticism (Simon H.), Monday, 30 December 2019 17:42 (four years ago) link

Enjoy how this thread went from largely positive to discourse about whether the film is feminist enough (ffs)!

Anyway saw this and really liked it. But then I have loved the books since childhood and my original one is read to tatters, so I’m obviously not the brilliantly objective reviewer I need to be here. Saw it with one of my sisters and my mother and one of her sisters. Cinema was full of women and groups of girls. I saw all these groups of girls downstairs and thought they were going to Frozen 2; they were not.

Enjoyed the timeskips but then there are few nonlinear narratives I don’t like. Sense of the bond between the sisters is real, but I totally get people not familiar saying it seemed shallow. It’s always the difficulty with book adaptations, isn’t it? Your time to establish the characters, their world and their bonds is in minutes rather than hours.

I wasn’t mad for Ladybird so I can’t remember if the quick cuts and rapid pace are her signatures? Felt I could have done with more lingering, some of it came across as like one of those YouTube montage of a whole film in five minutes.

Superbly cast, obviously; I enjoyed the scene between Jo and Mr Laurence after Beth’s death, and Florence Pugh was just great throughout. She was so Amy it hurt, down to her ridiculous outbursts.

Saoirse was incredible, her energy holds the whole thing together when it gets a bit patchy and I really enjoyed the scene of her negotiating for her book at the end others have already mentioned.

glindr jackson (gyac), Monday, 30 December 2019 17:44 (four years ago) link

would anyone who is not an alcott stan argue this is a better film than ladybird? i wouldn't... possibly it has a better cast, which is really really saying something!
though come to think of it i would've traded streep for metcalf six days out of seven.

LW feels to me like a passion project that will be well remembered but - i think/hope - a warm up for better original work on the way.

Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Monday, 30 December 2019 18:13 (four years ago) link

my takeaway from watching Little Women is that Florence Pugh is greatness

okay and Soairse almost mails it in on occasion. Emma, though serviceable, cruelly overshadowed, looks and performance

idg Timothee C

I know Gerwig was aware she was commanding a modest, unassuming project, but dammit she just plays it toooo safe

I have not yet begun to fart (rip van wanko), Monday, 30 December 2019 18:45 (four years ago) link

Too safe? Eh. That's like saying "not feminist enough."

FWIW, we actually had to go to a second theater because the first place we went to here in FL was sold out.

Josh in Chicago, Monday, 30 December 2019 19:29 (four years ago) link

Can someone -- I write without condescension -- explain how Gerwig might've filmed a dangerous adaptation? An adaptation based on this novel?

TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 30 December 2019 19:45 (four years ago) link

something like a doubling down of the opening of jane campion's portrait of a lady, so as to overlay and interweave the feminisms (and other political strands, re class and race and american empire blah blah) of different, more recent eras (1920s, 1970s, now) so that they jaggedly magnify ways the ideals (and loveliness) of the original is part and parcel with bad stuff as well as nice stuff, the ways we now wd heavily judge the LWs then -- and, hardest of all probably, vice versa

mark s, Monday, 30 December 2019 19:52 (four years ago) link

Just watched this with my daughters and quietly sobbed all the way through. Thought it was wonderful tbh.

Stevie T, Monday, 30 December 2019 19:52 (four years ago) link

I wasn’t mad for Ladybird so I can’t remember if the quick cuts and rapid pace are her signatures?

Yeah I would say Ladybird and Frances Ha (which she wrote but didn't direct) both have this style. I found it much easier to digest in those movies because they're only focusing on one or two characters

Vinnie, Monday, 30 December 2019 19:52 (four years ago) link

The 19th century produced several examples of more recognizably 20th century portraits of feminism: the novels of Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre, Shirley, Vilette), her sister Anne (The Tenant of Wildfeld Hall), Wilkie Collins, and Elizabeth Gaskell, not to mention the tough, complicated female characters in George Eliot and Henry James' fiction. Little Women outsold them all because it has a sentimental core inseparable from its aesthetic merit.

I wonder if those with cavils about Gerwig's version have seen the other film adaptations? I haven't seen anyone much mention Cukor and Armstrong's versions. They have scenes that even at the time audience members recoiled from. That's Alcott's material.

TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 30 December 2019 19:55 (four years ago) link

something like a doubling down of the opening of jane campion's portrait of a lady, so as to overlay and interweave the feminisms (and other political strands, re class and race and american empire blah blah) of different, more recent eras (1920s, 1970s, now) so that they jaggedly magnify ways the ideals (and loveliness) of the original is part and parcel with bad stuff as well as nice stuff, the ways we now wd heavily judge the LWs then -- and, hardest of all probably, vice versa

A good point, but the framing device using Jo and Dashwood, I think, did that? The closeup of the ink-stained fingers reminded me how some things never change.

TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 30 December 2019 19:57 (four years ago) link

ink stained fingers flying over the keyboard

Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Monday, 30 December 2019 19:58 (four years ago) link

btw I would've killed for a Campion or Sciamma adaptation! Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire finds the queerness in the conventional 18 th century setting (relationship between tutor/governess/artist and pupil).

TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 30 December 2019 19:59 (four years ago) link

Idk, I liked how it is what it is and not trying to be within the wider context? I found Mrs March’s line to the black woman she was working with cringey as fuck, and that’s a Gerwig bit I think? Like the film makes this an observation itself later, when Jo is saying how no one wants to read domestic dramas and Amy disagrees with her.

glindr jackson (gyac), Monday, 30 December 2019 19:59 (four years ago) link

I heard someone who’d clearly no knowledge of the story hiss “ah Jesus, the sister?!” so Alcott would be pleased to know she’s still boiling people’s piss with that choice ~150 years later.

glindr jackson (gyac), Monday, 30 December 2019 20:01 (four years ago) link

To me, Mother March has always been the weakest link: the vessel through which a writer/director has communicated his/her "modern" POV, whether in 1933, the forties, 1994, or now; it has tripped up every actress because it's too obvious a Trojan horse for ideas about THE WAY WE LIVE NOW. Laura Dern looked particularly ill at ease because her Dern-ness accentuated what she's supposed to be doing too explicitly; plus, of course, I thought of her feminist speech in Marriage Story.

TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 30 December 2019 20:04 (four years ago) link

Outside my comfort zone, to say the least, but well done, and I especially loved the last 10-15 minutes. Great job of capturing the awesome excitement of your book coming to publication, and I love happy endings in general. My brief engagement with classic literature was left behind at university 40 years ago, and Little Women wasn't part of it. So I was sometimes momentarily confused by past-present transitions, and, and I know I shouldn't be, by the relation of Jo March's life to her novel's story--was the story based on her life, or was I watching some kind of framing device? Basic stuff, sorry.

I avoid almost all advance discussion of films I plan to see, so I almost fell off my chair when Bob Odenkirk showed up as the father. Not that he's not a good actor who clearly can adapt to anything, but if you know him from The Larry Sanders Show and Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul--where he basically crawled out of Sweet Smell of Success, at least as relates to the first two--it's a real surprise.

clemenza, Sunday, 5 January 2020 21:17 (four years ago) link

I loved this, and I loved the editing and time transitions, but...where was Odenkirk/Dad when Beth dies? I realize he's not shown in the later timeline until she introduces him returning in the past, but I'd seriously assumed he'd died in the intervening time.

akm, Sunday, 12 January 2020 16:12 (four years ago) link

He's at her funeral, so he's around but the story's not about him, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Miami weisse (WmC), Sunday, 12 January 2020 16:25 (four years ago) link

This was good! The rare new movie I can earnestly describe as "pleasant" without using it as a term to dismiss it.

bold caucasian eroticism (Simon H.), Wednesday, 15 January 2020 17:32 (four years ago) link

i really liked this

difficult listening hour, Wednesday, 15 January 2020 17:34 (four years ago) link

It's the only acclaimed film of the past four or five I've seen where I'm eager to see it again.

clemenza, Wednesday, 15 January 2020 17:50 (four years ago) link

one of them for sure. certainly of the acclaimed films of this year, except maybe Parasite.

Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, 15 January 2020 18:06 (four years ago) link


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