Post by Dracula on Nov 26, 2022 8:46:50 GMT -5
Where the Crawdads Sing(11/22/2022)
When the movie adaptation of the bestselling Delia Owens novel “Where the Crawdads Sing” opened this summer I was kind of rooting for it. Not because it looked like a movie that would appeal to me (it demonstrably did not) but just because it seemed like one of the few opportunities we’d get this year for a movie made for adults could make some real money at the box office, which would theoretically be good for the film industry, but then the movie got panned by critics and at the box office it did okay but didn’t really send the message it needed to. Having finally given the movie a shot I can say, yeah, this thing is no good. I can’t say that this really gave me that much insight into why this story managed to sell so many books but I can say that it sure seemed to drop the ball in some very adaptation specific elements. The film is essentially a courtroom drama in which a woman is accused of killing a man and it’s pretty well established that the evidence against her is extremely flimsy. We’re told that the only thing that can really send her to death row is that the town is hideously prejudiced against her, not for any racial, ethnic, or religious reason but just because she’s poor and basically homeless and… that strains credulity. In order to sell that story the film would need to go a long way towards making this girl seem like a really disheveled outsider that one would think ill of but they don’t seem to put even the slightest effort into this. Rather they cast the conventionally attractive Daisy Edgar-Jones in the part, give her pretty normal looking clothing, and don’t give the slightest indication that she hasn’t grown up without all the best modern hair conditioning products available. It might seem shallow to dismiss a movie because its star it too attractive and well groomed, but this movie’s entire reason to exist rests on the idea of an overwhelming prejudice against this character existing and it fails miserably at establishing this and selling it. Beyond that’s it’s just some melodramatic Southern Gothic slop intended to flatter the sensitive modern readers and make them similarly confident that free thinking naturalist white girls were the main victims of injustice in the 1960s South. Not recommended.
*1/2 out of Five
When the movie adaptation of the bestselling Delia Owens novel “Where the Crawdads Sing” opened this summer I was kind of rooting for it. Not because it looked like a movie that would appeal to me (it demonstrably did not) but just because it seemed like one of the few opportunities we’d get this year for a movie made for adults could make some real money at the box office, which would theoretically be good for the film industry, but then the movie got panned by critics and at the box office it did okay but didn’t really send the message it needed to. Having finally given the movie a shot I can say, yeah, this thing is no good. I can’t say that this really gave me that much insight into why this story managed to sell so many books but I can say that it sure seemed to drop the ball in some very adaptation specific elements. The film is essentially a courtroom drama in which a woman is accused of killing a man and it’s pretty well established that the evidence against her is extremely flimsy. We’re told that the only thing that can really send her to death row is that the town is hideously prejudiced against her, not for any racial, ethnic, or religious reason but just because she’s poor and basically homeless and… that strains credulity. In order to sell that story the film would need to go a long way towards making this girl seem like a really disheveled outsider that one would think ill of but they don’t seem to put even the slightest effort into this. Rather they cast the conventionally attractive Daisy Edgar-Jones in the part, give her pretty normal looking clothing, and don’t give the slightest indication that she hasn’t grown up without all the best modern hair conditioning products available. It might seem shallow to dismiss a movie because its star it too attractive and well groomed, but this movie’s entire reason to exist rests on the idea of an overwhelming prejudice against this character existing and it fails miserably at establishing this and selling it. Beyond that’s it’s just some melodramatic Southern Gothic slop intended to flatter the sensitive modern readers and make them similarly confident that free thinking naturalist white girls were the main victims of injustice in the 1960s South. Not recommended.
*1/2 out of Five
