Wow, it’s been a long time since I visited a Catherine Cookson!

Ladies and gents, welcome to The Round Tower. It’s a sweet little romance about an upper-class girl, a middle-class boy, and the bairnsketball that comes between them!

The Round Tower probably Cookson’s most in-depth look at class differences in mid-century England and the turmoil caused by the idea of someone wanting to change their socio-economic strata through hard work. However, since most of those parts were filmed with the light from a single desk lamp, you can’t really tell.

It also has some of the skeeviest lines of any Cookson. Just…wow. This poor, poor young lady.

Vital Stats:

Era: 1950s. And 1960s. And maybe 1970s. Also maybe 2150. They’re in some time warp where they never age and yet five hundred years of the viewer’s lifetime pass before their eyes as they watch!
Heroine: Vanessa Ratcliffe.
Siblings that require looking-after: Nope!
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): She gets a bairnsketball thanks to her father’s skeevy friend. Does that count?
Asshole Father?: Oooh yeah.
Romantic interest(s): Angus Cotton, an employee of her dad’s who marries her to save her reputation.
Bairnsketballs: Check. Thanks, creepy neighbor!
Fistfights: I started counting, but gave up. I think this entire movie is one huge slapfight.
Assaults: On our characters, no. On our patience, yes.

“That was back when she was pure. Untouched.”

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John Hughes died earlier this week. The retrospectives and personal essays are going up all over the place, and though this movie has been in the hopper for a while, there’s no better time to talk about what I think is his best movie: Some Kind of Wonderful.

“This is what my girlfriend would look like without skin.”
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Okay, here’s the deal. Sometimes there’s a parody that gently tweaks conventions while still maintaining a sense of self and being generally likable and sympathetic. And sometimes there is a parody that picks up a baseball bat and wades into a sea of tropes, swinging at anything it can reach.

Drop Dead Gorgeous is one of the latter parodies. It hits small-town-hick tropes, Upper Midwest tropes, beauty-contest tropes, closet-quasi-pedo-lech tropes. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes it does.

Nutshell: Sarah Rose Cosmetics is on the hunt for the American Teen Princess. In tiny Mount Rose, Minnesota, the angelic Amber and bitchy Becky face off for the local crown against a backdrop of supporting actors who all seem thrilled to have a chance to be so relentlessly mean. This is also the movie where, if you paid attention, you get to say, “I already know Amy Adams” any time someone tried to pull any “Have you seen this young actress from Junebug?” shit on you. (She’s hilarious in this, no joke; if you’ve seen it, she was totally impossible to forget.)

“They’re never gonna let you perform naked, I asked.”
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[Previous episodes of The Catherine Cookson Experience here.]

This week, the CCE delivers my biggest letdown so far: Ciaran Hinds and Amanda Root, stars of the Persuasion (best Austen adaptation ever), team up again!

And man, they suck.

Welcome to The Man Who Cried, which is about a good-looking dude (Ciaran Hinds: well cast, casting person) who keeps tripping and falling into ladies, which disgusts him, just disgusts him. Why won’t these women stop getting with him, damn? He spends four hours being emo about how he just wants to be Left Alone with some other woman than the one he’s with at the moment. (Doesn’t matter which woman he’s with; he wants a new one.)

Vital Stats:

Era: 1930s, just before WWII
Heroine: Ciaran Hinds.
Siblings that require looking-after: His ten-year-old kiddo.
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): He begets one! Nice job, Ciaran.
Asshole Father?: Yeah, Ciaran.
Romantic interest(s): Every woman on the planet.
Bairnsketballs: Yup…CIARAN.
Fistfights: Largely nonviolent, except for ladies lunging at Ciaran and attempting to climb him like a tree.
Assaults: See above. SIT DOWN, LADIES.

“Even the CREDITS are crying, you guys.”
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I am not the biggest Bond fan in the world. When he’s not a cardboard cutout in a tux, he’s a suave-slash-vicious example of British imperialist blahblah. Even as a kid I couldn’t see the appeal; Bond rarely entertained, the women rarely lived. I caught a couple of the Pierce Brosnan ones, and I like Daniel Craig in the role (though I still haven’t seen the latest one he’s in), so my cultural awareness of James Bond is more or less a vague impression of guns and boat chases and Timothy Dalton scrunching up his face all the time like he’d just smelled poop. Also, because his girlfriend was probably dead.

All this to say, I was totally unprepared to be surfing channels and to run across Live and Let Die. I couldn’t bring myself to turn it off, because I kept waiting for a punch line that never came, and then it was over.

And you guys, we need to talk.

You know, let’s just begin with the title card.

Yeah. So, that happens!

You think it can’t get ironically better / actually worse? Aren’t you sweet.
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