The Clique

2008

Director: Michael Lembeck

No actors I previously knew

Rating: three stars

I saw half of this movie on TV - the second half. I thought it was a cheesy, made-for-TV version of Mean Girls. Turns out it was a cheesy, made-for-the-big-screen version of Mean Girls, minus the slutty stuff.

Why oh why do they always have twenty year olds playing twelve and fifteen year olds? It's obnoxious. And what kind of fifteen year old actually knows about designers and fashion to the extent that they did in this film? Seriously? Come on. Except the part where she pretended her Old Navy swimsuit was an Original I-forgot-the-word-she-used-but-it-sounded-Italian, and the other girls were impressed, that was funny.

Bad acting. Nobody is this shallow.

The real reason I think this movie failed for me was because the main character was vastly unlikable. This may be because she looked almost exactly like the main queen bee in my middle school days :::shudder:::

Bright Star

Director: James Campion

Actors: Ben Whishaw (he looks a lot like Marius from Les Miserables but he's not), Abbie Cornish

Rating: Four Stars

This didn't get a five stars because the ending sucked. Spoiler alert!

Actually, it couldn't have ended any other way. This is John Keats we're talking about! Famous Romantic poet, perhaps the MOST famous. His stuff is enough to make any High School English student vomit.

I just don't like sad endings.

It wasn't so much sad, as maddening because the impediments, the main impossibility of them being together entailed how much she was willing to sacrifice. He didn't have any income, and she wasn't willing to live in poverty. It was actually the main theme of the film, class differences. They did an excellent job showing the tensions, not telling them. The best example of this is when the maid-who-got-knocked-up comes back to visit with her forced-into-marriage-husband (John Keat's friend, who due to this sad misadventure was unable to finance Keats, which was almost definitely the main cause of his untimely death). They come back to visit, bringing the baby. Fanny's mom is totally excited and happy to see the baby, but completely and utterly ignores the former maid, even though she's wearing a new hat and is anxious to be noticed. This was a really quick, seemingly unimportant scene; it had little to nothing to do with the rest of the film and its plot. But it was so well done, I'm sure it will stay with me for years. Why were people like that, and are they still? How does this kind of prejudice translate into modern day American society?

Fanny pissed me off. She knew he would die if he left. She could have married him, was even considering it. But instead she didn't. What kind of love is that? Romantic love, that's what. Romantic with a capital R, meaning it's all about gloom, doom, the autumn that cometh, sweet death, oh no, oh no. Cry me a river. Pathetic. It was strangely humorous when her sister goes to her mom and says, "Fanny is asking for a knife." "What for?" "To kill herself with." The other funny part was the mom's reaction to the butterflies in her room; she was disgusted and horrified about there being so many bugs in the house. That's exactly what I would have been like.

I think the mom was really dimwitted. She should have taken a more active role in her daughter's adventures with Mr. Keats. I think Fanny's main flaw was her adolescence; she was so young, so clingy; I really think Keat's Irish buddy was right when he said she wasn't really in love with him, but in love with flirting.

As for Keats' character, he was basically a Mary Sue. If this was supposed to be a tribute to him, they sorely missed the mark. It was mostly a biography of his girlfriend. I didn't mind that so much, but just be warned you won't learn that much about Keats besides the fact that he was really poor and really unlucky.

And now I want to go research how much of this was actually true. This always happens to me at the end of historical British dramas.