Posted on February 19, 2013 at 3:51 pm
Want to know how the 600-page Beautiful Creatures was adapted for a two hour movie (script about 120 pages)? Jean Trinh helpfully lists all of the differences between the movie and the book on The Daily Beast.
Posted on February 15, 2013 at 8:00 am
Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl include a lot of literary references in their Beautiful Creatures series of books. This poem by Charles Bukowski is quoted in the film based on the first book.
The area dividing the brain and the soul
is affected in many ways by
experience —
some lose all mind and become soul:
insane.
some lose all soul and become mind:
intellectual.
some lose both and become:
accepted.
Posted on February 13, 2013 at 6:00 pm
B| Lowest Recommended Age: | High School |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated PG-13 for violence, scary images, and some sexual material |
| Profanity: | Some strong language, crude insult |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drinking |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Supernatural images, violence, peril, characters injured and killed, references to loss of parents |
| Diversity Issues: | Diverse characters |
| Date Released to Theaters: | February 14, 2013 |
| Date Released to DVD: | May 20, 2013 |
| Amazon.com ASIN: | B009AMAGXK |
In a small Southern town that feels far from everything, where everyone is “too stupid to leave or too stuck to move,” a teenage boy named Ethan (Alden Ehrenreich) dreams every night of a girl he has never seen. Ethan has recently lost his mother. His father is never there. He is about to start his junior year in high school “so insanity’s inevitable.” But his mother’s best friend Amma (Viola Davis), the local librarian, looks out for him. There are books that he loves. And the dream feels very real and somehow comforting.
Suddenly it is real as Lena Duchannes (Alice Englart) comes to town to live with her uncle, Macon Ravenswood (Jeremy Irons) in a creepy old mansion. Ethan feels an immediate connection, but Lena seems reluctant to talk to him or to make any friends in her new school. Some of the other kids in the class feel the same way. There are rumors that the Ravenswoods have strange powers.
The rumors are true. “You know how some families are musical and some have money. We have powers,” Lena explains. She is a witch or, to use the term her people prefer, she is a “caster.” She is 15 and on her 16th birthday she will be chosen for the light side or the dark.
No one wants Ethan and Lena to be together. But the love they share is stronger than any caster powers from the dark or the light.
The storyline is fairly basic but touches of self-aware humor help to hold our interest. And it is fun to watch Irons swan around in ascots and smoking jackets, striding past the swooping banister-less staircase in his mansion. Thompson and Emmy Rossum clearly relish the chance to chew scenery with Spanish moss hanging all over it. They revel in the Southern gothic setting, tossing off Dixie-isms like “Slap my ass and call me Sally!” and “She looks like death eating a cracker.” Viola Davis does what she can stuck with an exposition role that includes a completely random Nancy Reagan reference. It is also buoyed by the lushy imaginative settings from production designer Richard Sherman and goth-glam costumes from Jeffrey Kurland and an entertaining assortment of literary and popular culture references, from Slaughterhouse Five and poet Charles Bukowski to the “Final Destination” series, Bob Dylan, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Jane Austen. Most important, writer/director Richard LaGravenes creates a world where strange things seem both wonderful and normal. The various transformations, expanding powers, and sense of alienation seem like a tangible reflection (and only mild exaggeration) of the experience of adolescence.
Parents should know that this film includes themes of good and bad magic, some disturbing images, characters in peril, and sad deaths.
Family discussion: Who makes the choice for the casters? What makes Lena different? What do you learn from the sacrifice in the movie?
If you like this, try: the series of books by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, the books read by Ethan and Lena in the movie, and the “Twilight” films
Posted on February 13, 2013 at 8:00 am
Beautiful Creatures
What is it about the South that makes it such an appealing setting for gothic and mysterious and romantic stories?
KG: There’s such great rich history of literature from the South. And Margy was an American Studies major and my family is from the South. I’ve always the South and she fell in love with the South. We wanted to set the story in a place that was really specific and also that felt like magic could really still happen, a place with superstition and that sort of thing. And we mostly wanted to do it so we could go there and eat pie!
MS: The low country traditionally is a logical place, where the big ships stopped and brought new things in from the ocean and the islands have a mystical tradition. It is such a visual place, too, with these iconic villages with the Spanish moss and the village and historical homes and the coast.
When you created the town, did you physically sit down and draw up a map to show where everything was in relation to everything else?
MS: We didn’t at the very first, but we are such world-builders and super-visual so that after we started we had to figure out where the houses and library were and the shop, so then we did. We had twenty locations! We did the same thing with the family tree. The scale of Southern gothic is so immense that you have to do that to keep everything straight.
I was surprised and delighted by the literary references in the movie and the books that Ethan and Lena, the two main characters read, including books by Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski.
KG: Bukowski is from my brother! Most of the books are authors that Margy and I grew up loving. To Kill a Mockingbird is our shared favorite book. Slaughterhouse Five, the poetry, those are from us, and then there are certain things we borrowed from our friends like popcorn and milk duds, that’s one of Margy’s best friends’ signature movie snack. And my brother is a big Charles Bukowski fan and Margy loves him, too. Because we weren’t writing the book to be published, it’s our families and the things that were important to us and our friends.
MS: It’s a fallacy that people think that today’s teenagers are shallow or somehow less intelligent than in the past. As we were writing we shared the books with seven teenagers who are so smart and girls who are powerful and not slutty and want things for themselves so we were writing up to them, not down.
KG: All the kids Margy and I know are independent and powerful and smart. I teach these kids. Our seven happen to be super academically smart, too, but in general, I think teens are super under-estimated. Even if they don’t get straight A’s, they’re very sophisticated in whatever their talent is. I always found as a teacher that as long as I was willing to challenge them, they would rise to the challenge.
Tell me about the challenge of writing from the perspective of a boy.
KG: We have six brothers between us. And I’ve been teaching for sixteen years. That’s another fallacy, that there aren’t boys who have that emotional side. We get boys. But if we write from the perspective of a girl, people associate that with us and not the character. We wanted to do something different.
MS: The kids told us, “We loved Twilight, but we’re done with hit.” They wanted the girl to be powerful and magical and not just fall in love with a magical and powerful boy. And we want the boy to tell the story.
KG: They said, “We want something supernatural and not just ripping off Twilight. Not vampires again, something different, something new.” Those became the rules we wrote by because we were not writing something to publish; we were writing something for them.
How did it feel to watch the movie and see your story and characters come to life?
KG: Creepy. It was so weird!
MS: I think I’ve seen it five times now, and I notice different things every time.
KG: Now we can pay attention to it like an audience. Before, it was almost like someone who had crept into our heads and saw everything in there! It was neat but it was crazy. Like when we saw the library. I thought, “How could they possibly conceive that from our description? I don’t think we’re that good!” It was so surreal to see on screen everything we were trying to do.
MS: When we went on the set and saw Jeremy Irons dressed like Macon and saying what is basically the first line of the book, our editor burst into tears.
KG: And you’re supposed to be quiet on the set! And she’s sobbing!
MS: “Get that crying girl!”
KG: The amazing thing is — we expected Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson to be incredible but the teenagers are just astonishing. They are going to be huge! We’re so proud of them. And all those major scenes right in the beginning, they may have been intimidated but you cannot see it. Even Jeremy was talking about how remarkable they were.
MS: They don’t want to be famous. Alden Ehrenreich is a drama nerd and Alice Englert is indie girl. They’re so cool in the way that our characters are cool. They have defined interests and that’s what they shared with Jeremy, Emma — that shared passions, not wanting to be like everything else, enthusiasts for what they love.
Posted on February 11, 2013 at 4:03 pm
