Tag: Penny Marshall

Holiday Movies Directed or Written by Women

Hannah GersenLeave a comment

My love of Christmas movies started when my husband and I first moved in together and we spent our first holiday season together watching cheesy Christmas movies every weekend. Actually, maybe my love of the holiday genre started with It’s A Wonderful Life, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. I’ve probably seen it thirty times and it never gets old. I like the low stakes of Christmas stories, the predictability, the winter fashions, and I also appreciate how most holiday movies have an ensemble cast, so you can watch them over and over again and notice all the little moments between the minor players that you may have missed the first time.

This list includes a couple of my favorites, as well as some that I haven’t seen yet and am adding to my list for this year. Enjoy!

bridget-jones-colin-firth-renee-zellwegerBridget Jones’s Diary (2001)
Director: Sharon Maguire
Writer: Helen Fielding

This is a personal favorite. The book is hilarious and the film captures its zany energy. Also, it’s perfectly cast, despite worries at the time that Renee Zellweger was not sufficiently British enough to pull it off. I don’t know if it officially falls into the Christmas Movie category, but it starts and ends with holiday parties, so it counts in my book.

Continue reading “Holiday Movies Directed or Written by Women” →

Retrowatch: A League of Their Own

Hannah GersenLeave a comment

Film and TelevisionA League Of Their Own (1992) ★★★★
Director: Penny Marshall
Writers: Kim Wilson, Kelly Candaele, Lowell Ganz, and Babaloo Mandel

I had my sister over for Thanksgiving and she wanted to know when I was going to write about A League of Their Own, which we saw together last week at Alamo Drafthouse for a special “champagne screening.” She said, “I saw you making notes . . .”

It’s true, I made notes—and then I lost them, which my sister will tell is typical of me. I wrote them on the back of the paper advertising the drink special: “There’s No Crying in Cocktails,” which is a mix of Maker’s Mark, lemon, sugar, and cava, and which I ordered. It was actually my second cocktail of the night, because my sister and I met before the movie to get a drink at the bar outside of the theater. We sat down next to a group of four women who were clearly going to the same screening as us, because they were all wearing the pink skirted baseball uniforms from the movie. As it happened, we were seated next to them in the theater. My sister asked the woman closest to us when she had last seen the movie, and she said, ‘Oh, a couple of months ago? I watch it all the time.’ The other women had also seen the movie many, many times. It was their comfort watch.

Meanwhile, my sister and I had not seen the movie since 1992, when it was in the theaters. Continue reading “Retrowatch: A League of Their Own” →