Winona Ryder – Thelma and Alice

Little-Women-1994

I decided to catch up with 1994’s Little Women as a way of preparing for Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming version. I saw it in the theaters when I was a teenager, but I’m sorry to say that it didn’t make much of an impression on me. The only reason I know I saw it is that my older sister, who remembers everything, tells me we went to see it in the theater with our mother.

I was 16 in 1994, which my mother probably saw as just the right age for a period romance. But it had to compete with the other movies burning into my adolescent cortex, a list that includes Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Reality Bites, The Mask, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall.

Poor Little Women didn’t stand a chance.

Continue reading “Retro Watch: 1994’s Little Women” →

makeover mermaids

I got sick again, which is what happens when you live with a five-year-old who brings home a fresh batch of germs every day. Also, it’s March in NYC, a miserable season when everyone collectively wonders why they pay such high rents to live in a place with consistently terrible weather. It’s the one time of year when New Yorkers admit that the weather is usually awful. It’s true: there are about 15-20 beautiful days, tops, and yet New York imagines itself to be a place with mild, sunny spring days and crisp fall afternoons. I blame all the movies set in New York, which do not convey the bitter winds, flash flooding, fallen branches, pot holes, sleety rains, and white-gray overcast skies that appear in winter and summer.

I had plans to see A Wrinkle in Time, but they were foiled by my cold, the weather, and my son, who came down with an ear infection. Instead I watched two movies from my own childhood: Mermaids and Beaches. I had a craving for them. Continue reading “Mermaids & Beaches” →