Perhaps there is a bit of Mavis Gary in all of us. We know from the movie (mild spoiler, I guess?) that Mavis has been ghostwriting a high school-based series called "Waverly Prep" that is about to end its run. The poster (at left) quotes visually from the chapter books of my youth, at least until they threw it out and started using another one that wasn't nearly as unique, and that makes more sense when you know how much of an influence her book-in-progress has on the structure of the movie.
Also, at one point she visits a local Borders (RIP) and has a conversation with an employee that is painful and that paints her in a fairly negative light -- but no more so than the rest of the movie.
For those of you who have seen "Young Adult," I'm wondering if you thought her career choice was at all realistic based on presented evidence. I felt so while leaving the theatre, but now I'm teetering. This is not a standard most mainstream movies hold their characters up to, but given that Mavis is presented as being kind of in a slump (precipitating the trip back to her hometown that "Young Adult" covers) we don't see a lot of her doing the kind of work that might precede getting such a prime job. At the same time, when people expressed amazement about her job, I didn't feel like chiming in and saying "Yeah, how does that work exactly?"
I liked but didn't love Jason Reitman's last movie, "Up In The Air"; still, this exceeded expectations by a fair amount for me. Theron's portrayal of Mavis is harsh, but fair, and Patton Oswalt as perhaps the only sympathetic character (apart from the baby? Maybe?) As to the script, if I hadn't known going in that Diablo Cody wrote it, I likely wouldn't have been able to guess; the dialogue is a lot more natural, without the cutesy turns we've all heard quoted a million times.
No comments:
Post a Comment