The film world loves sure loves its adaptations of famous literary works doesn’t it? After all, as Mark Twain once said, classics are what everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read…or something like that. Titles like Treasure Island, Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol have seemingly been done to death, and now Great Expectations (another Charles Dickens novel btw) is getting close to its 20th retelling. So if you’ve missed out on the novel or 17 previous iterations, in this classic story young orphan Pip is given a chance to rise from his humble beginnings thanks to a mysterious benefactor. Moving through London’s class ridden world as a gentleman,…
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G-S-T Review…Brave
Stories of fantasy and high adventure are certain to contain genre stand-bys like magic, kingdoms a far, fair maidens and the like. Yet in Pixar’s latest (and first true period-piece) this “maiden” is not a damsel in distress by any means. Brave‘s Princess Merida actually has more in common with any number of Hayao Miyazaki’s female protagonists than it does the colorful princesses whose posters grace little girls’ walls. It channels some of the more stand-up kind of womanly characters we’ve seen in the last few decades…even if in this case she is defiant to a fault. With a line like “I am Merida, and I’ll be shooting for my own hand”…