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Fictionista, Foodie, Feline-lover

Showing posts with label Lord of the Rings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lord of the Rings. Show all posts

Friday, September 1, 2017

Labba Bray's Beauty Queens...a review

Libba Bray’s novel BeautyQueens is a satire that plays out like an all-female Lord of the Rings, a project that is now, contentiously, in development at Warner Brothers. The author has written an essay for Entertainment Weekly about what happened when Hollywood came calling for her project, and it’s definitely worth the read if you’re interested in what people are calling, “Hollywood’s Woman Problem.”

If you haven’t read the book, here’s my review:

When a plane full of teenage beauty contestants crashes on a not-quite-deserted island, the young women find themselves fighting for survival with all their pageant skills and determination.

It’s an old show business axiom that “Satire is what closes Saturday night.”  In Beauty Queens, Bray lets loose on a ton of popular culture topics, from reality shows (Amish girls and strippers share a house on Girls Gone Rumpspringa) to beauty pageants to plucky businesswomen running for president.  She hits her targets too, for the most part, although the arch tone of the book’s prologue is a little annoying. 

The result is not unlike the HBO movie about the Texas cheerleader murdering mom, which was played tongue-in-cheek to good effect.  The problem is that this estrogen-soaked version of Lost meets Lord of the Flies meets Survivor is kind of one note and awfully silly and it’s hard to see what demographic it plays to. 

There’s also a part of us that sees the story more like one of those parodies of contemporary movies, like Vampires Suck.  Adding the satire to the comedy is not necessarily a commercial choice.  (Two hilarious satires about politics, Election and Dick were both disastrous at the box office ($15 million and $6 million returns, with no international distribution), and this satire seems to have an even more narrow focus.)  Also, the shows that are the targets here seem like somewhat dated topics—having been done to death in Comedy Central and Mad TV and SNL and … many other places.

Thursday, April 10, 2014

K is for Katherine Kurtz

Now that Game of Thrones is a huge success, and in the wake of the tremendous success of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit movies, I want someone to finally take note of Katherine Kurtz' Deryni Chronicles. I loved those books and read everyone of them, including the offshoot novels about Camber of Culdi. Here's a site where you can see cover art and read synopses of the books which have all the intrigue, magic, and complicated family relationships you could ever want.

I'm also a fan of Kurtz' lesser-known novel Lammas Night, which is set during WW2 and deftly mixes magic and the mundane in a story that feels real, even though it's about a coven of witches who band together to save their country from a German invasion. Read the book and imagine Prince Harry as the novel's heroic prince.