Word: girling
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...Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees might have been written with the calculation of getting chosen for Oprah's Book Club. (It wasn't, though it did make Good Morning America's reading list.) The 2002 novel is a coming-of-age story about a white girl, Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning), who flees her abusive father and, in the company of her black nanny Rosaleen, finds refuge and surrogate motherhood with three Afro-angelic sisters who run a bee farm. Why did Kidd, a white woman, choose these heroines? "I grew up surrounded by black women," she told...
...black underling. (You've heard of Huckleberry Finn? Gone With the Wind?) The novel is set in rural South Carolina in 1964, which is just about the time it would have automatically been turned into an Oscar-nominated movie. The obvious reference point is To Kill a Mockingbird, whose girl narrator, Scout Finch, is 6 to Lily's 14, and whose fictional setting is Maycomb, Ala., instead of Bees' Tiburon, S.C. But that was back when most big films tended to serious sentiment. Today, the dominant tone is irreverence, sarcasm, facetiousness. Can a time-capsule movie like this one have...
...film. "That's all I know about myself." For the past 10 years, she has been raised by - been the prisoner of - her father T. Ray (Paul Bettany), who runs a peach farm. Lily is dreamy, wistful, self-hating and suicidal; T. Ray is a sullen beast, punishing the girl by making her kneel on grits (coarse-ground corn meal, to those of you - those of me - who are ignorant of Southern cuisine). Lily has her own roiling karma. No question, she is bad luck for the people she loves. Two of them die violently, two more are attacked...
...film is full of sweet, subtle touches. In the book Lily daydreams of meeting her mother Deborah in heaven; and after 10,000 years telling Lily she was not to blame for her death, Deborah would spend the next 10,000 fixing the girl's ratty hair. ("She would brush it into such a tower of beauty, people all over heaven would drop their harps just to admire it.") The movie doesn't make a big declamatory deal of this, but after a few days with the Boatwrights, Lily looks magically presentable, pretty - because for once she's been cared...
...Going to work every day with Jada Pinkett and Kim Elise and Vivica A. Fox, shooting guns and driving cars, was just a lot of fun. Plus, it was kind of controversial because I played a character who was gay. People were like, "You gonna kiss a girl? In a movie?" People were against it, but I knew I could do something special with that role...