I saw a couple of movies this weekend, both of which got a lift from weird girls.
The first was Hairspray, which wasn’t bad. Parts of it were an awful lot of fun, though I thought it peaked with the “Welcome to the Sixties” number in the middle. (It must be the closer for act one of the stage version, right?) Overall, it was a little too sincere and not weird enough for me.
Amanda Bynes as Penny was plenty weird, though, and I absolutely loved her. She was so sweetly out of it, and who wouldn’t fall in love with Elijah Kelley’s Seaweed? I mean, she clearly couldn’t be a worse dancer, and I’m glad the producers didn’t try and pretend otherwise, but I was really smitten with her on the whole.
The second movie I saw was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which I thought was awful. None of the other movies have seen quite so much as a study guide for the novel. The script and the editing were really clumsy, and the pacing was so off. When you have to make your characters spout painfully expository dialogue to explain what’s going on to people who haven’t read the books, you should probably go back and do a couple of rewrites.
I did very much like Evanna Lynch as Luna. I like to think my fondness for the character would leave me with extremely high expectations of the actress playing the role, and I think she did extremely well. She had to spit out a lot of story morals, and I think she was surprisingly convincing.