Nancy Drew: Almost Out of Teenhood and STILL No Rehab!!

6/13/2007

WEDNESDAY

12:30 PM

Let s start here: I don t care whether the new Nancy Drew

movie is good.

Unlike, say, some people.

Take this reviewer, for instance, at rottentomatoes.com, who writes:

The cumulative effect of [Andrew] Fleming's direction and [Emma] Roberts' casting is to make eternal heroine Nancy into a chipmunk-chipper detective and a social nincompoop.

See, none of that interests me. I don t care about the directing. I don t much care about the casting. I don t care about plot, or pacing, or lighting, or cinematography, or dialogue, or any of the other things I m supposed to care about as a movie-goer.

In this case (should we call it The Case of the Hollywood Secrets? ), when it comes to Nancy Drew: Celluloid Version circa 2007, all I can say is: Well, it s about $^*! time

Nancy! Oh, Nancy! Where have you been? What took you so long? Do you not understand how many tween girls have been hijacked by All The Wrong Things? Do you not understand that we need you, less for entertainment and more for social ointment?

Heal us, O Nancy! Or rather: Heal Our Girls!

And yes, I'm being only vaguely hyperbolic here...

I write today not as a movie-goer, but as the mother of a daughter. I write today from a female perspective. I write today as a fed-up female who is disgusted on behalf of my gender, and especially on behalf of all young girls. I write today as an American spectator who has watched with mounting dismay as the Paris/Lindsay/Nicole juggernaut has turned tween girls into living Bratz dolls left abandoned to shopping-mall lives where thong underwear and push-up bras are marketed to females whose ages are still calculated by single digits.

And no, in case you re wondering, none of this should not be considered a good thing.

So do I care whether Nancy Drew the Movie is good filmmaking? No I most certainly do not. Go ahead. Call me a philistine. In this case, I d wear it proudly.

The first sentence of this review is more to the point (as I see it, anyway):

A great coming of age girl movie that prioritzes teen personality and brain power over female body appeal

My own daughter, now 17 (and, like her mother, a one-time Nancy Drew devotee) was paging through the current Newsweek when she stumbled across Lorraine Ali s article on the upcoming movie. Her reading prompted this remark:

I like that they didn t slut her up for the movie.

Bingo...