Quick Thoughts: I Capture The Castle

I can't believe this book is out of print. It belongs in that canon of delightful romantic girl heroine-narratives that include Anne Shirley and Ella of "Ella Enchanted" and Elizabeth Bennett and all the rest. If I were an writer, this is the kind of story I would have wanted to write. I may train myself to read Paradise Lost and the Economist and endlessly repetitive sociology papers, but books like "I Capture the Castle" will always draw out my core and be as addictive as crack. I could hardly believe it when I started reading it - it was practically manufactured just for me or: Further Proof That Period Romance Is Better.

Precocious, winning, and feisty heroine - check off with Cassandra Mortmain. Interesting side characters like the devoted diva-ish stepmother Topaz or the awesome little brother with maddeningly blunt observations - check. Angst. Entanglements. Beautiful rambling countryside and ruined castles. Dramatic plot devices that manage to downplay their dreariness while keeping you fully invested, though that owes mainly to Cassandra's delightful POV. Also........really hot intelligent romantic foils, twists, and surprisingly intellectual whiffs. That last one is new; I wish I had read this when I was younger.

As soon as I finished the book, I remembered that there had been some sort of movie adaptation, and god it would be thrilling to see it onscreen. It was on Youtube, thank the lord, but it was DREADFUL. Stale and angsty and uneven acting, though it had guilty-pleasure potential. "This isn't how I imagined the book to be" is an annoying and lame complaint, I find, but in this case, I thought that they really had not done justice to the book's wit and charm. The book is still primarily a comedy, albeit with some very serious moments, but the movie was trying soooo hard to be a romantic drama. Actually, scratch that. It had no idea what it wanted to be. Coming-of-age quirky comedy or wistful loss of innocence. There was some serious tonal contradiction.

I wasn't a fan of the casting either, though geez, Henry Cavill was fine as fuck. It was the first time I ever sat back and thought, "Oh. God. This guy's looks are truly ridiculous. There is no way anyone mortal looks like this. No wonder he keeps getting comparisons to Greek gods." And I know that Romola Garai is the go-to girl for Spirited & Precocious (she was brilliant in the 2009 "Emma" in what was in my opinion the best embodiment of an Austen novel ever) but I think that all the characters were slightly off-kilter in this one. I guess I'll just have to wait for PBS to inevitably re-make this.

Missing Mad Men

My summer tv will be so uneventful. Game of Thrones will soon end (alas! two more episodes! I can barely hold my excitement for them - the shit is about to go down harrrrd), and afterwards there will be luscious frustrating True Blood. But I'm still mourning that there will be no Mad Men this summer. Ugh. I miss it a lot and I don't know, summer always seemed the perfect time to watch it. Maybe it's the same simmering slow quality they both share. I'm going to have to start watching Doctor Who or Parks and Recreation, or something.

Last year, Mad Men surpassed True Blood on my can't-wait-for-Sunday-night list, and all I can say, shame on you, Alan Ball. Yes, I actually prefer watching 50s ad executives and their Kennedy wives drown their non-problems in booze and cigarettes over x-rated vampire porn.

But no, it'll be nine more months before I can see Don Draper and John Slattery and the weird transition from 60s outfits to the 70s, and Cristina Hendricks and our favorite preteen psychotic Sally Draper, and all the rest.

Season 4 just hit the jackpot. It was just so unbelievably human and funny and tense - watching the characters reel off the precipices and caring enough about them to mentally beg them not to. You can read them like a book, and it doesn't lessen their complexity. Even the most surprising revelations made absolute sense, because the development was so organic. For instance, I loved that everyone on the blogs had the same eerie feeling that Don was going to propose to Megan, though it was so subliminal that most didn't confess until after it happened, and when it did, I actually shouted at the screen, "No! Don, don't you dare, you bastard!" When Boardwalk Empire premiered, everyone predicted that would be the next rising of the Sopranos, but in my opinion, Mad Men has emerged as the real, unlikely successor. (It still makes sense, seeing as the creators of both shows are ex-Sopranos writers) Mad Men explores the same theme "can people ever truly change?", and with the same psychological astuteness and subtlety (as well as a lot more grace and humor). And unlike the other two, Mad Men portrays some of the most fascinating and dynamic inter-female relationships on tv right now (whereas both the Sopranos and BE fail[ed] the Bechdel Test quite often and miserably).

God, it seems so unfair that Boardwalk Empire is just winning all the TV awards by default, just by virtue of being a novel, first season prestige show with all those fancy names attached. I'm sure it will only get better, just as Mad Men did, but its time hasn't come yet, and its first season did not even remotely COMPARE to Mad Men's season 4. I'll never forget how nuts everyone would go over every single episode (was there even a weak one?), especially for "The Suitcase". The aftershow blogs and discussions just made it ten times more interesting. And discussing Mad Men was really half the fun.

Well, until it comes back, I guess I can just spend the countdown wait speculating about January Jones' baby daddy. I wonder if the father is actually someone from the set of X-Men: First Class, as the rumor mill suggests. Also just putting it out there: James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender (aka Tom LeFroy and Mr. Rochester) are totally the Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield of 2011. Bromance forever.