Three Films Make A Post: An Avalanche of Thrills!

Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (2019): This is not really a film made with my age bracket in mind at all, but as a family movie that drags a well-worn pop culture character into contemporary times and social mores without going the route of deconstruction, grimdarkness or irony, Katt Shea’s film does fall into my areas of interest. The film is not just highly effective at this but charming as hell, the sort of family film even the childless like me would totally watch with their imaginary demon children and can enjoy without. It’s also excellently paced, silly when it needs to be silly, earnest when it needs to be that, clever and even mildly subversive in an unassuming way that’s easy to miss if you blink too often. Sophia Lillis makes a fantastic contemporary version of Nancy Drew too, projecting just the right mixture of self-assurance, rebellious streak, intelligence, humour and family love a modernized version of the character needs.

10 Things I Hate About You (1999): While it is not quite on its level, Nancy Drew would probably make a great double feature with what may very well be the best teen comedy/teen romance of the second half of the 90s, as directed by Gil Junger and written by the sometimes unassumingly brilliant writing team of Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith. As everybody probably knows, this gives Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” a bit of an update for the late 90s teen set, making nearly all the right decisions about what to keep and what to discard of old Bill for its time and audience, adding some Old Hollywood flow to the dialogue (which always endears a romantic comedy to me), and then proceeds to charm the pants off of anyone watching with a heart and a brain.

The thing this and Nancy Drew share is an unwillingness to pretend a teen audience is dumb, so while it does a very crowd pleasing kind of dance, it also contains subtleties and complexities and isn’t afraid to show and use them, very much in the spirit of Shakespeare, the godfather of great commercial art if ever there was one. That Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger work fantastically together hardly needs mentioning.

Vibes (1988): But why not end this entry on a let-down, namely Ken Kwapis’s sad attempt at doing a romance/adventure movie clearly meant to be in the spirit of Romancing the Stone but with added psychic powers. Jeff Goldblum, Cyndi Lauper (who would have been ordered to drop the accent by any half-competent filmmaker) and Peter Falk do their best with what they are given, but there’s only so much anyone can do with a comedy script whose jokes aren’t funny, nor a romance that doesn’t know how to be romantic.


Particularly when the not terribly funny nor romantic script is then adapted with all the style and panache of a kitchen table (that’s the least stylish and panach-y thing coming to my mind right now, and it’s still funnier than most of the jokes in here), bogged down by leaden pacing and finally killed by a disturbing lack of imagination.