Better roles for child actresses than adult actresses? Jennifer Lawrence graduates to 'adult' roles by playing the token girlfriend/manic pixie dream girl.

Yes, this started as deleted material from my Silver Linings Playbook essay from Saturday. I don't want to get into another 'roles for women' rant, but it's interesting that Jennifer Lawrence may win an Oscar for arguably the first role of her career where she exists purely to support the male lead's arc (even her token girlfriend role in The Beaver had a character arc for *her*). She has not a single scene in this film where she exists as a character outside of her role as Bradley Cooper's girlfriend/spiritual healer. She is basically a glorified manic pixie fuck toy who exists purely to support the male lead's emotional journey, not fit for even a single scene disconnected from Cooper's story. This parallels the career trajectory of the likes of Shailene Woodley and Blake Lively, solid actresses who did film and/or television work as leads who only earned real acclaim after they took supporting roles in more automatically prestigious 'manly dramas'. Blake Lively was a lead in films like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and the television show Gossip Girl.  But she was written off as a kid-friendly television star before she played a strung-out junkie with romantic feelings for Ben Affleck's oh-so-conflicted bank robber in The Town. Shailene Woodley was a lead actress in ABC Family's The Secret Life of the American Teenager, but critics only started taking her seriously once she played supporting fiddle to George Clooney in The Descendants. It's a great film and Woodley is terrific in it, but would critics have even noticed the picture had it been told from her point of view? I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of this as the newer crop of child actresses 'come of age'.

Review: Super 8: An IMAX Experience trips over its nostalgia-fueled ambition.

Super 8  
2011
112 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

I have written several times over the last few years about various filmmakers basically spending time, money, and imagination basically recreating film genres of the past.  While they may succeed as technical assignments and/or loving forgeries, they need to have some other reason to exist other than to just remind moviegoers of the films of a long-ago era (at least Machete was an angry pro-immigration polemic).   J.J. Abrams's Super 8 is a technically proficient and superbly-acted homage to the theoretical first-wave (1974-1982) films of Steven Spielberg.  It operates on several different levels of viewer nostalgia but struggles to truly work as an emotionally potent work on its own accord.  It still barely passes for quality entertainment for most of its running time until it absolutely collapses in its third act.  Whatever my issues with the film as an impressionistic copy, Super 8 would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for that meddling climax!