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Tuesday, April 10, 2018

#31: Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day




Poor woman says 'Stop acting like assholes' to the rich.

Between this and Julie and Julia, there's quite a few 00's era movies that have Amy Adams in them that you'd never realize unless you really looked.

I'd include Sunshine Cleaning as well but I didn't see it in full. How did I not when it also stars Emily Blunt? I'm a failure of a fan.

Also, I should have dedicated a month to reviewing movies that would be ten years old this year. I'm sure I can pencil it in for May. Nothing important is in May.

I wondered why this movie went so far under my radar until one of the studio cards opened with "Focus Features" and went "Ah, that explains it."

They obtain very interesting movies but never seem to have the means to advertise or release them properly.

Off the top of my head, the movies I've seen with Amy Adams are;



  • Arrival, which I loved immensely. Watching it alone in a theater didn't hurt either.
  • Enchanted which I'm not a fan of. 
  • Man of Steel and Batman v Superman where she did wonderfully with what little they gave her Lois Lane.
  • The aforementioned Julie & Julia, which was enjoyable.
  • Doubt, which is killer.
So clearly, not a lot, but I like Amy. She seems like a lovely and smart person. 

She has a long history of working with Meryl Streep. So does Blunt, come to think of it, between Devil Wears Prada, Into the Woods, and the upcoming Mary Poppins Returns.

All of that serious diverging to say that Delysia is the first peppy go lucky upbeat sweetheart character of hers that I actually believed in and liked. The other one is Giselle and that's a little too on the nose subversive for my liking.

The titular role of Miss Pettigrew by Frances McDormand, who you may know as the current holder of the Best Actress Oscar, is also a humongously stern delight in a world very different than her own, of opulence and wealth and amazing production design.

Thing is, besides 'solving the romantic problems of various rich women and avoiding detection that she snuck into this job', the movie focuses very heavily on everyone but the titular Miss and it's a bit vapidly confusing what the real conflict is for a while.

"Day long" stories can work for some things, but this wasn't one of them.

Delysia strings along three men, angling to get the best life from each of them...except one she's supposed to love genuinely but it doesn't come across that way except for being told. Of course, the pace is not great, so it does what it has to to get by.

It's supposed to be a movie about true love when it should have been playing up the fact the fact that Miss Pettigrew is a fraud, which would be a far more interesting film.

That's the big problem with this, you have great talent doing their best in a movie with a very awkward screenplay.

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