Angela Lansbury Young

One of my favorite things about watching BBC productions is that everyone is so familiar. I always recognize some of the actors from other movies or tv shows. The fun part is trying to guess where I saw them before. Emma was a wonderful example of this because I recognized half the cast!!! Here are the people I knew:

Last Sunday I had the pleasant surprise of stumbling across the new BBC version of Emma on “Masterpiece Classic”. As most of you know, I adore watching adaptations of Jane Austen’s books. Many Austen movies are among my favorites of all time. I really liked the Gwenyth Paltrow version of Emma (mainly because Toni Collette and Jeremy Northam are A-MAZING), so I didn’t know what I was going to think about this new one.

Well, I have only seen the first episode (there are three all together) but I love it!!!!! Romola Garai plays Emma and she is so adorable! She does a great job of making Emma likable and relate-able. As Laura Linney pointed out in her “Masterpiece Classic” introduction, Emma is not an easy character to like. She is rather stuck up, meddlesome, and does not really listen when people tell her she is wrong. But Romola makes Emma seem like a fun person to be around, and there is great chemistry between her and Johnny Lee Miller who plays Mr. Knightly. I am really excited to watch it tonight (I have actually been looking forward to it all week!!) I thought since there are only two hours left, that it would end tonight, but apparently they are playing one hour tonight and then the last hour next week. Curses! Those crafty PBS people are making me wait a whole nother week!!! (Nother is a word I picked up after reading A Whole Nother Story by Dr. Cuthbert Soup……very cool book, you should check it out.)

Whoa. I just tried to watch it again, but I only made it about a minute in before I lost it. Anyway, the trailer is for the movie Hachiko: A Dog’s Story, which I had never heard of before. Apparently it is being released straight to DVD, which is kind of sad considering it has Richard Gere and Joan Allen in it, who are pretty big names (not to mention a GORGEOUS dog). Well, I cried like a baby the first time I saw it, and then tried to forget about it and move on with my life.

Then I saw this post on EW that talked about the trailer and I couldn’t help but think, “I wonder if that is based on Greyfriars Bobby?” For those of you who don’t know, back in long ago Edinburgh a cute little dog named Bobby followed his owner (who happened to be a policeman) everywhere he went. Then, when his owner died (sniffle, sniffle) he spent most of the next 14 YEARS sitting next to his owner’s grave. The cemetery was named Grefriars Kirkyard and that is how he became known as Grefriars Bobby. Well, you can imagine how my mom and I looked after our nice tour guide told us this story while standing in front of the statue dedicated to this loyal little guy. Needless to say we were both sobbing hysterically enough that people were muttering “silly Americans.” Here is my very own picture of the statue. Luckily my tears did not interfere with the shot.



I've posted before about how I don't generally care how old an actor or actress is. If Rachel McAdams can convince me that she's 16 when she is in fact 25, more power to her, right? There is, however, a limit to my I-believe-you-are-whatever-age-you-claim-to-be stance. That limit appears when one character's age is relative to another character's age, and the relativity of said ages is important to the story.

Confusing?

Here, I'll give you some examples of the worst age discrepancies in Hollywood.

I know this is an oldie, but it's a goodie. In The Last Crusade (which was not, by the way, the "last" crusade, but that's beside the point), Sean Connery and Harrison Ford play father and son. They are eleven and a half years apart in age. Possible? Sure. Likely? Really not. Especially considering Daddy Jones is a PhD.