Okay I'm posting out of order at this point but make it five straight female-driven dramas.
Read this book [consults blog archives] three years ago and liked it just fine. Always figured that with Gone Girl and Dark Places both being adapted into movies, it was only a matter of time for an adaptation of Sharp Objects. What I did not expect was that this 250-page murder mystery would get the HBO miniseries treatment and balloon into eight fucking hours of content. And this really just brings me to my main critique here - eight hours? Holy shit. Holy shit, no, this should have been four at most. There are all of three characters here - two half-sisters and their mother - and for all the depth to their various dark pasts and weird relationships, I'm sorry, there's just no way this deserved to take longer to watch (eight hours!) than it did to read. Plenty of adaptations expand on their source material - this miniseries barely even did so. It was just this slow, slow, painfully slow slog, I thought. The vibe was great, the set design was great, the soundtrack choices were very inspired, the way it dealt with the past influencing the present, flashbacks and present scenes just existing in the same scene at the same time - I loved it all. But what a shame this was eight hours long when four (or even five!) would have sufficed.
Seriously, I'm not averse to long and slow - look at how many multi-minute segments in Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul consist of like, criminals meticulously staging or cleaning up crime scenes - but you've got to make long takes and lethargic pacing matter.
A secondary, distant nitpick I have with this series was its casting. Look, Amy Adams is wonderful and talented, and no one disputes this. But are we really buying her as someone who's more or less thirty, with a teenage sister? She is 44 years old. And on the one hand, I know, I know, it's hard as hell for women in their forties to land compelling multidimensional roles, or so the thinking went as recently as 2015 or so. But I mean, she fucks an 18-year-old here. Mrs. Robinson fantasies aside, that just plays as weird. And it also plays as weird when she lets her mother bathe her and give her various medicines when she's sick. And I know the point is that it's a weird and fucked up family dynamic, but I just think it skews more realistic to have, say, a 30-year-old actress fucking that 18-year-old and being babied by her mother. This is no knock on Amy Adams or her age or appearance - she looks great here, and I'd even buy her as being in her mid-thirties. But it's very hard to lose yourself in a character being 30 or so when such a well-known actor is playing her. And I know not every actor is available for or interested in every gig, but I can't help but think this would have worked so much better with like, Emma Watson in the main role, caught between a dark past, a rough relationship with her mother, and a developing but generally untrusting relationship with her younger half-sister, whose affirmation she seeks. Speaking of which - Amma, perhaps even more so, is miscast here. Credit to Eliza Scanlen, the 19-year-old actress playing the role. She was great! But she was also 19, and very clearly not 13. So much of the shock of the book's twist ending comes from (SPOILERS!) the idea that a two-faced 13-year-old could be a stone-cold killer. That shock dosn't exist here! Eliza Scanlen is 19, so when you see her being a good little mama's girl at home it feels particularly like an act, a ploy, rather than just an actual childlike innocence. Again, not every actor, not every role, but I find myself wishing we had something more like a Mad Men-era Kiernan Shipka in the role. Someone actually young enough to not look out of place and shady as hell wearing nightgowns and playing with dollhouses.
Okay, I've ranted long enough. Lunchtime!
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