things with Christina Ricci in them

Wednesday
Mini-series released all at once and consequently gulped down by me in several big bites. As with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd, Tim Burton turns his source material sour and rancid, eliminating all the joy and wit that I loved in the 1964 Addams Family tv show, not to mention the original cartoons. In 1964, Gomez and Morticia truly loved each other, a rare phenomenon among married couples in tv comedy, and treated only as grotesquery here. So why couldn't there be a show about a teenage girl who doesn't burningly resent her mother, for a change?

Still, Jenna Ortega is outstanding in the premise of "Sheldon Cooper goes to Hogwarts" (as some critic put it). Ortega has said in interviews that she didn't discuss the character with Christina Ricci, but she's much more Ricci's Wednesday than Lisa Loring's, let along Charles Addams's. I found her more than usually relatable: while I don't share Wednesday's taste for the macabre, the complete loner with utter disdain for teenage social activity was entirely me at that age. I was only sorry that they didn't hold to it: Wednesday goes to a school dance and actually dances, which I would never have done; and by the end she's unbent enough to learn to hug. Ycch, what a cop-out.

As the mystery plot takes over the storyline, I found it much less tedious than mystery plots usually are, though the twists, reversals, and fake-outs became excessive in the last couple episodes, as did the sfx. Battles between CGI monsters still suck technically: they shouldn't be made. What I wasn't expecting in the closing episodes were several call-outs to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, including to Buffy's disposal of Gachnar.

As for Christina Ricci, at first one is evidently meant to think she was horribly miscast. By the end, not so much.

Monster
2003 movie, based on fact, for which Charlize Theron won an Oscar for playing a scatter-brained prostitute who murders her abusive johns, with Christina Ricci as her lover/sidekick/?. I'm not entirely sure what the character is doing in the movie, and neither is she. Having her complain that the plot is boring and doesn't make sense is no excuse for doing it that way. Evidently, like A Late Quartet, this movie is intended purely to be admired as a showcase for Great Acting, but my inability to distinguish great acting from merely pretty good acting trips me up here.