power, love, magic and southern gothic gowns: #beautifulcreatures

darlings

it’s late.

we just got back.

but had to write Now while the words are in our head.

beautiful creatures is sumptuous and surprising and elegant and shockingly beautiful and raging-with-lust-and-magic in a sticky darkly humid southern heat.

a great cast – gloriously shot against a landscape of swollen overhanging trees and rotting succulents with southern undercurrents of violence and one-hell-of-a-family-dinner

Jeremy Irons is glorious.

a debonair dandy with a dark soul. 

Alice Englert, who plays Lena “We prefer the word Caster” (to witch), is mesmerizing – and then we realized why – she’s Jane Campion‘s daughter.

writer/director Richard LaGravenese took these extraordinary books that talk about personal power and finding your own centre/center/soul and forging a Path that’s yours – but turned in a script that layered a smart (and snappy teen banter like something out of the 1930s or a beat pix from beatniks in love with the novels-of-freedom and the road-calling) with a deep, dark longing that recalls another, much earlier love story – we couldn’t put our finger on it – but then, when listening to interviews with the Clever Mr. LaGravenese (who also wrote another of our personal favo(u)rite movies about Finding Out Who You Are no matter what that path is revealed to be – Living Out Loud) he mentioned the love story – Romeo and Juliet – and more specifically the Franco Zeffrelli movie version (we’re sure the Bard liked this one) – from 1968 that influenced him…….and the visual parallels are indeed clear, despite a different time – and Place – the underlying story is a triumph of passion entwined with destiny.

and we just thought we were going to see a light but gorgeous-looking Teen flick.

oh gosh, no.

this was a sublime cinematic treasury of beauty.

do go and see it. 

you were almost-sixteen, once upon a time, right?

we’d almost forgotten what it felt like.

like you’re on the

prec·i·pice