The next Natalie Portman

So, it's not that I haven't been watching movies... it's just that my downtime after the movies has been a little more rare. Regardless...

Can I just say? I think Evan Rachel Wood is simply gleaming with nubile promise. She's got this incredible fragile fury that I'm pretty sure is gonna take her places... and fast! Really, she reminds me of a pre-Closer Natalie Portman. She's not yet quite as sexy as the Natalie Portman in that SNL rap video thing (that video has an effect on my I can't fully explain... but... Damn! It! That little pixie haircut and all that f-word-ing. Is it hot in here?) but the potential is there. And this brings me to my viewing of Pretty Persuasion.

I think this movie probably overshot a little in its ambition. It's an entertaining story about a very very bad little private school girl... behold the stock porno character! And Wood certainly is something to behold. But, tacked onto the end, we find something of a poorly integrated stick-on moral. Or maybe it's not so much a moral as it is an attempt at locating a social conscience in what is basically a simultaneously fluffy and dark sex farce. In the last five minutes, it suddenly becomes an indictment upon the culture of American High Schools in which we have teachers constantly fucking students and students constantly bringing semi-automatics into the cafeterias... *Yawn*. I could've done without the moralizing and been happy with the little bit of devious, slightly deviant candy that this movie was at the onset. Well, maybe not happy... certainly not enraptured... but more certainly more entertained than I would have been if I had spent an evening watching She's All That.