Notes, etc.

[mercy_angel_09]

On Facebook, my brother posted that he's watching Van Wilder. The temptation to quip, "Oh, you're watching the movie version of your collegiate career?" is very, very strong and it's taking every single ounce of willpower I possess not to. But I want to, so very, very badly. Seriously, the kid has been in college for the last seven years. It's about damn time he graduated with a B.A. in something.

At any rate, and in other irrelevant news, I found a way to sit through Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story and reached two very logical conclusions.

1) If your only exposure to the Anne-verse is through the Kevin Sullivan productions, go ahead and watch it and enjoy it. For what it's worth, the story is fairly solid, makes a few callbacks to the previous two TV movies, and really, I think the chemistry between Megan Follows and Jonathan Crombie is still strong and they slipped into the roles of Anne and Gilbert as if they hadn't been out of them for twelve years.

Buuuuuuuuuut...

2) If you're a fan of the books and have read them to the point of memorization, avoid it unless you are drunk or have a serious case of schadenfreude or BOTH. Because Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story should be called Fanfiction: The Movie. Because that's what it is.

I figured that Kevin Sullivan wasn't following the book timeline in the first installment, based on the fact that Anne recites The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes at the White Sands concert. Seeing as the poem wasn't published until 1906, this either a serious case of "Did Not Do the Research" or "Did the Research But Didn't Care." If Anne was fourteen in 1906, then she was most likely born 1892(ish) when she was most likely born in 1865 or 1865 in the books. But the continuity snarl introduced by The Continuing Story is something that I can't even get into. I'd rather not wade into that hot mess, thank you.

I'm usually pretty good about giving things a fair shot. I didn't totally hate The Continuing Story but I certainly didn't love it. For what it was, it was fine, but it could have been so much better. I think I should watch it with the commentary to see if I can make a little more sense of it. And it should, at the very least, prove somewhat entertaining.

Anyway, I still love Anne and Gilbert as much as I did when I first read the books back in the ninth grade. Again, I will not own up to how long ago THAT was. They'll always be one of my dearest OTPs (not an original, perhaps, but still, one of the first) and that hasn't diminished any over the years. However, I sometimes wish that they'd be left alone by meddling screen writers.