Our Sweet and Sour Summer of YA Angst marches on like a june bug in a Southern pride parade with 2013’s Beautiful Creatures, a country-fried slice of supernatural teen drama stuffed with a bunch of heavy-hitting actors in turn stuffed with all the scenery they devoured. What might otherwise be a pretty rote YA adaptation becomes considerably more interesting by making the brave choices to swap the expected gender roles and also not really explain anything very well. Come sit a spell on the veranda with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they discuss the vague and confusing world of the Casters, a YA story that seems to remove all agency for its female protagonist, and the weird details from the source material were apparently lost in translation. And also there’s yet another lemonade cocktail that’s so sweet and boozy, you’ll think your dining room table has begun to rotate rapidly while two other people rotate outside you in the other direction. Stop it! Lena, stop it. Stop it, Lena! Lena!
Tag Archives: beautiful creatures
83.5 – Blasé YA
As part of our process of determining movies for our Sweet and Sour Summer of YA Angst, we went through several lists of movies based on young adult novels that never quite took off or flopped miserably. Naturally, we ended up watching multiple potential candidates and came across several movies that we found fascinating in some way but didn’t merit a full discussion. Maybe they were actually good! Maybe they just sucked so much that no one wanted to talk about them! Anyway, on that note, please enjoy our discussion of three YA novels that were not the hits the studio may have hoped they were- 2014’s Vampire Academy, 2016’s Fallen, and and 2018’s Every Day. Which one of these was the secretly good one? Hint: it’s the one we spend the most time talking about! Also our summer of teen angst continues unabated with our next piece of country-fried cinematic supernatural nonsense (and yet another lemonade cocktail to accompany it).
Filed under Why Watch?