Show & Tell: Can You Ever Forgive Me?
All:
Well, here’s one of those “on the one hand … on the other hand” kind of situations that makes New England such a joy to live with.
On the one hand, we have a wonderful movie coming to The Music Hall’s Historic Theater and bringing with it all kinds of Oscar buzz about its lead actress and supporting actor.
On the other hand, we have a stone-cold bastard of a winter storm heading our way, offering Winter Misery Mix #7(c), which is snow followed by rain. Lovely.
I can’t really solve the weather riddle for you, but having actually seen the movie, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, at Telluride by the Sea all those warm months ago, I can definitely certify that it’s going to be worth getting into your car and risking your neck to see. The movie stars Melissa McCarthy as a biography writer who’s down on her luck and decides to sell some celebrity autograph letters to raise rent money. And when she finds that the juicier the content of the letters, the bigger the price, she finds that she can definitely supply additional juice, even if she has to write the letters and forge the signatures herself.
She is aided in her quest to give the market what it wants by a drunken pal played with evident gusto by Richard E. Grant.
And if the literary community eventually picks up the trail of her overly creative missives and sics the law on her, well, it’s clear that she’s having the time of her life.
And it’s the gusto, the anger, and the joy that McCarthy brings to this role that makes the movie such a pleasure. I know that she made her reputation by being an outrageous bad-ass, but she can definitely more than hold her own as a desperate and inventively criminal character. The woman has genuine acting chops that weren’t apparent when she was sitting on that sink in Bridesmaids (even if that one got her an Oscar nomination).
So, unless the weather really throws a Blue Norther at us, I hope to see you at The Music Hall on Tuesday night. This should be really fun.
And you might also want to mark your calendar for January 22, when we will be discussing Boy Erased.
See you at 7:00!
Paul Goodwin
TMHMG