#RITA OWENS MOVIE#
#RITA OWENS TV#

Harry and Meghan's lost years with the Queen: How a family rift, attacks on the family and interviews drove pair from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II dies 'peacefully' at Balmoral at 96 after historic 70-year reign plunging Britain and world into mourning for an unparalleled lifetime of 'service' Meghan Markle may have stayed away from Balmoral over fears she would not be 'warmly welcomed' by Royal Family, BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell says How the royals raced to Balmoral to be at Queen's death-bed: Reconstruction of historic day that left the world in mourning - including worried faces in Parliament Too late to say goodbye: Prince Harry raced to join royals at Balmoral AFTER announcement of Queen's passing - while Meghan stayed away Heartbroken Britain: Huge crowds gather at the gates of Buckingham Palace after Queen Elizabeth II died 'peacefully' at Balmoral at 96 But even that compounds the vague feeling, when you stagger out after two of the longer hours you’ll endure at the cinema this year, that you’d have derived as much pleasure from an extended shampoo commercial. On the upside, there’s some tip-top cinematography the North Carolina wetlands never looked lovelier. Tate and Chase are no more than caricatures of good and bad, while Kya’s doughty lawyer in the murder trial, played by David Straithairn, might as well be a hologram of Mockingbird’s Atticus Finch. This supposedly feral child looks like she’s learnt self-sufficiency by being allowed, occasionally, to go to Waitrose on her own.Įvery time the story demands an unequivocal punch, it delivers a lacklustre slap. I’m loath to say so, because she’s an engaging young actress, but a good deal of the problem lies with Edgar-Jones. In any case, the big spoilers all come courtesy of Newman and screenwriter Lucy Alibar, who don’t so much sanitise the story as scrub the life out of it. I think that gives you the narrative without too many spoilers. Throughout all this we are whisked back and forth in time, between Kya’s burgeoning career, her romantic adventures, and a later murder trial, in which she is the defendant. So she takes up with the town’s football hero, Chase (another Brit, Harris Dickinson), and while she might understand the inner workings of your average crustacean, she does not see that he is rotten to the core. In the meantime, however, Tate heads off to college, where his gigantic heart evidently no longer has room for Kya. And darn it if they don’t turn out to be just what the world of publishing was waiting for. Trademark look of adoration etched on his handsome features, Tate tells her that she really should send her wildlife sketches to a publisher. Handily, she can also draw like Leonardo da Vinci.

Moreover, Tate shares Kya’s love of nature, which she has somehow parlayed into a professorial-level knowledge of the birds and shellfish (a variety of which are colloquially known as crawdads) that exist in the marsh. Together, they are a sugary young dream, less Tate and Kya than Tate & Lyle. Nevertheless, Kya meets and falls for the preternaturally kind and respectful Tate (Taylor John Smith), who gently teaches her to read and write. By the time she has reached her teens, in the 1960s, the local townsfolk have shunned her, regarding her as savage and contemptuously nicknaming her ‘marsh girl’.

#RITA OWENS TV#

The English actress Daisy Edgar-Jones, who became so convincingly Irish in the TV hit Normal People, here adopts a whole new accent as Kya, who in the 1950s is abandoned by both parents and grows up fending for herself in the marshlands of coastal North Carolina.

#RITA OWENS MOVIE#

This movie plunges waist-deep into just about all of them. It really could be shown in film studies courses as an example of the pitfalls that directors and screenwriters should sidestep. But Olivia Newman’s picture systematically squanders all the virtues of the source material. There were conspicuous echoes of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, never a bad thing, in the 2018 bestseller by Delia Owens.

Where The Crawdads Sing turns a stirring and suspenseful story into cinematic mush. The new Netflix version of Persuasion offers a salutary lesson in how not to adapt a book, and here comes another.

Great and good novels, as we all know, face a perilous journey from printed page to silver screen. A feral girl? Daisy looks like she's off to Waitrose: BRIAN VINER reviews Where The Crawdads Sing

Rita owens