<--- Remember last week when I shared that little AFM peak at August: Osage County? [Click on the photo to the left if you missed that post].
Well, anticipation means bread crumb madness; no matter how stale or tasteless they are, we have to nibble on them! Supposedly the movie is wrapping up filming on Thanksgiving weekend so it's all over but the post-production and the marketing and the re... okay, it's not remotely over.
So... bread crumbs: here's what the inside of the house might look like; here's what Ewan McGregor recently said about working with Meryl Streep and the director John Wells (not much but I devoured it); and here's what the text on the pamphlet to your left actually said:
Three-Time Academy Award winner Meryl Streep and Oscar winner Julia Roberts, star in the "fiercely funny and bitingly sad" big screen adaptation of Tracy Letts' Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winning Play, AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY. Coming on the heels of her latest Oscar win for The Iron Lady, Streep stars are Violet Weston, the sharp-tongued matriarch of the South's most dysfunctional family since Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor tore up the screen (and each other) in that other Pulitzer-Prize winning classic-Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Directed by John Wells, August begins on the night that Violet's husband of 30 years, Beverly, mysteriously vanishes without a trace. Beverly's disappearance draws the couple's three daughters, including eldest Barbara (Roberts), back to the family home, each returning with husbands and boyfriends in tow to comfort their mother and help solve the mystery of what happened to their father. as with all families, home brings out the best and worst in everyone, as each of the children settles back into their place in the unforgiving hierarchy of the family-all amid the palpable heat of the summer. Letts' work borrows its name from the famous Howard Starks poem, describing a month of August heavy with "heat-thicked air" and "no real breeze all day." And it's that stifling climate that will slowly force Violet and her family to face truths about themselves and each other until the secret of what happened that fateful night is revealed."
I almost balked at the comparisons to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof* -- so risky/shameless to compare yourself to a work of such unarguable genius and iconic stature -- but then I remembered that August: Osage County** the play is hardly lacking in genius or, it must be said, the potential for being thought of in the same hallowed way 60 years from now that we think of Cat now.
Will this movie do the play justice? We'll find out a year from now. Or thereabouts.
*incidentally, I sometimes --in fact quite often -- think Cat is actually Tennessee Williams single greatest work as a playwright (though the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire is unquestionably the single greatest adaptation of his oeuvre)
** If you've never seen August: Osage County on stage, you should. Readers living near Raleigh North Carolina have an opportunity this month through early December, readers living near Baltimore Maryland can see a production in January.
Sunday, February 17, 2013 at 9:17PM 
It would be incorrect to say that musicals were made to lift one's spirits since plenty of great musicals are as grim as any ruthless drama. But the genre lifts mine even through tears. So I was instantly in love with the new box set that Warner Bros sent. It's called Best of Warner Bros: 20 Film Collection Musicals (on sale now) and it will serve me well in March once I have time to settle in with some older movies again. I wish I had a copy to give away but I'm keeping this one all to myself - mine! mine! mine!
