Suzy Says

Pink is for girls…and my sister’s rat-tail cactus

…at the All Girl Multiplex…

Actually, it’s a single screen, but most of the movies are rated NB17 (no boys). Rob came home while we were watching “Working Girl” and literally fled. Suddenly, it seemed like an excellent time to water the garden!

To be fair, we did watch all the Harry Potter movies, too, which are very boy-friendly with whizzo-zappo effects and Quidditch games, which are also an excuse for the previously mentioned w-z effects. I had only seen the first one when it came out at the theater, so the others were new to me. I’d read all the books, but have an amazing ability to forget things, so I got to be surprised a few times, as well as marvelling at the kids’ terrible haircuts and still wondering why they didn’t give Harry green eyes when they made such a big deal about it in the books.

But after the Harry Potter movies were exhausted (cheer up, Part One of the Deathly Hallows is due out in November, and the second half next year), we pretty much lapsed into utter girldom, watching the following:

How to Make an American Quilt An all-star cast (Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Maya Angelou and more) of women tell their life stories as they make a wedding quilt for a girl (Wynona Ryder in her pre-shoplifting days) who isn’t quite sure she wants to get married. We got so involved in the stories of the past that we kind of forgot about the movie’s present. As usual, the past was more interesting.

We both screamed in horror at one scene, where Ryder wraps herself in the newly-completed quilt and walks outside, dragging it in the dirt. User reviews on IMDB confirm that we aren’t the only ones.

Wish I had that quilt. Or one like it.

13 Going on 30 Jennifer Garner is charming in this light little romp about a gawky girl whose disastrous thirteenth birthday party leads to a heartfelt wish to be thirty (if only she knew that the wait is much shorter than you’d think, or even like). She wakes up in a fabulous New York apartment and discovers that she’s thirty, dating an NHL player and is an editor at her favorite fashion magazine. But things aren’t what they seem. Garner is charming, and the movie is fun, light-weight fluff.

27 Dresses Megan’s a big “Grey’s Anatomy” fan, though I’ve never actually seen a whole episode, so it was a bonus for her to see Katherine Heigl as the movie’s heroine. She’s been a bridesmaid 27 times, but never a bride, mostly because she is secretly in love with her magazine editor boss. Her sister comes to town and immediately enchants the boss, and the “commitments” writer for the local paper covers her upcoming wedding and her sister’s bridesmaid past a little too honestly…

As for Working Girl, it was more fun than I remembered, despite the appalling theme song which plays over the opening credits and almost ruins the spectacular shots of the New York skyline*. We laughed a lot, and those 1980s clothes and make-up are hilarious. Harrison Ford looks so young in it that it makes me feel old.

*Meg observed that now we always look for the Twin Towers, whereas before they were just part of the landscape, and not a very pretty part at that. We can never go back, I guess.