#Hilderbrand

[lizzardtales]

What Manderville quest lines in Endwalker could have been (thankfully not)

[thebubblesoutlet]

If I had a nickel for everytime Nicole Kidman played a rich milf from a book to TV adaptation who lives in a wealthy-but- sleepy seaside town and somehow becomes implicated in a murder then I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's funny that it happened twice.

[aseaofquotes]

Elin Hilderbrand, 28 Summers

[v171]

I love a book that knows its audience.

[theodegas]

of all the The Perfect Couple book → netflix series changes, I’m most upset about the omission of Celeste’s stutter

one, it showed just how anxious getting married to Benji made her. like she was in such disarray that she developed a stutter that only progressed as the wedding date got closer.

and then it meant we didn’t get the on-screen version of Merritt helping Celeste practice her wedding vows. Merritt telling her to think of it as saying “I dew,” to get her through.

also my best friend has a stutter, and reading a book with a main character who stutters made her feel so seen. I’m sad she won’t feel that when she watches the show.

[tv-moments]

The Perfect Couple

“She Would Never Do That”

Director: Susanne Bier

DoP: Roberto De Angelis, Shane Hurlbut

[blackramhall]

No one's getting married today. Somebody died.

Happy Wedding Eve - The Perfect Couple, Episode 1

Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes. WS, Ha Avatar pic by Mitchell Turek

[catmint1]

Summer does something to the brain. It’s intoxicating. Everything shimmers.

—Elin Hilderbrand, Summer People

[cantsayidont]

Three mediocre recent streaming shows:

TELL ME LIES (2022–2024): Padded and flavorless Hulu adaptation of a 2018 Carola Lovering novel, set mostly in the late '00s, about a bland young white woman (college student Lucy Albright, played by Grace Van Patten) and her regrettable affair with a manipulative asshole (upperclassman Stephen DeMarco, played by Jackson White). Typical of recent Hulu dramas, it relies heavily on some surprisingly explicit sex scenes to enliven a dull plot and thinly drawn characters. Stephen isn't even an interesting creep, just a garden-variety douchebag, and Lucy herself has no discernible personality. (The eating disorder with which the character struggles in the book is also omitted, one supposes because creator Meaghan Oppenheimer felt it wasn't sexy enough.) The entire first season contains exactly one memorable story point: a nightmare-fodder subplot about Lucy being accused of plagiarism after reusing for creative writing class a short story she wrote on her LiveJournal in high school. CONTAINS LESBIANS: Lucy briefly gets a Black lesbian roommate (Zoe Renee), and one of her friends is closeted, but little comes of it until Season 2. VERDICT: Has the "I guess you had to be there" vibe of listening to strangers gossip about their boring college reunion, and Lucy's lack of personality becomes a really glaring weakness in the recently started second season.

TERMINATOR ZERO (2024): Convoluted, gloomy, pretentious animated TERMINATOR variation, written by Mattson Tomlin, but produced by Japan's Production I.G. and directed by Masashi Kudō. Set primarily in August 1997 — the eve of the nuclear war in the timeline of the first two movies — it focuses on the efforts of scientist Malcolm Lee (Yuuya Uchida) to convince his powerful new artificial intelligence, called Kokoro (Atsumi Tanezaki), to save humanity from Skynet; inevitably, visitors from the future seek to intervene. More conceptually ambitious than many of its predecessors, but also very muddled, with frustratingly hazy stakes and a lot of high-minded speechifying that sometimes clashes with this franchise's by now very tiresome story conceits. The 2-D animation is generally good, but it's dragged down by some dreadful 3-D inserts (particularly in the finale), and the action sequences lack imagination, wasting too much energy trying to echo familiar moments from the live-action movies rather than coming up with anything very new. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Not that it acknowledges. VERDICT: Tries hard — sometimes too hard — but doesn't ever add up to much, and if you're not sure the world needed yet another TERMINATOR spinoff, you'll likely remain unconvinced. In the time it would take to sit through all eight episodes, you could watch GHOST IN THE SHELL (1995) and most of TERMINATOR 2 (1991), so why not do that instead?

THE PERFECT COUPLE (2024): Unbearably grating mystery, ineptly adapted by Jenna Lamia from a trashy novel by Elin Hilderbrand, about a murder investigation on the eve of the posh Nantucket wedding of a cute middle-class zoologist (Eve Hewson) to the vacuous middle son (Billy Howle) of a mega-rich mega-bitch mystery novelist (Nicole Kidman) and her shiftless old-money pothead husband (Liev Schreiber), who's constitutionally incapable of keeping it in his pants. Plays like a Benoit Blanc mystery without Benoit Blanc, laboring under the misapprehension that just showing rich people being entitled, racist assholes constitutes incisive social satire, and the entire cast (which also includes Isabelle Adjani and Dakota Fanning) is unbelievably bad, not helped by a total lack of coherent character motivations. Stupid, abrasive, and stretching the story to six one-hour episodes makes it a real endurance test. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Just some '90s-style comic relief gay guys. VERDICT: Like broken glass on the beach, featuring one of Kidman's career-worst performances. If you're in the mood for something like this, try the recent Peacock adaptation of Liane Moriarty's APPLES NEVER FALL, which is much better.

[authorstalker]

My December, January, & February Reads

Will I ever have time to read again????? Here's a pathetic roundup of the past three months.

Thin Skin, Jenn Shapland - One of the most beautiful book covers I've ever seen. The essay topics are a real bummer—radioactive waste, consumerism, the struggle to find meaning—and as someone who loves contemplating life's horrors, I had a great time reading this collection.

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, Molly McGhee - This would kill as a TV adaptation. Apple, since it seems like we're never getting Severance season two, here ya go!

Winter Storms, Elin Hilderbrand - I have no critiques; a perfectly pleasant, festive read.

Big Swiss, Jen Beagin - An incredibly fun time, pulled me right out of a reading slump. It's hilarious and I haven't read anything like it—thank you, Jen Beagin!

[blueberrygrapes]

summer at nantucket

[alapagedeslivres]

Eté après été d'Elin HILDERBRAND

Marque de fabrique d’Elin HILDERBRAND : l’île de Nantucket. Tous les récits de cette auteure ont ce cadre avec le même espace temps : l’été. Je ne m’en lasse pas. Je suis fidèle au rendez-vous (en éditions POCHE, cette fois) Le résumé des éditions LIVRE DE POCHE – 05 juin 2024 : Été 1993. Mallory vient d’hériter d’une petite maison sur l’île de Nantucket. Elle y reçoit les amis de son frère, qui…

[thequotefairy]

Bad things can happen, terrible things. You can lose the people you love the most; you can lose homes, cars, antiques, hand-knotted silk rugs that cost five figures; you can discover that the very life you’re living is a terrific lie. And despite this, despite all this, the sun will continue to rise.

Elin Hilderbrand, Troubles in Paradise

[theivorybilledwoodpecker]

A 6 year old's ball rolled into a neighbor'd yard....so he (Robert Louis Singletary) felt entitled to open fire on her and her whole family.

Ralph Yarl. Payton Washington. Kaylin Gillis. And now Kinsley White, Ashley Hilderbrand, and William White.

America has multiple problems. You see, race was a factor in Ralph Yarl's shooting, but so far, there's no indication that it had a role in the other shootings.

This is about people who should never have access to guns being handed them on a silver platter, and it's about people interpreting the "Stand Your Ground" ideaology to mean that they have a right to shoot anyone on their property, regardless of whether the person is a threat.

[desdasiwrites]

– Elin Hilderbrand, The Hotel Nantucket