![]() ![]() Turns out she has a good reason: she was actually raised in an orphanage there for a short while before being adopted by kindly midwestern farmers, and now wants to find her birth parents. But, just a few years earlier, she was a 15 year. When she hears that local pianist Myra Brooks (Victoria Hill) is in search of a chaperone to accompany her precocious but exceedingly talented teenage daughter Louise (Haley Lu Richardson) to New York to attend a prestigious dance school, Norma mysteriously jumps at the chance. Louise Brooks, the 1920s silver screen sensation who never met a rule she didn’t break, epitomized the restless, reckless spirit of the Jazz Age. When first met in 1922 in Wichita, Kansas, Norma seems like a nice, churchgoing lady of a certain age, respectably married to a lawyer (Campbell Scott) and mother of two practically grownup sons. 1h 48m IMDb RATING 6.6 /10 1. ![]() In this handsome period piece perfectly suited for cinephiles of all stripes, director Michael Engler (Downton Abbey, 30 Rock, Six Feet Under) and screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey. Here, that parallax view is from the perspective of Norma – played by Lady Grantham herself, Elizabeth McGovern, taking a lead role for a change. In the early 1920s, a Kansas woman finds her life forever changed when she accompanies a young dancer on her fame-seeking journey to New York City. Like so much of Fellowes’ work, it effectively flatters the viewer by assuming he or she must be familiar with certain historical figures (in this case, early cinema star Louise Brooks) and then appears to dish the dirt on them through the eyes of a character from another class or at least different social sphere. 2 When the opportunity arises for Louise Brooks (Haley Lu Richardson) to go to New York to study with a leading dance troupe, her mother insists there be a chaperone. ![]() The time when the parody replaced the horror film. We come to the campiest part of the series. Written by Julian Fellowes, who brought us Downton Abbey and recent series The Gilded Age, and directed by Michael Engler, who worked on both the aforementioned, this based-extremely-loosely-on-fact costume drama adapted from a novel by Laura Moriarty should hit the sweet spot for fans of Fellowes’ particular variety of saucy-soapy period pieces. So, eight movies into this franchise and I keep forgetting that these films were originally released by Paramount Pictures, who's logo comes up in the beginning of each film. ![]()
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