Henry James’ place in the pantheon of nineteenth-century novelists was cemented long ago, thanks to his stockpile of classics, including The Turn of the Screw, Portrait of a Lady, and Wings of the Dove. James’ best-known work was as remarkable for its depth of insight into the human animal as it was for the intricacy of its storytelling. But there is an argument to be made that his most enduring and unsung cultural contribution lies in his back catalogue of fiction and essays exploring the psychological impact of the social changes brought on by the industrial revolution.

Exhibit A: What Maisie Knew, James’ 1897 account of an acrimonious divorce from the point of view of the titular six-year-old child torn between her self-absorbed parents. This strikingly astute and realistic dysfunctional family drama showcases James’ science fiction-like prescience about the far-reaching impact of a new phenomenon with which James (who never married) had no firsthand experience and little secondhand knowledge.

As it happens, filmmakers David Siegel and Scott McGehee didn’t have much personal experience with divorce either when they set out to film a contemporary adaptation of What Maisie Knew. But they were both drawn in by the challenges and rewards of offering a window onto the inner life of how a young girl survives being marooned between her two warring parents. The film, which opens in theaters today, stars Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan as two world-class narcissistic members of New York’s creative elite, who take refuge from each other in new spouses — leaving their moon-eyed wise child to fend for herself.

Word&Film spoke with Siegel and McGehee about the challenges and rewards involved in capturing the painful, pivotal point in a child’s life she’ll undoubtedly return to in countless future therapy sessions.

Word & Film: What drew you back to this Henry James novel? Had it always been a book you loved?

David Siegel: We actually read the screenplay, adapted by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright, before either of us had even heard the title of the novel. We’re both Henry James fans and went and read the novel secondarily. It was a nice luxury to encounter the modern version and learn what it was about and then to experience it through Henry James.

W&F: Were you struck by how ahead of its time James was in terms of its emotional and social perceptions of divorce?

DS: I think it surprised both of us. When we read the novel we were both expecting a lot less would have found its way into the modern version than we found. Given how different the context was 115 years ago, it’s remarkable how much he understood this situation that was rare back then.

Scott McGehee: Particularly in terms of the emotional relevancy of the child. That’s what amazed me. We had read anecdotally that he was inspired to write the book because he had heard of a split custody situation he had never heard of before and he thought it was kind of absurd and ridiculous and it was kind of satirical in that way. And now it’s the most common thing in the world. And yet that emotional relevancy is there.

W&F: Did the parents come off as humans in the book or were there just really screwed up?

SM: He explores people’s dark sides and worst motives pretty thoroughly – how selfish and thoughtless they can be. But I still found them human and interesting people. I felt like we worked harder to redeem them than he did.

W&F: Was that a challenge, to deal with narcissistic characters and mine the humanity out of them?

SM: The great added advantage with a movie is that you actually have a human being to look at. And when you have actors who are as talented as Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan, you see the cracking in their visages. You see that it’s not as oblique or as opaque as you might fear. They’re so wrong headed. They’re so egocentric. Their motives are so misguided that you have to believe there’s a complexity that at least allows their humanity to exist. And that comes from the actual embodiment with each of the characters.

DS: It was something we thought about throughout the process and it was something we kept working with through the edit. We’d play with dialing up and dialing back how awful a character could be and still be real.

W&F: It’s kind of radioactive material – someone who doesn’t treat their child well. Was that challenging and emotionally taxing on you and everyone else?

DS: No one was carrying around their character in a method sort of way. Onata, her natural personality and spirit are much more like the scenes where she’s playing on the highline or at the beach. She’d turn off the pensive sadness like a switch and that was really a beautiful thing. She wanted to be there so much and was having such a good time that it translated to the spirit on the set.

SM: I would also say that Julianne Moore was kind of playful about how she was approaching her role. She would play a scene and do something really awful and then we’d cut and she’d say, “Oh my god, she’s just awful!”

W&F: Being jealous of your six-year-old daughter is something that’s hard to pull off without hating someone outright on screen.

DS: Julianne’s really admirable in that way and not vain that way and that’s a must with a character like this.

W&F: It was also fun to see her playing up this sexy rock star part of her personality, which is something we haven’t seen from her before.

DS: I think she liked that too.

SM: She told us the rock star aspect was the thing that most attracted her. She wanted to do that thing she’d never done before.

W&F: Is that her singing?

DS: Yeah that’s her singing. Those are two songs by The Kills and their manager was really generous with giving us rights to the songs and we took Allison’s tracks off and Julie did it with a little help from Pete Nashel, who has composed music for a bunch of our films. She wasn’t confident with it at all at first and she really hit it off with Pete and her confidence really grew and we loved what she did with it.

W&F: What did you connect individually with this, emotionally?

DS: This is so personal but I’ll just say it anyway. The isolation that made the experience on an emotional and a psychological level so hard, I identified with that from my childhood in a strange way. My parents were together. They split up when I was in college. But there were a lot of things about my childhood that kept me feeling isolated and I don’t think it’s such an unusual thing. But for me it wasn’t really identifying with the parents, it was really identifying with the experience of experiencing the world from your own space.

W&F: I think that during the seventies there was a real lapse in the evolution of parenting. There were a bunch of Baby Boomers who didn’t know how to focus on anything but themselves. What about you, Scott? What did you connect with in this?

SM: I don’t have anything as nice to say as David so I was just going to try and be quiet. But now that you’ve called me out, I come from a really nice Midwestern family who stayed together and were very much in love from ten years old.

W&F: I think every child feels existentially alone on some level, whether you have good parents or not.

SM: I think that’s true. For me that was interesting, to think about what it means to reach outside of yourself and take care of someone who needs you – what those responsibilities are and what those rewards are.

DS: We both were touched by the story on an emotional level. And the opportunity to tell a story from the perspective of a six-year-old, that was really exciting to us. It allowed us to play with fundamental building blocks of filmmaking in a really interesting way, everything from how high is the camera, where is the camera, how often does the child come in and out of frame. What she hears, what she doesn’t hear. How does the music relate to her interior life? You don’t get that many opportunities to work with something as simple but specific. It turned out to be as rewarding as it would be.

W&F: Has your working relationship changed much since you started co-directing in 1993?

DS: I think it’s deepened. We certainly know each other a lot better. We both went through a lot in the making of this movie, personal things we struggled with. In that process we learned to rely on each other in new ways.

SM: It doesn’t get worse, let’s put it that way.

W&F: Then 2012 was just a really brutal year. I can vouch for that as well.

DS: It really is true. It was a horrendous year. And so many people have said there’s something about 2012 that really hit people hard. It was a whacker. One thing after the next. But through that we kept going and relied on each other in new ways and we came out of it closer and stronger.

One of the earliest fables in the Indian Jātakas of the Bodhisattva concerns itself with a talkative tortoise who befriends two geese who eventually agree to transport the kacchapa to the Himalayas provided he can keep his mouth shut in order to grip the stick they would carry between their talons. On the journey, some young children make fun of the tortoise who, when he answers back, quickly plummets to his death. Welcome to Sarah Polley’s last year on the film festival circuit.

On the day “Stories We Tell” premiered at the Venice Film Festival last summer, Polley posted an instructional on how she would be handling press on her third film, first documentary, at least for its nine-month gestation on the festival circuit. In it, she details the film’s dizzying sweep through her own personal history that hit a crescendo when she found herself outside the set of her 2007 film “Mr. Nobody” begging a journalist not to break a story Polley had been sitting on for the last year. The irony that she was dressed in her Neanderthal costume and tears were threatening to unmoor her facial prosthesis is not lost on the thirty-four-year-old Canadian.

“I have a lot of trepidation about doing interviews and being asked how I feel about it all,” the actor-turned-director writes in her manifesto’s nut graf, which first appeared on the National Film Board of Canada’s website, but tore though journalistic circles faster than a tortoise plummeting from the sky. “I worry about seeing my deepest feelings about my life taken out of context or shortened or made to fit into someone’s already written story,” she continued. “And I have spent five years deciding, frame by frame and word by word, how to tell this story in this film. I’d hate to see my inability to think before I speak wipe out years of work with one stupid comment.”

Cut to more than six months later and Polley’s return to the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art’s annual confab: New Directors/New Films, which gave New Yorkers their first look at everyone from Spike Lee to Wong Kar Wai. It could be that her adaptation of an Alice Munro short story and its flawless direction of Julie Christie in her 2006 directorial debut “Away from Her” or her 2011 follow-up feature that finally got her script “Take This Waltz” off The Black List of the year’s best unproduced screenplays made heavy the crown of “new director,” but whatever the case, Polley was slightly more loose lipped about her film than she’d been previously, though one could hardly qualify what preceded the screening as a Q& A. Polley simply encourages filmgoers to “talk to me on the way out.”

Two months later and Polley’s position has finally reversed, and who can blame her? Her micro-budget doc is thrown into the turbulent high seas of the summer blockbuster, opening the weekend after “Iron Man 3″ and the weekend before “Star Trek Into Darkness.” Her distributor, Roadside Attractions, decided to bump the film so it would be eligible for awards consideration this year and Polley is finally – and quite necessarily – talking back to the children below. “This film took years of my life,” Polley explains, “and every single day was a torment. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I didn’t even want to do it! The impulse to throw in the towel never left me, but now that it’s done, the process of digging that all up again is daunting, but I had to make peace with that.”

She admits that digging is, in actuality, other people writing about her film, but that’s something that she’s finally ready to let go. “Making this movie was more challenging than my previous features,” Polley says. “The scary thing was revealing myself, because for the first time I didn’t have a character to hide behind. On top of that, I’m not only exposed, but I’m exposing my family. And that’s a very dangerous proposition. It comes with a tremendous amount of responsibility.” But that responsibility in no way translates into Polley playing it safe while constructing what she calls a “personal documentary.”

The lines between fiction and nonfiction are blurred as Polley employs actors cast as family members alongside members of her actual family who function as multiple facets along her story’s complicated arc. When asked about the reenactments, Polley laughs, eventually admitting she thought she’d “gone nuts.” But is it possible to engage in the techniques of documentary’s true-crime underbelly and still stand apart from reality television? Polley thinks so. “I don’t watch a lot of reality television because it feels exploitative to me,” she says. “It’s like we’re not watching people’s lives, we’re watching them construct this facsimile of a life. I wanted the reality of my film to rise out of a cacophony of voices, but each one of them is authentic, some telling different versions of the same events.”

It’s always hard to ask a filmmaker who’s just emerged from a highly personal, five-year gauntlet what’s next, but Polley is game. She is most excited about an adaptation of her fellow Canuck Margaret Atwood’s award-winning historical novel Alias Grace. This true story of the 1843 murder of a wealthy landowner and his housekeeper has been described as “Southern Ontario Gothic” and presents another unique challenge around blending fact and fiction as Atwood famously drops in a fictional doctor who narrates most of the tale. Polley made no secret of wanting to put Atwood’s novel onto the big screen, telling funders the book inspired her to become a filmmaker and she’s been chasing the rights since she was eighteen years old. In fact, her latest film opens with the quote from the book: “When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion … It’s only afterwards it becomes anything like a story at all.”

She has less to say about another role she’s prepping for opposite James Franco in the latest Wim Wenders film slated for 2014. Polley has quite publicly turned her back on some of her schlockier fare, like the 2004 “Dawn of the Dead” remake, 2005 literary clunker Beowulf & Grendel, and the 2009 genetics-based sci-fi “Splice.” That’s not to say Wenders film is any of the above, but it will roll out with a bigger bang than she’s recently become accustomed to. And maybe that’s okay. In fact, the new film’s title could be something that chatty turtle was saying on the way down: “Every Thing Will Be Fine.”

Thinking about moving to New York to try and make it as an artist? Just Kids author Patti Smith advises against it. She told Jonathan Lethem and an audience at NYC’s Cooper Union art school that the opportunities that launched her career no longer exist there anymore. “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling,” she claimed. But apparently she’s heard great things about Poughkeepsie!

While everyone’s still humming about Christina Crawford’s “Surviving Mommie Dearest,” I figured it would be helpful (and extremely tasteful) of me to point out these beautiful hand-crafted “Mommie Dearest” dolls. When you think about it, $150 isn’t bad for two whole dolls, especially when the “ultra-convenient neck post” allows you to switch the heads at a whim. And remember: If you don’t like them, you can make them disappear.

Paul Thomas Anderson is finally starting to flesh out his adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, and he seems to have a good eye for flesh! New cast members include Reese Witherspoon and Jena Malone, with a side order of Martin Short. I’m hoping this will be the oddest detective movie since Robert Altman turned Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled The Long Goodbye into a sun-baked love letter to ’70s Los Angeles.

What better thing could I possibly leave you with for the weekend than a music video that reprograms Ursula from “The Little Mermaid” to perform a song by John Waters’ trash-cinema goddess Divine? Without further adieu, here’s “Shake It Up”.

With fifteen narrators, a stream-of-consciousness interiority, and some intense Southern dialects, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying wasn’t exactly screaming for a big-screen adaptation. But such literary barriers can’t deter Hollywood’s book-to-film whisperer, James Franco, whose passion for the page extends from his studies as a English PhD candidate at Yale to his own short story collection and recent scrapbook-cum-memoir to his seemingly insatiable desire to option/adapt/direct/star in every book ever published in the English language. (A quick glance at his IMDB page reveals that the dizzyingly prolific actor-writer-director, who recently signed on to direct and star in an adaptation of The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III, currently has seven book-to-film properties in some stage of production and another half-dozen or so in development.)

Franco’s Faulknerian interests were piqued when as a teenager his dad gave him a copy of the As I Lay Dying, the 1930 Southern masterpiece about a family coping in the wake of the death of their matriarch. “I can remember spending a weekend reading late into Friday night and Saturday night, when all of my friends were out partying,” Franco told Entertainment Weekly.

With so many projects in development, we assume he’s maintaining his all-nighter book binges, but what kind of stories continue to light the tireless Franco’s flame? In honor of the upcoming premiere of “As I Lay Dying” at Cannes, we thought we’d do a little literary analysis of our own to see what the artist’s adaptation choices say about the man himself.

Mid-Century Man
Franco won raves early in his career for playing another great enigmatic actor named James. So perhaps by delving deeply into the glamour of 1950s Hollywood to star in the television movie “James Dean,” Franco developed a taste for mid-century stories. In 2011 he optioned Steve Erickson’s speculative novel Zeroville about an obsessive cinephile in mid-sixties L.A., and following on the heels of Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks’ attempted development of American Tabloid, Franco is slated to direct and star in the James Ellroy thriller about three unscrupulous lawmen whose interconnected stories ultimately unfold with the JFK assassination. And in one of his side projects (teaching at CalArts), he worked with a class of student filmmakers to develop DJ Waldie’s fragmented, postmodern memoir Holy Land about suburban Lakewood into a full-length feature.

The Quest for Truthiness
Like any good post-postmodern scholar of letters, Franco seems drawn to the question of truth in narrative. As a writer-director, he continues to develop complicated meta-memoirs like Holy Land or Stephen Elliott’s frenetic part-true crime narrative, part-ADHD memoir The Adderall Diaries. As an actor, Franco is attracted to adaptations where his characters have a complicated relationship with the facts — whether as the snake oil huckster Oscar “Oz” Diggs in the L. Frank Baum prequel “Oz the Great and Powerful” or as Christian Longo, a murderer on the lam who adopts the identity of journalist Michael Finke (played by Jonah Hill) in the upcoming big-screen version of Finke’s memoir True Story.

Isolation
Being the hardest-working hyphenate in show business (after Ryan Seacrest, of course) may be fulfilling, but it can be a lonely life, or at least that’s what many of Franco’s adaptation proclivities would have us believe. From his Oscar-nominated turn as a hiker stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place in “127 Hours” to the tales of suburban loneliness in the upcoming Gia Coppola-helmed adaptation of Franco’s own short story collection Palo Alto to Franco’s next directorial outing, Cormac McCarthy’s dark saga of a reclusive, murderous necrophiliac with Child of God, this guy’s got a thing for loners.

Bildungsroman
Maybe it’s because he’s the son of a children’s book author. Or because he got his big break starring in one of the most beloved high school shows of the last decade (Freaks and Geeks). Whatever the cause, Franco’s clearly got a soft spot for coming-of-age stories. DJ Waldie’s Holy Land and Franco’s own Palo Alto both explore the transition from childhood to adulthood. And Franco is currently filming his Charles Bukowski biopic, which he stresses is not based on the poet-writer’s thinly veiled autobiographical novel Ham on Rye, but is similarly concerned with Bukowski’s bleak Los Angeles boyhood, using an undisclosed biography as source material. Picking up on other favorite Franco themes of isolation and abuse, Bukowski’s upbringing was riddled with bullying from his classmates and beatings from his father, but Franco insists he will cleave to the wry, funny tone with which Bukowski tells his own sad stories. “The thing about Bukowski is that, as hard as his life was when he was a child and adult, it all turned into work, work that is harsh but humorous,” wrote Franco in his occasional rambling blog for Huffington Post. “He always casts himself as the loser, but in the end he is the winner because he turns his losses into art.”

He likes the boy books
Sure, he starred as Julia Roberts’ young paramour in the uber chick flick “Eat Pray Love,” but for the most part, Franco is solidly of the manly adaptation persuasion. His current development slate is almost entirely by male authors, many of whom are known for their stark “masculine” prose. Case in point: NPR called American Tabloid a “testosterone-filled romp” and the New York Times found McCarthy’s Child of God to be full of “harsh words … like bumps of dirty ice.” Perhaps the attraction to manly authors is the result of starring in all those bromances? Either way, as is clear in his experimental art film “Masculinity and Me,” for Franco, manhood is a theme that’s a real page-turner.

The surest sign that Hollywood has fallen in love with an idea but had some trouble conceiving is when twins suddenly show up on the big screen. Did the world really need two Truman Capote biopics or a pair of Snow White thrillers? Things are about to get a whole lot more confusing given this week’s news that the most recent twosome of genetically similar films to hit studio slates also shares the same name: “Chef.” As the title suggests, both of these projects explore the high-stakes world of high-end cooking. The alpha of the siblings will star Bradley Cooper as a celebrity chef who flames out in a bonfire of vanity and decadence. The second is a small-scale affair about a cook who loses his job and opens a food truck, featuring Jon Favreau as its writer, director, and star.

So what’s with Hollywood’s sudden infatuation with the culinary arts? The better question is: What took so long?

Nearly a decade ago, a wise friend observed that food is the new drug. Naturally, her epiphany came over dinner at A.O.C., one of LA’s first and best seasonal small-plates joint on the front wave of the foodie revolution. This was before “Top Chef” became appointment viewing and readers began gorging on a never-ending feast of food-oirs — the summer reading snack of choice. And while it’s no secret that eating can be addictive, my friend’s insight was more about how the culture of a well-crafted meal – and all that goes into creating it – has become compulsively alluring to the point of becoming a national preoccupation.

Given the ubiquity of our food obsession, movies have been surprisingly slow on the uptake. Sure, “Ratatouille” and “Julie and Julia” were set in the world of fine dining, but our current food fetish is more about the the adrenaline rush for chefs experimenting with new flavors under pressure to blow minds with every plating and the dopamine rush for diners on the receiving end. In other words: Today’s foodie culture is to traditional fine dining as adventure travel is to a cruise ship.

Whatever the reason for Hollywood’s delay in seizing on the public’s growing appetite for entering the emotional and creative crossfire involved in food creation, producers are now digging in with gusto. And given that the movie business is not known for its moderation, hopefully this signals the beginning of a multi-course meal of food flicks. As mentioned earlier, the pantry is well stocked with source material. Below you’ll find our top five food memoirs we’d most like to see on the big screen. We can only hope this sparks feeding frenzy of adaptations.

1. Heat: An Amateur Chef’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford
2. Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton
3. Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table by Ruth Reichl
4. The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher
5. Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater by Frank Bruni

Eighty-four years ago, on May 16, 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences handed out the first round of Academy Awards at a dinner party at the Blossom Room of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California. There were two hundred seventy people in attendance, and tickets cost no more than five dollars. The dinner was spearheaded by MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, who believed there should be a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of the film industry. At the ceremony, there were two special awards presented: The first, to Warner Bros. for producing the first ever “talkie,” “The Jazz Singer,” starring Al Jolson; and the second to Charlie Chaplin for his role in “The Circus.” Since then, there have been countless milestones and enduring Oscar moments, but today, we’re looking back at our top five favorites.

Robert Opel, the infamous Oscar Streaker
The 46th Academy Awards ceremony, which aired April 2, 1974, was presented by John Huston, Diana Ross, Burt Reynolds, David Niven. The tremendously cool David Niven was introducing Elizabeth Taylor, who was to present the Oscar for Best Picture, when Robert Opel — forever to be known as the Oscar Streaker — ran by, completely nude, and flashed a peace sign. Without missing a beat, Niven calmly remarked, “Ladies and gentlemen, that was almost bound to happen. But isn’t it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings.”

Sacheen Littlefeather
Sacheen Littlefeather accepted the Oscar for Best Actor on behalf of Marlon Brando for his performance in “The Godfather.” She delivered a speech Brando had written, informing the audience that the actor was boycotting the ceremony in protest of the treatment of Native Americans by the film industry. Though she wasn’t able to relay Brando’s full speech, she confirmed she would recite it in its entirety to the press after the ceremony.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay with “Good Will Hunting”
Never was an acceptance speech more genuine or heartwarming than when best friends Ben Affleck and Matt Damon took center stage at the Academy Awards for their first time. The movie, which was nominated for nine Academy Awards, was written by Affleck and Damon, with Damon in the title role.

Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to take home the Oscar for Directing
Director Kathryn Bigelow made history at the 82nd Academy Awards when she became the first woman to win Best Director. The award was for war film “The Hurt Locker,” which took home six Oscars that night.

Heath Ledger wins Best Supporting Actor for “The Dark Knight”
On January 22, 2008, Australian actor Heath Ledger was found deceased in his New York City apartment. Six months later, his penultimate film, Christopher Nolan’s ”The Dark Knight,” opened nationwide. Ledger’s performance as the criminal mastermind known as The Joker was harrowing; so harrowing, that at the 81st Academy Awards Ceremony, Ledger’s family ascended the stage to accept the Supporting Actor Oscar on his behalf.

What did we miss? Let us know about your favorite Oscar memory in the comment section below. 

Just when you thought the twenty-first century couldn’t get any more self-aware, Rena Riffel has set a new standard by joining NYC’s current production of “Showgirls! The Musical!” reprising her small-yet-memorable role from the 1997 film as a winsome stripper temporarily named Penny. Riffel’s other claim to fame is that she wrote, directed, and starred in her own low-budget sequel, “Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven,” which is more than most of the other “Showgirls” alumni have accomplished over the past eighteen years. She also enjoyed bit parts in movies like “Mulholland Drive” and “Striptease.”

The show itself (which I reviewed recently) has also experienced a dramatic change of venue, airlifted out of its seedy downtown theater space and given a Goddess-caliber makeover at the fancy Hell’s Kitchen nightclub XL. Describing this as “Off-Broadway” seems like a stretch, but as my friend pointed out, it’s at least technically true; after all, the show certainly isn’t on Broadway.

The new production makes the most of their new shimmering LED backdrop, which approximates scenes from the movie and made me nostalgic for sixteen-bit video game graphics. Maybe there’s a “Showgirls” Super Nintendo cartridge out there that we’ve been missing out on all these years? If there isn’t, count on Riffel to have one on the market by the end of the week!

The musical would still be perfectly entertaining without adding her to the cast, but while they’ve got her, they’re going for broke. A new song has been squeezed into the first act for Penny to warble, which not only rhymes “gonna be a star” with “sleeping in my car,” but also allows Riffel to blatantly (albeit cheekily) plug “Showgirls 2,” which of course is on sale at the merch table after the show.

There are a couple of specific questions you might have about all this, which I will attempt to anticipate and answer as tastefully as possible. First, Riffel looks fantastic. The years have been much kinder to her than you’d expect based on the hard-living “characters” she’s played in so-called “movies” all these years. She’s fully committed to the fun and the fans; she’s in on the joke, but still takes the job so seriously that it almost breaks your heart a little.

And it’s a bigger job than you might expect: Since not much happens to poor Penny in the second act, the producers dutifully deploy Riffel as a backup dancer at strategic intervals. I appreciate how hard she’s worked to learn all that choreography, but I’d be more satisfied to imagine her cooling her jets backstage with a bottle of spring water and then meeting her fans at the merch table after curtain call. Whatever she’s making, she’s already earned it at that point, and then some.

Meanwhile, whatever they’re making off of her, they’d better enjoy it! After May 25, Rena Riffel will return to the parallel universe from whence she came — the one in which Penny really was the star of the show all along.

“Refuse to live your life by the book,” pronounce the posters for “The English Teacher,” the indie feature debut from television director Craig Zisk. Julianne Moore stars as said English teacher, who, when we meet her, has been doing just that. A little mousy, a lot lonely, Linda Sinclair lives her life by rote, only really coming alive when discussing Charles Dickens or Gabriel Garcia Marquez with her high school students. But Ms. Sinclair begins to deviate from her script when one of her favorite former students, Jason Sherwood (Michael Angarano) returns to town, having tried his hand at playwriting in New York. Unwilling to let his talent fester, Ms. Sinclair hatches a plan to produce Jason’s unwieldy tale of magical realism at the school — a plan that quickly veers off course.

But even as she ceases to “live by the book,” Ms. Sinclair never stops being bookish, referencing writers, delighting in perfect prose, enjoying the cozy quiet of a great independent bookstore. And so in honor of “The English Teacher,” which hits theaters on May 17, we thought we’d take a look at some of our other favorite bookish women on film.

Hermione in the “Harry Potter” series
If Harry Potter is the boy who lived, Hermione is the girl who read, and read, and read. And not to knock our bespectacled hero’s powers, but how many times do Hermione’s bookish tendencies save the day? As Ron says of her in The Chamber of Secrets, “That’s what Hermione does … when in doubt, go to the library.” And whether she’s figuring out the secret of the Sorcerer’s Stone or cooking up a mean batch of polyjuice potion, Hermione proves over and over that the book is as mighty as the wand.

Marian in “The Music Man”
She’s Marian the Librarian — of course she was going to make our list. With her thick glasses and tight bun, Shirley Jones, who stars as the literary leading lady in this 1962 adaptation of the Broadway musical, nails the staid, buttoned-up librarian archetype. But her Marian also shows us how brave bookish types can be, passionately advocating that her patrons check out the “dirty books” and ultimately selling her skeptical neighbors on the works of Chaucer, Rabelais, and Balzac.

Kat in “10 Things I Hate About You”
What a person reads for pleasure tells you so much about her, and so the second she picks up The Bell Jar in this 1999 teen rom-com, we know exactly what Kat, played by Julia Stiles, is all about. After all, what else would any self-respecting, snarky, misunderstood alt-girl read but Sylvia Plath’s beloved, depressive tome? It’s the perfect literary choice for this raging modern-day version of Shakespeare’s shrew Katrina, and interestingly, the book that Stiles has been working to bring to the big screen for years.

Belle in “Beauty and the Beast”
To the villagers in her poor provincial town, the cerebral Belle, with her nose habitually pressed to the page, may be a “most peculiar mademoiselle,” but to literary-minded girls everywhere, she’s not just a beauty of the book, but also a total beast when it comes to devouring story after story. We like to think that it’s years of throwing herself into other people’s narratives that gives the heroine of this 1991 animated classic the courage to rescue her bumbling scientist father and the empathy to fall in love with her Beast.

Annie in “Misery”
In this 1990 Stephen King adaptation, Kathy Bates, as Annie, the self-proclaimed “No. 1 fan” of a series of schlocky romance novels, takes her favorite author (James Caan) hostage and threatens to maim him and more unless he comes up with a better ending for his latest book. Sure, she takes it a little too far, but you’ve got to admire Annie’s passion for a satisfying story.

Jo in “Little Women”
Whether played by Katharine Hepburn (1933), June Allyson (1949), Winona Ryder (1994), or even Susan Dey in the short-lived 1978 television series, we’re hard-pressed to come up with a more literary-loving character than Jo March, who when not curled up reading Shakespeare or Dickens, is doing her best to imitate their authorial voices, penning wildly melodramatic plays for her sisters to star in. And where so often bookishness is used to telegraph timidity, Jo is anything but. Her hunger for great storytelling fuels her search for true adventures in her real life, making her the hero of bookish girls (and boys) everywhere.

Mae in “A League of Their Own”
“All the Way” Mae Mordabito, Madonna’s hard-drinking, hard-sliding taxi dancer-turned-center-fielder may not be your typical bookish broad in this 1992 Penny Marshall comedy, but she knows that the best way to pass the time on those long team bus trips is to curl up with a good read. And she’s willing to share the wealth, teaching her illiterate teammate Shirley the pleasures of the page by helping her sound out a tawdry bodice-ripper. The other players may be scandalized by her pedagogical choice, but Mae responds with the reader’s creed, “What difference does it make? She’s reading, okay. That’s the important thing.”

Annie in “Bull Durham”
Another baseball movie with some bookish cred. Along with handcuffs, Annie Savoy, the sexy minor league groupie played by Susan Sarandon in this 1988 comedy, uses the allure of poetry to seduce and inspire her flavor-of-the-season, reading Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman to her young, impressionable ballplayer paramours. She wins bonus points for teaching Tim Robbins’ Ebby “Nuke” LaLoosh that while Walt Whitman would have been a great name for a shortstop, he had other contributions to make to American culture.

Suzy Bishop in “Moonrise Kingdom”
You gotta love a girl whose version of packing for a runaway rendezvous in the wilderness entails stealing her favorite books from the library so that she can read from them along the way. Like many a great bookish heroine, this younger, slightly more optimistic version of Gwyneth Paltrow’s literary Margot in director Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums” uses reading as a means of escape in Anderson’s 2012 release, but she earns a spot on our list for knowing that even once you run away in real life, you’re still going to need something good to read.

Kathleen Kelly in “You’ve Got Mail”
Sure, with its meet-cute in an AOL chat room and a big, bad conglomerate bookstore poised to take down the neighborhood shop around the corner, this 1998 romantic comedy is showing its age. But the snappy script by Nora and Delia Ephron holds up, and as Kathleen, the owner of a cozy Upper West Side kids bookstore, Meg Ryan achieves a perfect cozy bookishness — we’d take her recommendations on the next Eloise or Ferdinand the Bull anytime.

Angelina Jolie has been duly hailed for her courageous choice to undergo a preventive double mastectomy after discovering she carried a gene that radically raises her risk level for breast cancer. But the actress-activist has been exalted and elevated to a state of grace (occupied almost exclusively by pioneering public figures who died too young) by her simple — but in some ways even more daring — decision to share her story in a strikingly intimate and revealing New York Times Op Ed.

Jolie has always stood in defiance of the conventional behavior ascribed to any of the archetypes – sexpot, Oscar-anointed actress, ass-kicking action heroine, human rights crusader, mother, wife, goddess – associated with her throughout her career. There are few movie stars, living or dead, who have refused to succumb to the pressure to follow Hollywood’s rules requiring that she fulfill the fantasy of one of the familiar personas available to actresses.

Instead, she has written her own script, without apologies for unbridled ardor (the vial of Billy Bob’s blood), creative inconsistency (she’s steered clear of Oscar-baiting roles since 1999’s “Girl, Interrupted” in favor of gun-wielding women warriors), and humanitarian conviction (traveling to refugee camps and battle fronts across the third world). All the while, she’s endured an unrelenting onslaught of tabloid scrutiny (not always favorable), while confidently embracing her fierce femininity as sex-positive icon for young women.

This latest act of dauntless transparency, however, separates her commitment to using her power for the good from the usual celebrity sanctimony. She understands that the value in going public with her decision lies in the act of exposing her relationship to the disease. Her mother died of the disease. She took decisive action to protect herself and her children from its legacy of pain and loss.

Jolie’s Op Ed is just the latest and most high profile contribution to a growing canon of personal storytelling about breast cancer. For anyone interested in diving deeper into this subset of uniquely harrowing and inspirational survival stories, the following five books offer startling insights and provide valuable tools for coping with a diagnosis.

Cancer is a Bitch: Or, I’d Rather be Having a Midlife Crisis by Gail Konop Baker
Baker delivers a wry and unsentimental account of the challenges specific to a woman in her mid-forties juggling the stress of a life-threatening illness along with her ongoing responsibilities as a mother and doctor’s wife.

Red Sunshine: A Story of Strength and Inspiration from a Doctor who Survived Stage 3 Breast Cancer by Kimberly Allison, M.D.
As a thirty-three-year-old new mother, Allison was diagnosed with advanced-stage breast cancer, an illness she’d spent her career researching and treating as an oncologist. This emotionally honest memoir reflects on the toll and unexpected gifts she received as a result of her evolution from doctor to patient.

Pretty Is What Changes by Jessica Queller
Like Jolie, after Queller’s mother died of breast cancer and she discovered she carried the BCRA gene, the TV writer underwent a prophylactic double mastectomy. This thoroughly researched book tracks the facts and fears that informed her decision, including how it might impact her future prospects for marriage and children.

Songs from a Lead-Lined Room by Suzanne Strempek Shea
Shea, a noted novelist, takes a lyrical approach to this vivid recollection of her experience in radiation treatment for breast cancer.

Humor After the Tumor by Patty Gelman
As her title advertises, Gellman finds the funny in a situation that’s as serious as cancer. Her book is a compendium of the regular e-mail updates she circulated to her friends and family as she harnessed her powerful optimism to steamroll through a dire diagnosis and its aftermath.

James Franco seems to take a certain pride in his power to incite the kind of blinding rage that sends reasonable people grasping for their pitchforks before joining the angry mob gathering on his front lawn. And why shouldn’t he? There are few public figures outside of politics and religion capable of satisfying the collective hunger for an outlet for the collective sense of powerlessness and disaffection. Franco makes himself an easy target by serving up an all-you-can-eat buffet of hate bait in the form of his ridiculously ambitious projects and extracurricular academic and literary pursuits. What would the chattering class do without him?

Media vultures have already swarmed around the above trailer for his adaptation of William Faulkner’s magnum opus, As I Lay Dying (debuting at this year’s Cannes Film Festival), as if it were fresh roadkill. They’ll continue pecking away until there’s nothing but a carcass left of Franco’s audacious interpretation of Faulkner’s notoriously adaptation-resistant stream-of-consciousness portrait of the Bundren clan’s journey to bury its matriarch. Ironically, the relentless Franco sniping resembles the kind of small-minded groupthink one might expect to find in a small town in Yoknapatawpha County, but not in Hollywood.

Fortunately for Franco, the French have always loved nothing more than embracing an American pariah, a script they’re continuing to follow to the letter by including the actor-author-director-grad student’s film in this year’s impressive lineup. That’s not to say that “As I Lay Dying” isn’t worthy of the honor. We’ll reserve judgment until we’ve seen the finished film, but let it be said that there is nothing in the trailer (below) that trips any alarms that an American classic has been defiled or degraded. It looks like a movie with a bunch of talented actors sporting beards and Southern accents trying to keep from drowning in a raging river and some messy family business. Hell, that alone beats spending two hours enduring “Iron Man 3,” “Pain & Gain,” or most anything taking up space in multiplexes right now.

That said, “As I Lay Dying” doesn’t rate close to the top of our list of promising Cannes debuts. Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” and the Coen Bros’ “Inside Llewyn Davis” are running neck and neck among the films from which we expect unmitigated greatness. Though we weren’t quite as enamored with “The Dependents” as we were with “Sideways” and “About Schmidt,” “Nebraska” packs elements of Payne’s best work into this black-and-white road picture that unites an estranged father (Bruce Dern) and son (Will Forte) on a trip to claim a Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes prize. The Coens can always be depended upon to deliver a slightly off vision of a familiar milieu wrapped in a layer of sangfroid existentialism. Now they’ve turned their lens on the Sixties folk scene in Greenwich Village and the titular talented troubadour who can’t seem to get any traction. Think if this as “O Brother Where Art Thou” meets “Searching for Sugarman.”

We’ll also be keeping tabs on the Riviera’s response to the following films:  “Only Lovers Left Alive,” Jim Jarmusch’s post-modern vampire saga; “The Immigrant,” the latest James Gray exercise in bleakness starring Marion Cotillard as a Polish prostitute in Manhattan; “Behind the Candelabra,” Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Scott Thorson’s account of his turbulent relationship with Liberace, starring Matt Damon and Michael Douglas; “Only God Forgives,” in which Ryan Gosling reunites with “Drive” director Nicolas Winding Refn to reexamine the relationship between rage and redemption in this minimalist gangster story set in Thailand.

We could go on, but leave it to you to fill out the rest of the list of the films most likely to dominate conversation in the cafes along the Croisette. What films top your must-see list in this year’s Cannes lineup?