{"id":11747,"date":"2019-05-02T14:00:54","date_gmt":"2019-05-02T21:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=11747"},"modified":"2019-05-02T14:18:32","modified_gmt":"2019-05-02T21:18:32","slug":"review-wild-nights-with-emily","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/review-wild-nights-with-emily\/","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: Poetry Comedy <i>Wild Nights with Emily<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are two things I know about Emily Dickinson: She was a reclusive spinster, and many of her poems can be sung to the tune of &#8220;Yellow Rose of Texas.&#8221; The second thing, which is definitely true, is addressed in <strong><em>Wild Nights with Emily<\/em><\/strong>, Madeleine Olnek&#8217;s deadpan biopic that tongue-in-cheekily details how the first thing probably isn&#8217;t. Turns out Emily (played by Molly Shannon with apt nervous spaciness) had a romantic relationship with her brother&#8217;s wife, Susan (Susan Ziegler), on whom her brother was cheating with one Mabel Todd (Amy Seimetz), who would posthumously publish Emily&#8217;s work after erasing all of the poet&#8217;s references to &#8220;Sue.&#8221; Olnek wants to set the record straight (as it were) about Emily&#8217;s life and personality, but she does it in the style of the &#8220;Drunk History&#8221; TV show: historical facts mixed with comedy. A potential publisher of Emily&#8217;s poems (Brett Gelman) is a fatuous, &#8220;woke&#8221; feminist; Emily and Susan (and the film itself) mock the shallow verses of Helen Hunt Jackson, then called &#8220;America&#8217;s greatest lady poet,&#8221; with modern causticity, albeit expressed in the formal, contraction-less language of the 1880s. It&#8217;s altogether more charming and sweet than you might expect an Emily Dickinson biography to be. <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-11378\" src=\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/crookedc.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"21\" height=\"24\" \/><\/p>\n<h3>Grade: <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">B<\/span><\/h3>\n<h5><em>1 hr., 24 min.; rated PG-13 for sexual content<\/em><\/h5>\n<hr \/>\n<h6><em>Join our <a href=\"http:\/\/crookedmarquee.us16.list-manage.com\/subscribe?u=dc6679cd997ec610eeaf50562&amp;id=db71dbf4c3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mailing list<\/a>! Follow us on <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/CrookedMarquee\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter<\/a>! <a href=\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/writers-guidelines\/\">Write<\/a>\u00a0for us!<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are two things I know about Emily Dickinson: She was a reclusive spinster, and many of her poems can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":11748,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}