Thelma Adams: Novelist, Critic, Oscar Expert

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Why do we need a Peter Pan Reboot — What About Wendy Darling?

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I despite websites when they function as straight ahead marketing, riding on the back of poster reveals or new trailers fed to them by the studio publicity machines. It means that journalists that rely on the page view spikes become more beholden to the industry they should hold at arm’s length. Which brings me to Pan, which happens to be directed by Joe Wright, who made a movie out of Anna Karenina and arguably the best Pride and Prejudice. But, do we really need another Pan? The trailer, with a glancing look at Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily (that she is not a Native American is a rant for the more literal minded), seems to owe a debt to Terry Gilliam:

What I’d love is a Peter Pan reboot that investigates the enduring power of the Peter Pan complex by focusing on Wendy Darling, maybe with Alicia Vikander in the role (and Mads Mikkelsen as Captain Hook?). In my novel, Playdate, I wrote:

“When had it become so hard just to sit still and play? Men had Peter Pan complexes, but women had the Wendy Darlings. The Wendys wanted to fly a little and be dazzled by pixie dust, but they were consumed with relationships and caretaking and what the neighbors thought. Wendy’s lost boys were content to fly; Wendy had to civilize. She couldn’t abandon herself to wild dancing by firelight with the Indian braves; she had to funnel them all back into London middle-class respectability. Wendy was in such haste to grow up and become the mother, that central domestic figure; to children, their mother’s skirts were the world.”

I feel an essay coming on — do you have any strong feelings about Wendy? Did you pretend to be her in make-believe childhood role-playing games?

‘Savages’ author Don Winslow on point-of-view

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A civilized Winslow has his own point-of-view

Recently, I sat down in Manhattan to chat with “Savages” author Don Winslow for Yahoo! Movies. Afterwards, there were transcript bits on the cutting-room floor that novelists interested in craft would appreciate. Here, Winslow on using the omniscient point-of-view:

Don Winslow: Writing books I’ll change point-of-view inside a sentence. I just don’t care, as long as the reader can hang in with it. And then people, particularly heavy-duty crime genre types, go nuts on me. They say you have a chapter where there are two or three points of view and I want to say, dude, I have a sentence where there are two or three points of view. I would switch every syllable if I could. It doesn’t bother me at all.

TA: When I went through editing on “Playdate,” which has an omniscient narrator, my editors encouraged me to go through a rewrite and pull any point-of-view that would shift within a paragraph, and since it was my first published novel, I went along.

DW: In my first book, whatever they said, I was like, yeah. But, now, it’s stet, stet, stet. And you’ve seen the book. It’s a copy editor’s nightmare. I said, ‘when you get to the copy-editor, take away his belt and shoelaces.’

Good Day New York Book Club selects ‘Playdate’

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Thelma Adams talks about her debut novel, “Playdate.”

She is currently a Yahoo! contributing editor and her column “Thelma Adams on Reel Women” runs on AMCFilmcritic.com. She was Us Weekly’s film critic from 2000 to 2011, after six years reviewing at the New York Post. She has written for Marie Claire, The New York Times, the international Herald Tribune, The Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan, More, Interview, and Self.