maynarddugan

Ignore the morbies and nay-sayers and give this a watch. It's hilarious. My (male) partner thinks so, too. The ladies are *not* hysterical, as per other reviewers. The show talks straight about real issues in women's lives but it's also very, very funny. We just wandered into it by chance and ended up binging quite a few episodes, laughing all the way.

It is well-executed. The show is not just about menopause - although why would that be a bad thing? If it makes you want to vote for the Tories, you're taking yourself way too seriously. And why is everyone so hard on the Ceeb? The Ceeb does great work.

I like that the characters are fallible, vulnerable, fully-rounded, and look and sound like real people. No one is a caricature. The humour is apposite, the narrative is engaging, the characters are sympathetic. It's nice to see a show that deals with the realities of women's lives without sinking into sentimentality or cynicism - it's just, refreshingly, right.

Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel is charming. This movie is a bloated melodrama. 1. Just because you can use CGI doesn't mean you have to. 2. Who needs all the ancillary backstory(ies) that aren't in the novel, and serve no useful narrative purpose. 3. In this film, the secret garden - which is, in the novel, a secret garden - is about the size of the county of Cornwall in England, and full of all sorts of exotic plants that are not in the garden in the novel. In the novel, the children gain agency in their lives by learning to take care of the secret garden, and bring order into a place that has been abandoned and left to go wild (as, in some respects, two of the children have been left uncared-for) - this is sort of the whole point of the story. It would take an army of professional gardeners months if not years to maintain the garden in this film. Read the book, watch the earlier movie. Miss this one.