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WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

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It’s like Drunk History, but sober. Wild Nights with Emily is an absolutely brilliant, absolutely hilarious, stupendously ultradry sendup of a costume drama with the very serious feminist mission of setting the historical record straight — or, actually, setting it queer — on poet Emily Dickinson.

Ever just on the edge of toppling over into outright satire, this brilliant corrective, written and directed by Madeleine Olnek, gives us Molly Shannon as the legendary writer (with Dana Melanie as the teen version), but not like any sort of woman our culture has ever acknowledged before. Based on Dickinson’s own work — which also features here in illustrative voiceovers — as well as the book written by the niece who knew her well, this is a portrait not of a miserable, death-obsessed, reclusive, secretive spinster who hid herself and her work away from the world, but… Continue reading…

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MaryAnn Johanson

MaryAnn Johanson is a freelance writer on film, TV, DVD, and pop culture from New York City and now based in London. She is the webmaster and sole critic at FlickFilosopher.com, which debuted in 1997 and is now one of the most popular, most respected, and longest-running movie-related sites on the Internet. Her film reviews also appear in a variety of alternative-weekly newspapers across the U.S. Johanson is one of only a few film critics who is a member of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (the Webby organization), an invitation-only, 500-member body of leading Web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities. She is also a member of the Online Film Critics Society. She has appeared as a cultural commentator on BBC Radio, LBC-London, and on local radio programs across North America, and she served as a judge at the first Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Film Festival at the 2003 I-Con, the largest SF convention on the East Coast. She is the author of The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride, and is an award-winning screenwriter. Read Johanson's recent articles below. For her AWFJ.org archive, type "MaryAnn Johanson" in the Search Box (upper right corner of screen).