| 'Penelope' audiences may turn up noses
The setting is clearly London, where the movie was filmed. (Where else but in England would we hear talk of "bluebloods"?) However, although most of the aristocratic suitors speak in English accents, hardly anyone else does. Max and the Wilherns are American, and so is the tabloid journalist pursuing Penelope. He also offers "five thousand bucks" to Max for his cooperation.
It proves too big of a distraction in a film with a flimsy, mostly predictable plot. It's too bad, because Mr. McAvoy, a Scot who here sounds eerily like Tom Cruise, offers more proof that he's a leading man with the chops and choices of a character actor. The talents of the wonderful and funny Mr. Grant and Miss O'Hara are also criminally ignored.
"Penelope" made its debut at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival and has been sitting on the shelf ever since.
Don’t write off this story yet
Only later, after searching the archives, do I discover why my colleagues fixed me with such vacant stares: I wrote that story back in 1996. Even our most loyal readers, the ones who keep piles of old HCNs in their garages and bathrooms alongside boxes of National Geographics, have likely forgotten my majestic prose and would appreciate a fresh take on the subject. I went through a similar process when Terry Greene Sterling first pitched this issue's cover story on the Salton Sea. Contributing editor Michelle Nijhuis did a fine piece on Southern California's accidental inland sea back in 2000. What more was there to say? Plenty, it turns out. Seven years ago, Salton Sea boosters were cautiously optimistic that federal and state money would pump new life into the drying, irrigation-fed body of water and the struggling tourism and retirement economy it supports.
Pair of plows taken from trucks at Tradeport
Another auto parts crime was reported Feb. 23, when an employee from Portsmouth Ford on the Spaulding Turnpike told police that two tailgates were stolen from pickup trucks parked on the lot. News reports indicate the theft of truck tailgates is widespread and the crimes are occasionally solved when the items are listed as for sale. On Jan. 10, local officers were dispatched to Clean Harbors on Gosling Rd., where a report was taken about the theft of a catalytic converter, again from a Ford pickup truck. The converters, also known as cats, are valued at approximately $70 each, because they are coated in a wash of valuable metals, including platinum and rhodium.
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