Ella Taylor

Fighting For Their Family, One Day At A Time

Ella Taylor — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:03:00 +0000

It would take a heart of stone — or zero tolerance for soap — to resist Any Day Now, a full-throttle weepie about a West Hollywood gay couple trying to adopt a neglected boy with Down syndrome.

Their quest might be an easier one today, when 16 American states permit joint adoption for same-sex couples, and all manner of family forms proliferate on and off-screen. But the film, loosely taken from real-life events, is set in 1979, when institutional homophobia was as common as pointy collars on loud print shirts.

'The Words': Serious Questions, Meet Sappy Romance

Ella Taylor — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 21:03:00 +0000

Bradley Cooper has the wolfish grin and raffish charm of a cardsharp — or a baby hedge-fund manager. So at first you may find him a tough sell as a writer of prose so sensitive and "interior" that even an admiring old-school editor tells him it's unpublishable.

Hold on, though. The writer has moral flaws, and a name, Rory Jansen, that's better suited to a designer of racy swimwear than a crafter of lambent sentences about the inner workings of the psyche.

Rory's wise old dad (J.K. Simmons), who writes the checks that keep Rory at his desk, cautions him to know his limitations.

Chilling Future Awaits 'Girl Model' Recruits

Ella Taylor — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 18:32:00 +0000

In Girl Model, an alarming documentary about the trafficking of Russian child models to the Japanese fashion market, a garrulous modeling agent explains his philosophy: To expiate his own past bad behavior, he says with papal solemnity, he approaches model recruitment as a religious calling, not to mention a fatherly responsibility to do right by the girls, give them a better life than they have now and protect them from harm.

This apparently includes hauling novices off to the city morgue to see how badly things can end for a recruit who doesn't do as she's told.

'For A Good Time': More (Dirty) Talk, Less Action

Ella Taylor — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 21:03:00 +0000

Hot topic du jour, discuss: Do women rule the world?

First the girls took over the schools, with their stellar grades and all. Then they got the lion's share of the jobs. (Not quite true, but the claim generates Web punditry by the ton.)

Now, it seems, young women are the queens of raunch. According to an Atlantic article hot off the newsstands, the hook-up culture that allegedly runs rampant among the youth of today is driven not by horny frat boys, but by ambitious female college co-eds whose career paths leave no time for anything but quickie one-night stands, or less.

For Chinese-American Adoptees, Matters Of Identity

Ella Taylor — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 21:03:00 +0000

Of the roughly 80,000 Chinese children adopted in the United States since 1979, almost all are girls, abandoned at birth by their parents because of China's one-child policy, coupled with inheritance laws that favor boys.

Waiting for them at this end was the pent-up parental longing of thousands of infertile couples, single women (and a few single men) and gay and lesbian couples.