01. I love, love, loved Nancy Drew books when I was a kid and this movie totally made me want to read them all over again.
02. This film isn’t actually based on any one book but is more of an amalgam of all the little things you need for it to be a Nancy Drew story. She’s got her convertible, she’s got her lawyer father, Carson Drew (TATE DONOVAN OMG!), she’s got Hannah Gruen baking her wonderful things to keep her blood sugar levels high while she’s on a case. Bess and George are there (although George is never named and is otherwise unrecognizable since she does not have short brown hair), as is Ned. Nancy is barely sixteen in this one, though, and so Ned isn’t quite her boyfriend yet (and he’s definitely not in college, either).
03. The mystery itself isn’t overly complicated nor hard to solve, but I don’t think it’s meant to be, really. Especially not for the adults in the audience.
04. Nancy would be considered a Mary Sue in any other context, but they take her brilliance-at-all-tasks to such an extreme that you know they’re being deliberate about her perfect skills. Constructing Notre Dame in shop class while everyone else makes birdhouses? Nice. It’s the same sort of deliberate irony they use in Pleasantville, but instead of everyone being excited when the fireman rescue a cat from a tree, you get the townsfolk all smiling knowingly when Nancy repels down the side of a church to escape certain death.
05. AWESOME COSTUMING. Loved the variation on fifties style they insisted on dressing her in. Nancy herself says she just likes “old fashioned” things, but I thought they did a nice job of updating standard 1950s cuts and patterns for this decade.
06. Ned is basically Theresa’s boyfriend Eric. When we saw trailers for The Astronaut Farmer and saw the same actor in it, we did a double take and thought “Whoa, that kid looks like Eric.” But in this? He is Eric, down to the lines he gets, how he delivers them, and his general mannerisms. It was kind of freaky. Loved the bit when Nancy, Ned, and Corky go out for dinner in Chinatown and Ned just looks at Corky and says “Who is this person?”
07. As far as movies about detectives solving the murders of dead Hollywood actresses go, Nancy Drew totally kicks The Black Dahlia‘s ass. God that movie sucked. “YOU LOOK LIKE THAT DEAD GIRL!” Oh my god, shut up, Scarlett Johansson. Ahem.
08. If for some reason you were wondering whatever happened to Chris Kattan, he plays a thief at the start of this movie.
09. Emma Roberts is terribly endearing in the title role. She’s freaking adorable.
10. Best cameo ever? BRUCE WILLIS. NO, I’M FUCKING SERIOUS! HE IS IN THIS MOVIE! Nancy and Corky decide to pay a visit to a make-up artist while doing some sleuthing, only they end up on the set of what is apparently a film set in the 1950s. Cue the make-up artist hurrying Nancy on set in a frenzy because she looks like she’s already in costume. Mr. Willis appears as a 1950s cop and as he’s reading the Miranda Rights to the perps he’s just busted, Nancy steps up and voices her concern over the authenticity of the scene, citing that the Mirand Rights did not have to be legally read until 1963, so they’ve got an anachronism on their hands. The director pitches a fit because he doesn’t care since the dialogue sounds good despite the mistake and Bruce Willis, being the fine actor that he is, will have none of that. He asks Nancy her name and then promptly asks her in all seriousness if she’d like to direct the rest of the film because they really don’t need the jerk-off who is currently doing the job. It was freaking hysterical, wow. Just… wow. I love Bruce Willis cameos.
11. There’s one part in the film where Nancy is having lunch in the cafeteria of the new school she has transfered to in Los Angeles and one of the hip, popular girls looks at Nancy’s penny loafers and asks if she’s wearing them to be ironic; later Nancy ends up in a fashion magazine (Elle? I can’t remember) wearing the loafers and thus started a new trend called “sincerity”. This, I think, sums up the movie best: there is a lot of deliberate irony in the movie that makes it really, really funny but in the end it’s a really wholesome and sincere film that is too adorable not to like. I think a lot of people might feel the movie doesn’t really know what it’s trying to do, but for a kids film I think it does enough. In a world full of Paris Hiltons, do we really need to justify the existence of a Nancy Drew?
12. I completely forgot one of the best parts. As part of her sleuthing, she actually IMDBs the dead actress! I guess it was only a matter of time before IMDB started showing up in movies the way Google does.
This was just a really, really satisfying movie that was way better than I expected it to be. [Seriously, this and Grindhouse are my favourite so far this year.] Also? For the first time in our lives, we finally saw a movie with no one else in the theatre! Every time I get close to this happening, someone always walks in halfway through the previews and ruins the fun. But no one came in tonight — such is the benefit of going to the late show of a kids’ film on a Sunday night — so we got to talk and comment out loud as much as we wanted to. Fun times.