While I never played with dolls back in the Paleolithic era I call my childhood (I was more partial to finding methods of blowing things up real good), I did prefer the "chick-lit". Seeing as Harry Potter had yet to wield broomstick and wand, I should have been a "Hardy Boys" boy.

But their boy-scout antics didn't appeal to me. They inhabited a world of cowboys and Indians, devoid of any hint of darker undercurrents or dangers aside from the villain of the week, who was always foiled by the boys in the end. No, I went for the girl's fare, the "Nancy Drew Mysteries", or as they were called in Norwegian, "Frøken Detektiv".

There have been numerous games based to the books, and a number of made for TV movies and shows. But now Warner Bros. Pictures will soon unleash "Nancy Drew" the movie for theatrical release. But there are a couple of things to be gleaned from the press releases and the trailer for the film which makes me doubt it will capture the spark of those early books that launched the series. One of them is that they will probably excise one of the key elements that set the books apart from, and above, "Hardy Boys", mood.

According to the Warner Bros. Pictures' press release, the film was shot in Los Angeles, by director Andrew Fleming (who once made the half way decent "The Craft"), from a script by Fleming and Tiffany Paulsen. And Nancy Drew herself will be played by Emma Roberts (daughter of actor Eric Roberts and niece of actress Julia Roberts). Also starring are Josh Flitter, as her new friend and fellow Hollywood Hills High School student Corky, Max Thieriot, as Nancy's hometown boyfriend Ned, Tate Donovan and Rachel Leigh Cook.

"Nancy Drew" follows Nancy (Emma Roberts) as she accompanies her father Carson (Tate Donovan) to Los Angeles on one of his business trips and stumbles across evidence about a long-unsolved crime involving the mysterious death of a beautiful movie star. Nancy's resourcefulness and personal responsibility are put to the test when she finds herself in the middle of the fast-living, self-indulgent world of Hollywood. And this setting is, as I hinted at, something of a problem, in my opinion.

Though located somewhere in the Midwest, there was an unmistakable air of East Coast gentry pervading the fictional River Heights, where Nancy Drew and her widowed father, attorney Carson Drew, lives. There's a sub-soil of buried history and dark secrets, haunted houses and dark towers full of spider webs, in short, the Gothic, which seems less and less plausible the farther you move away from the old East Coast, and the closer you get to the open sunlit spaces of California. While it is of course possible to coax Gothic moods even out of LA, it would be more akin to David Lynch, and less to ivy covered crumbling stone walls. And I think we can take it for granted that David Lynch isn't the principal aesthetic inspiration for this particular production.

Now, aside from the, in my opinion, problematic choice of location, and accompanying mood, there's another point which perhaps should have given the producers pause. The plucky girl detective, with a single father working in the field of law/-enforcement, solving mysteries in sunny California, while admittedly deeply influenced by the Nancy Drew books, has already been done as well as it's probably going to be, in the television show "Veronica Mars".

And by removing the one element that could have distinguished the updated Nancy Drew from Veronica, chances are that it will end up looking like a third rate knock-off of its own knock-off, which would be a sad fate indeed for a character with the potential for being so much more.




Anyway, the trailer, such as it is, can be found and watched in streaming format through AOL's God awful embedded player here and here, or streamed, and downloaded in Windows Media Video format here. Or, if your computer has Adobe/Macromedia Flash installed, you can watch it below, courtesy of YouTube.