Celestial Timepiece

Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, the film based on a book written in the 1990s about a small town in the 1950s, has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday night and its theme is more timely than ever, says its author, Joyce Carol Oates.

Rebellious Margaret “Legs” Sadowsky and her classmates Maddy, Lana, Rita and Goldie form the titular secret gang to revenge themselves against the men and boys of their 1950s small town.

“They were girls whom I knew — a composite of girls, not necessarily all in one group, some I went to school with,” Oates, 74, says in an interview from her home in Princeton, N.J., last week.

“I saw the first [version] years ago,” she says of the 1996 adaptation that starred a young Angelina Jolie as Legs, and moved the setting to a high school in present-day Portland. “The problem with the first film, as you probably noticed, was that it was so low-budget that they couldn’t do it in the proper time. And as a result it just was middle- and upper-middle-class suburban girls.”

The National Book Award winner is more optimistic this time around, though, as this film is adapted and directed by Palme d’Or-winning French filmmaker Laurent Cantet …

Read the complete interview at the National Post.