Eight days after my 3.20 Hunger Games review and six days after posting an insincere mea culpa, and after getting slapped around by bloggers and tweeters for saying that Jennifer Lawrence “seems too big” for costar Josh Hutcherson, and that “she’s a fairly tall, big-boned lady,” L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein has stepped into the fray.
Maybe if I try clarifying things again the idiot wind will relax into a breeze. I never said that Lawrence being “fairly tall” and “big-boned” was a problem of any kind. I said that in a romantic context she “seems too big” for her pint-sized costar Josh Hutcherson. (Which she is, comparably-speaking.) Columnist Nell Minow suggested that instead of saying Lawrence is too big for Hutcherson, I should have said Hutcherson “is too small for her. ” So I said that also.
And that was it. I have no problem with tall. (I’ve always chuckled at the catcall line “tall…and that’s not all!”) On her own semi-statuesque terms Lawrence is totally fine.
I think the line about Lawrence being “too big” for Hutcherson came from a line in The Big Sleep when Humphrey Bogart‘s Phillip Marlowe tells Elisha Cook Jr.’s Harry Jones that his girlfriend Agnes, played by Sonia Darrin, is “too big for ya.” (To which Jones replies, “That’s a dirty crack, mister.”)