I wonder if Julia Sweeney regrets creating the Pat character? That was one that was funny in very small doses, and it was pretty much the only thing she got to do on SNL. Which is a shame, as she is genuinely funny. I've read a lot of essays and things she's written on aetheism, and parenting without religion, and I know she's done shows on those topics but all I could dig up from the library was God Said Ha!, her monologue about when her brother got sick and eventually died of lymphatic cancer, how her whole family moved into her cute little single-gal-who-likes-her-personal-space house and took it over for the sake of caring for her brother, and about how she got ovarian cancer at the same time. And somehow she finds humor in all that. It's funny and sad and thoughtful, and I really wish I could see more of her shows.
In a similar vein are Kevin Smith's Q & As, An Evening with Kevin Smith and An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder. The man can tell a story. The man can, in fact, tell a hugely inappropriate story about his wife and make it incredibly funny and full of heart all at once. You can see why she would refrain from killing him for over-sharing. I liked the second Evening better, with disc 1 in Canada and disc 2 in England. The crowds there asked better questions, and the little segments out on the street of those towns looking for authentic Canadian cuisine or seeing if Jay's pick-up lines worked on English women were fun.
In the realm of things I did shell out cash for: Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Kevin Smith and Seth Rogan working together? It's all good. I wasn't overwhelmingly impressed with Clerks 2, so I went into this with muted expectations, but it's Smith at his best: funny and raunchy but so full of heart. It's really a romantic comedy, but not one with a "meet cute" and slapsticky misunderstandings. It's much realer than that. The struggle to pay the bills, the deeply shitty car that makes getting to work a job in itself (it is in fact the same car I had when my husband and I first moved in together; and the bit in the deleted scenes where he can't get the door open, and then later when he can't get it shut again - I laughed so hard it hurts. Been there, done that). I can't recall a single thing I've seen Elizabeth Banks in, but she's wonderful here; you believe her as the kind of girl who would be best friends with a guy like Zack. It's a movie about two friends who have known each other forever but are completely out of step with each other in the whole falling in love thing. So yeah I liked it a lot. Although those I'm a Mac/I'm a PC commercials have just gained another layer of amusement in my mind.The Reader. Nope, didn't like. Wait, that doesn't quite encapsulate it. OK, I fucking hated this movie. How's that? I could give a whole long rant as to why, but this sums up most of my feelings pretty well, particularly the patently manipulative use of Kate Winslet nudity. Imagine if the film had been about an illiterate male Auschwitz guard who deflowered a fifteen-year-old German girl. I doubt the guard in question would be winning an Oscar (I'm picturing Harvey Keitel myself). But at least it wouldn't be a film that was using a naked body to engender sympathy. Or at least that's not the usual response to Harvey Keitel's penis.
(Mostly the movie pissed me off because it made no sense. She has no learning disability, we see this as she teaches herself to read while in prison by listening to Ralph Fiennes reading stories out loud, not an easy trick. But how did she manage to get through life without ever even picking up the word "the", the first word she teaches herself to read? At some point you'd work out that all the stores that sold bread had "Bakery" on them, every bottle of Coca-Cola says Coca-Cola. You have to be willfully not learning to avoid picking up any words at all. Which I suspect was meant to be a metaphor for the German people being willfully ignorant of what Hitler was up to. But as a metaphor it just doesn't work, because it trips up against literacy-not-as-a-metaphor too many times, and as I said it makes no sense. You don't have to know how to read to know that locking people inside a burning building is the wrong thing to do, and it doesn't matter who wrote the report, they all stood there and let it happen. It's possible the novel this is based on makes more sense, but the movie insulted me over and over again. I hate to see fine acting talent wasted, particularly the teenager who played the young Ralph Fiennes, but this movie sucked, sucked, sucked).
Looks like I went on a long rant anyway. Apologies.
OK, I checked out Gone Baby Gone, because who doesn't want to see how Ben Affleck handles directing? I liked this movie, Casey Affleck is terrific, as is the supporting cast. It handled disturbing subject with a delicate touch. This movie didn't make me feel emotionally manipulated. I hope Ben does more films, this one was good.
Gone Baby Gone was based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, so I thought I should check out another film based on one of his novels: Clint Easwood's Mystic River. Kind of a mistake. It's an excellent film, Clint Eastwood is very good at letting actors do their thing and not ruining their performances with an overly-exuberant musical score. All of the actors in this were chillingly good. But this movie upset me deeply, to the point where I actually considered shutting it off. Only I was afraid that the ending I made up in my head would be far worse than what I was about to see and I'd be better off just sticking with the movie. (Which is true, actually, I was so afraid for what Tim Robbins was going to confess there at the river bank that when he finally did tell all it was a relief).
A few days after seeing this movie I came across a quote from G.K. Chesterton on why we believe in fairy tales: “Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” Which I think is why movies or stories like this upset me so much. It says there are dragons, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about them.
Black Snake Moan I admit I only picked up because Justin Timberlake is in it. It's set in Memphis, with Samuel L. Jackson as a once-bluesman, now-farmer who finds Christina Ricci drugged out and beaten on the side of the road and takes her home to fix her up, in a lot of senses of that term. It was an interesting film, reminding me a bit of Lost in Translation in the depiction of an atypical relationship between an older man and a younger woman, although Lost for me is hampered like many Woody Allen films are, in that I can't really understand the problems of the idle rich who wander the world trying to find themselves, trying to figure out what useless skill is what they're meant to be doing. Must be tough, she said sarcastically (Alice aside; I liked how that ended with Mia Farrow deciding just not to be the idle rich anymore). Black Snake Moan is sort of the white trash version of that journey, the one where you don't actually go anywhere beyond the borders of your rural stomping grounds because you don't have the gas money. Plus Christina Ricci's character has real problems, the kind that don't have solutions just ways of dealing with them a bit at a time, as Justin's character eventually learns to accept. I liked this movie, there were some fantastic scenes like when Samuel L. Jackson plays his electric guitar during a storm that makes his electricity dim and threaten to go out. It was an eerie and cool effect. But it was a tough movie to get into in the beginning because the tone was so uneven. There were scenes in the beginning that I wasn't sure were meant to be played for laughs or not. (And Christina Ricci is naked here as much as Kate Winslet, but for reasons that actually matter to the story and her character, reasons that make her the opposite of sympathetic at first. The sympathy comes when she stops being physically naked.)
Namesake is the latest from Mira Nair, about a woman who marries, leaves Calcutta for the US and raises her family there, and about her son who's father named him Gogol and his long journey to understanding and owning his own name. Tabu played the mother, and I always love her. She has a gravitas that works well in this part. (She's also a gorgeous dancer, which she doesn't get to show off here, alas). Gogol is played by Kal Penn, whom I sincerely hope hasn't given up acting entirely to work for Barack Obama. He's got this whole smart/funny thing going on that I really like.(Gogol is the name of a Russian writer, and I'm not going to say why Kal Penn's character is named that, but I will say that there was a point when I was 19 or 20 when Gogol's "The Overcoat" was my favorite story evah, but I had since forgotten about it until I saw this movie. Such is my fickle nature, obsessions come and go. But it was nice to revisit this one.)
Which leaves only my two Bollywood movies for the month. Golmall Returns was amusing when I watched it. I certainly remember laughing and enjoying it. But I can't really recall the plot now. Something about Kareena Kapoor watching too many soaps and suspecting her husband is having an affair, because that's what all the husbands on soaps do. Plus there was a little homage/joke with a prostitute pretending to be Rani's character from Saawariya, I remember that. Hmm. Guess the movie was just a bit of a time-pass.
More memorable was Chandni Chowk to China. Perhaps you remember I was looking forward to this one. Well, it didn't disappoint. It's everything I love about Bollywood, with Akshay Kumar and Deepika Padukone both being so fun and likeable. Plus it's everything I love about the funny sort of kung fu movies, like Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu Hustle or even Kung Fu Panda. On top of that, it's a genuinely good story, with a main character who has a meaningful arc (his relationship with his deity even matures during the course of the film; how many times have you seen that?). Deepika plays her Indian self as well as her Chinese twin sister, and she pulls it off. There's the requisite band of kung fu henchmen, a long montage set to my new favorite martial arts song (just edging out "Mortal Kombat"), and a very clever fight scene that involves Akshay only thinking he's throwing the punches. There are actually lots of clips with music and scenes from the movie at YouTube, but they are official from the film company and they won't let me embed the video. (But check out "Chak Lein De" in particular). So this month's video clip is an oldie, from the movie Bichoo. This one is like the siren's call, it lures men to my office. Or one man anyway. Of course he says he's just heading into the laundry room, or to get something from the closet, but I'm not fooled. I know it's really Malaika Arora in tiny skirts. Particularly when she goes "yeah!".
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