Archive for November 10th, 2003
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Nov10
NOW IF I COULD ONLY GET SOME CRACKER JACKS
November 10th, 2003 |
(11 votes, average: 8.36 out of 10)
I’m using another snippet of real life and injecting it into today’s comic. Cami and I did try to see Elf this weekend, but our local google-plex was only showing it on one screen. (wha?!) So instead, we hunkered down and saw Love, Actually.
I wasn’t planning on liking this movie. In fact, when we stepped out of the theater, I was bashing it with some glee. But as the weekend progressed and I thought back on the film, it was in fact a very satisfying affair. That it was able to stay with me at all is quite the miracle.
It’s true there are a lot of characters to keep track of. A few of them intersect in interesting ways, but it feels more like an idea that they tacked on at the end of filming. They’d sneak a pair of actors you saw earlier in the movie into the background of another scene as if to say “Remember these guys?”
Love, Actually is actually very long. Too long. There were a couple of places where I thought “The movie HAS to end here,” but it just keep going. That’s part of the problem of having so many characters. There are lots of loose subplots to tie up
Another thing that surprised me is the amount of nudity in the film. I don’t think I’ve seen so many topless women in a Christmas film. Heck, even Laura Linney takes it off! In retrospect, that was a fairly cloying move to keep the male contingent placated. After all, this movie has “CHICK FLICK” stamped all over it in big, red letters. Better give the fellas some boobies to look at before they start burning down the theater.
There are several moments in the movie that border on saccharine overload, but somehow director/writer Richard Curtis pulls it back from the teetering edge by finding some disarming nugget of humor in the dialogue. There are a few scenes that are genuinely touching. Maybe even one that will go down as classic example of unrequited love. The performances are sharp and it portrays a very active, diverse and modern London. The film proclaims that Christmas is the time of year to make our romances known, that love conquers all and to wear your heart on your sleeve proudly – with your chest out, so to speak. 😉
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Last night, I attended a screening of Born Into This, a documentary about writer Charles Bukowski. The fact that I was one of three hundred people crammed into the sold-out theater at 10:00 pm on a Sunday shows the scope of his grasp.
Reading Bukowski is like getting hit in the head with a beer bottle – sentence after sentence. Few writers say what they mean like he does. You won’t find flowery, prosaic sputtering or insignificant details, you’ll only read as many words as it takes to tell a story. The magic of Bukowski is that no matter how few words he used, his writing crackles with poetry.
The film is composed of interviews with Bukowski, family, and friends between 1972 and the early 1990’s. he most surprising thing is how gentle he seems. His calm, smooth voice and laid back manner are a direct contradiction to his wino-lifestyle, pockmarked face, and stories of barroom fights and barroom women.
Bukowski lived hard, but he also had a hard life. One of the most powerful scenes is where he visits the home of his childhood, a childhood he refers to as “A horror story with a capital H.” He stands in the bathroom, nervously drinking a Heinneken, and explains how that was where his father beat him with a leather strap five nights a week for six years.
Normally, you wouldn’t consider a movie where the protagonist dies at the end to be a feel-good film, but when Bukowksi died in 1994, he was happy. Born Into This serves as a fitting tribute to whom Bukowski’s publisher referred to as, “A Whitman of the street.”
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