1. The Bourne Identity (2002)

Victoria,

And now for something completely different.  We chose to follow up the sappy, emotionally scatter-brained P.S. I Love You with the dour, gray-scale The Bourne Identity.  I like this movie, but with caveats.

In some respects, the Bourne films play out as the anti-Bond; while Bond is playful, Bourne is intense; while Bond is confident and brash, Bourne is reluctant and measured.  I ultimately prefer Bourne’s style of spy action - his please-don’t-mess-with-me-now-I’m-going-to-kill-you thing makes the violence somehow feel more justified.  This dichotomy, between Bond and Bourne, is particularly fun because of the way it makes us think about national stereotypes.  Bond, the Brit (who should be tepid), is the brazen one, whereas Bourne, the American (who should be ballsy and crude), is cautious.

This is maybe worth thinking about because Bourne’s creator, Robert Ludlum, was an American, as are the film’s director (Doug Liman) and screenwriters (Tony Gilroy and William Blake Heron).  This film, and its sequels, feel very much to me like an American version of a European thriller.  Or, put another way, this is an action-packed, car-chase filled version of something like Le Cercle Rouge, The Day of the Jackal, or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  It is perhaps unfair to blame this solely on the nationality of its creators, but my impression remains: this is an American action film putting on the act of having European cinematic sensibilities.  For an example, I would direct you to the scene in which Bourne, quietly assessing his options at a lonely French farmhouse, decides to evade his sniper by blowing up a gas generator.

I don’t mean to sound too negative about the style of the film, because ultimately it works for me.  I enjoy seeing a fireball just as much as the next guy.

Far more interesting in this film is its take on knowledge and ethics.  This movie seems to be straining for most of its runtime at allegorizing the Platonic doctrine of recollection.  According to Plato in his dialogue Meno, “We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.”  In other words, people don’t actually learn anything new, they simply figure out things they already knew, probably, Plato thought, from a past life.  Plato understood this to work for virtue too - one couldn’t learn to be virtuous, you simply had to locate the virtue already locked into you.  Plato understood that some people would naturally have more than others.

Insert Bourne (or “born.”  Get what they did there?).  Bourne spends the entire movie learning things about himself that he ultimately already knows. In the conclusion of the film, he is told/remembers that he messed up on his final mission, and, rather than assassinate an African politician like he was supposed to, he chose to be merciful.  This occurs, we (and Bourne) find out, because his conscience awoke and thought it might be a bad idea to ruthlessly murder a father in front of his children.

Speaking in terms of strict allegory, this works.  Bourne not only learns that he has all sorts of super-spy abilities, he also learns that he has some sort of ethical awareness.  This is not something he accrues through education, this is something inherent to his person.  As a viewer, this introduces a tremendous problem, however.  Why on earth would Bourne’s conscience kick in right at that exact moment?  Prior to his amnesia, he was, presumably, a highly successful assassin.  Why did his sense of right and wrong kick in then, and not sometime earlier in his life?  Say, when he signed up to be a gun-for-hire in the first place?  Or when he made his first kill?  The film doesn’t offer any sort of explanation, and this feels a bit like cheating.  Of course, Plato didn’t offer much of one either, and so perhaps this is just in keeping with the formula.  It still bothers me though, more than anything else in the film.  Maybe the sequels will clear this up.

Love,

Adam

2. P.S. I Love You (2007)

Victoria,

Mazel Tov indeed.  Like you, I also hated this movie.  Unlike you, I don’t feel like I’ve been robbed of any right to righteous anger.  On the contrary, it is exactly a film like P.S. I Love You that warrants a very particular form of aggravation.

You noted that P.S. I Love You is clearly the work of a human mind and couldn’t possibly have been assembled to further corporate interests.  I totally agree, and it is because of this that the movie becomes irritating.  Because someone (Richard LaGravenese) made choice after choice after choice, thinking, I presume, that he was saying something worth saying.  Something, I presume, about the way relationships work.  Or the way grief happens.  Or the way people move on after hardship.  Instead of accomplishing this in any way, shape or form, LaGravenese has produced a film about narcissists wearing hats.

The hats in the film are quite nice, by the way.  P.S. I Love You is credited by some in the fashion world with popularizing the Cloche hat.  To quote Morgan Cullen of Runway Daily, “What I do want to do here is point out here is [sic] Swank’s UBER cute head-wear throughout the entire movie.”

Hats aside, the infantile self-involvement of the characters, particularly Swank’s Holly, becomes difficult to watch after only a few minutes of screen time.  The film opens with Holly frustrated with husband Gerry (Gerard Butler) because he mentioned to her mother that she wasn’t ready to have children.  The problems with this scene are numerous.  To begin with, it is in no way endearing that she is furious with him for saying something that, it becomes clear, she in no way indicated she didn’t want him to say.  She’s just upset to be upset.  Gerry, rather that attempting genuine communication with his wife, eggs her on and antagonizes her, fueling her distemper.  It quickly becomes apparent that he, too, has the emotional capacities of an elementary-aged child.  The film implies that via this scene, the first and most important time we see Holly and Gerry alive together, we are supposed to somehow intuit the depth of their love for each other.

Instead I intuited that: A. Holly and Gerry need couple’s counseling, and B. Writer/Director LaGravenese doesn’t understand how feelings work.

The emotional tone-deafness of the film carries on from this point, and the viewer is treated to a slew of scenes that don’t feel quite right.  We get to see a funeral wake in which everyone is laughing, smiling, and having a good time.  We see Holly embark on a faux-romance with the quasi-autistic Harry Connick, Jr., and are encouraged to think this is cute.  Most disturbingly, she has a one-night-stand with husband doppelgänger and (surprise!) husband’s childhood friend William (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).  This is supposed to be romantic.  The movie’s overall out-of-stepness with anything remotely human makes it the source of well-deserved frustration.  This is, after all, a work of art, made by a real human being.  A human being, it should be noted, who has committed his life to creating art, and has occasionally done so with aplomb (as you mentioned, The Fisher King and A Little Princess).  To see something come from the same creative mind, but fall so tremendously far from those marks, is maddening.

Love,

Adam

1. P.S. I Love You (2007)

Adam,

It finally happened.  The first bad movie in the box.  Mazel Tov to us both!

This is a movie too easy to hate, thereby robbing its viewers of even the righteous pleasure of hating it.  Getting worked up about P.S. I Love You is akin to being violently opposed to one’s local chapter of the John Birch Society: a dutiful, ultimately unsatisfying and ineffectual exercise in self-congratulations.

And yet, in spite of all that, here I find myself, performing my blessed American duty in hating this movie.  Adam, I really hated this movie.  I really did.  I hated its vacant heroine and her insipid friends.  Hated her stupid ghost husband and his bizarrely cooing yet tepid love notes (“A disco diva must always look her best!”).

What’s simultaneously consoling and disconcerting about the whole thing is the slowly-dawning realization that this film could not be anything but the product of a human mind.  It is too inefficient and scattershot, too impulsive in its interests and too meandering in its plot construction, to have been assembled by committee.  There’s the snaps game, which in a more coherent film could have been a unique character- or narrative-illuminating detail, but here only registers as pointless quirk.  There’s Lisa Kudrow’s speech about the male vs. female gaze, whose sentiment—however legitimate—feels cheapened by its being so out-of-place in the rest of the movie (“After centuries of men looking at my tits instead of my eyes…, I now have the divine right to stare at a man’s backside with vulgar, cheap appreciation if I want to!”).  There’s Harry Connick, Jr.’s character whose apparent autism is dismayingly both a point of emphasis and also completely extraneous to the plot.  There’s Hillary Swank’s mourning widow wailing along to Judy Garland in a scene that should have been about feeling pathetic, but instead is just itself pathetic.

And so on and so on throughout the film.  Where it hopes to be idiosyncratic it ends up being inexplicable.  Where it aims for emotional complexity it lands instead at crass insensitivity.  There are too many examples of movies that have successfully blended humor, romance, and realism to let P.S. I Love You off with a pat on the back and a “good try.”  Think Richard Linklater’s Before series.  Think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Think When Harry Met Sally.  Heck, think Ghost, which for all its preposterousness at least possessed a core of genuine human longing.

Even more unfortunate than the mere badness of the film is maybe what it suggests about its intended audience.  Do real flesh-and-blood women actually enjoy watching this nonsense?  Do they appreciate being made to seem like air-headed puppets blundering through life without the direction given by a man?  Do they really see themselves as empty little baubles who are most likely to achieve premium spiritual satisfaction through shoes?  Do men receive any satisfaction in believing that women are this stupid?  One especially excruciating scene on a boat executes the neat hat trick of making the characters, the creators of those characters, and the audience all look like idiots for taking part in the spectacle.

P.S. I Love You is the box wine of romantic comedies: cheaply made, apathetically consumed, and ideally meant to be paired with a lot of crying.  Richard LaGravenese, the director and co-screenwriter, has authored a lot of competent scripts and worked with a lot of more-than-competent directors, among them The Fisher King with Terry Gilliam and A Little Princess with Alphonso Cuarón.  I wouldn’t want my worst efforts held against me forever either, but some acknowledgement of wrongdoing here would have been nice.

Love,

Victoria

P.S….

2. Thank You for Smoking (2005)

Adam,

Leaving aside the fact that I’m going to use the above quote “I’m…a Marxist” against you during our head-to-head run for office, I dig what you have to say about Thank You for Smoking’s equal-opportunity brand of cynicism.  Like you, I appreciate that the movie tries to take on the whole corporate-political-media axis of lie-slinging and self-promotion.  While you talked about the movie’s cynicism from a systemic angle, I want to consider it from the perspective of its makers.

Christopher Buckley (L) and Jason Reitman (R)

It’s interesting to note that Thank You for Smoking is the product of two second-generation cultural power players whose satiric sensibilities seem to come directly out of their proximity to the worlds of money and influence: book author Christopher Buckley (son of conservative commentator William F.) and screen adaptor/director Jason Reitman (son of Ghostbusters director Ivan).  Given his conservative pedigree, it’s a little odd that someone like Buckley would write a novel that so thoroughly skewers both business and politics.  Then again, he would probably know better than most how powerful men talk and think, would know what it looks like when corporate interests infiltrate the political system.

So I think you’re right that many of the most astute parts of Thank You for Smoking are its portrayals of characters like the Captain, characterizations that are lifted straight out of the book.  “I was in Korea shooting Chinese in 1952,” the Captain, an aging tobacco baron, reflects in one scene.  “Today they’re our best customers.  Next time we won’t have to shoot so many of them, will we?”  It’s a perfect bit of dialogue for a character whose business savvy compels him to be fickle and short-sighted in spite of the tremendous weight of his experience.

Where the movie manages to improve on the book is where it journeys onto Jason Reitman’s home turf.  Unlike Buckley, Reitman didn’t grow up in the shadow of Washington; he grew up a film set brat.  It makes sense that some of the sharpest satire in the movie is focused in the Hollywood offices where Nick Naylor goes to solicit an executive (played by Rob Lowe) for help in maximizing cigarettes’ positive representation in media.  Here Reitman’s observations of a uniquely L.A. combination of maniacal pragmatism and preening affectation take on a charge and a specificity that the rest of the film somewhat lacks.  In terms of dialogue, characterization, pacing, and cultural allusion, these scenes are also a distinct step up from the book.

“Cigarettes in space?” Reitman has Naylor ask about one product placement idea.  “But wouldn’t they blow up in an all-oxygen environment?”  “Probably,” the Hollywood exec concedes, “but it’s an easy fix.  One line of dialogue: ‘Thank God we invented the…you know, whatever device.’”  Later, Naylor takes a call from the executive who, in my favorite comic reveal, is shown to be standing in his home, headset on, wearing a full-blown kimono.

But now to return to the subject of cynicism, particularly in view of the movie’s ending.  If you look at Reitman’s other projects (Juno, Up in the Air, Young Adult), I think you can see a recurring tension between cynicism and idealism about human nature.  There’s Juno, whose pregnancy variously brings out either the selfishness or the kindness of those around her.  There’s Up in the Air’s pragmatic-to-a-fault corporate downsizer, whose career hinges on the misfortune of others, but who is still capable of making himself vulnerable to and being betrayed by love.  And there’s the ex-beauty queen in Young Adult whose own emotional stuntedness comes into contact with the hard-won wisdom of a disabled former classmate.

Nick Naylor shares with all these protagonists a curious mix of acuity and guilelessness.  He’s talking a senate committee under the table one minute, falling for Katie Holmes’s transparently predatory news reporter another minute.  Ultimately, I disagree with you that Thank You for Smoking’s ending comes out of the same pure cynicism that the movie starts out with.  I tend to believe that the ending, a departure from the book, arises out of the impulse to end on a faint note of redemption.

In summary, the main lesson I take from this movie: I don’t have to prove I’m right; I just have to prove you’re wrong/a Marxist (paraphrased).

Love,

Victoria

1. Thank You for Smoking (2005)

Victoria,

In contrast to the sincerity of Tarantino’s Kill Bill, our third film is the supremely cynical Thank You for Smoking.  Despite its sort-of turn in the conclusion, which I’ll get to, this movie paints a picture of humanity that assumes all (or, at least, most) of us are self-interested to a fault, and that no matter our level of intelligence, we all fall prey to bullshit embarrassingly easily.  I don’t think the movie is all that wrong, unfortunately.

I’m tempted towards a Marxist reading of this film, which would see the rhetoric and easy exchange of vast sums of money portrayed in the movie as tools of capitalistic control.  A true Marxist would point out, though, that these messages are being transmitted via a tremendously expensive (budget: $8.5 million; domestic gross: $24,793,09), rhetorically manipulative medium.  Can we trust the film to be honest, even for a second, about the nature of money, media, and power?  I think the answer is possibly, but it would be foolish to not, at the very least, put up our guard when thinking about what the film has to say.

The thing I think we can trust the film to do is to revel in portraying a variety of different types of unethical people.  There is a smorgasbord of people behaving badly in this movie, and there is a certain pleasure in simply having them pointed out.  This is because in real life, off-screen, these kinds people really do have power, and really aren’t the subject of much genuine scrutiny.  There is the protagonist, who, as a lobbyist, is the self-proclaimed “sultan of spin.”  There’s the faux-environmentalist senator; the floozie reporter; the racist, hypocritical tobacco tycoon.  My favorite of these monsters is Adam Brody’s Hollywood intern, who delightfully talks up his Japan-obsessed boss while simultaneously skewering him with lines like, “That sand won’t rake itself!” shouted at a Zen Garden artist.  In his funniest moment, he insults a fellow coworker with  a purported inside joke: “I'm going to impale your mom on a spike and feed her dead body to my dog with syphilis!”

I like this character because, though he is an egotist like everyone else in the movie, he’s an egotist that seems to be aware that he hasn’t fully ascended the power ladder yet, and that any agency he has is sourced in the power of his boss rather than himself.  This possibility of self-awareness (or hope, rather), makes him the most fun character to watch.

And, before I close, about that ending.  Nick Naylor, our lobbyist protagonist, has a quasi-change of heart and rejects the offer made by the Institute of Tobacco Studies to reclaim his rightful seat as its Vice President.  He allegedly does this because he is concerned about his son and the future of his family.  I think that this move, just like everything else Naylor says, is a kind of bullshit.  Naylor reminds his son, and us, frequently throughout the movie that to win an argument, you have to remember your audience and change the terms of the debate.  This is exactly what Naylor is doing here.  We are his intended audience, not the characters on-screen: he wants us to sympathize with him.  The way to “win” isn’t to tell anyone in the movie they’re wrong: the way to “win” is to tell us we are right for rooting for him.  This is the film being supremely cynical, and we are reminded to be delightfully skeptical of the work as a whole as a result.

Love,
Adam

2. Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)

Victoria,

I’m going to start by responding to your quote with another one, this time from Tarantino himself:

“I’ve had people write that I’ve seen too many movies.  In what other art form would being an expert be considered a negative?  If I were a poet, would I be criticized for knowing too much about Sappho?  Or Aristotle?”

I think those words, Tarantino’s own, speak to your point, and against DFW’s.  Because you’re right - the source of Tarantino’s irreverence, in this film or any other, is a sincere love and affection for the medium of film, and for the kinds of stories film tells.  It’s the same for French New Wave directors, like Godard or Truffaut, or for David Lynch for that matter.  Director’s such as these, who imbue their work with evident discipline and attention to craft, simply don’t make film their life work if they aren’t in love with everything about it.

And again, you’re right, Kill Bill Vol. 2 is at its heart a love story, between Bill and Beatrix to a certain extent, but even more so between Tarantino and the silver screen.

My favorite way to think about this film, and its preceding volume, is as a postmodern movie about movies.  The meta-narrative here is a revenge-fueled love story, which, in typical postmodernist fashion, is at once contradictory and profoundly honest.  It’s worth noting how universally these emotions resonate, both in real life and across film history.  Tarantino is showing us our basest feelings, the things that can be vulgar and beautiful and most profoundly human in us, and reminding us that these are the sentimental fuels powering most of the cinema we consume.  This can be seen most clearly in the scene in which B.B. asks if she can watch Shogun Assassin, a notoriously violent film about a man avenging his lost love.  B.B., already established as a kind of less-than-innocent innocent, desires this film because, as a human, it is natural to be attracted to this sort of narrative material.  A viewer’s first response, “Shogun Assassin?” is necessarily followed by, “Of course, Shogun Assassin.”

The metatext of the film works its way out through a variety of styles and genres, moving from East to West and back again.  Some of these are fun, some serious, and some absurd, but their points of connection are only possible because of the time and attention Tarantino has invested in knowing genre inside and out.  I’m reminded of the aphorism that before you can break the rules you have to master them.  Tarantino may not have mastered the “rules,” but he certainly knows them inside and out to the extent that he can play with them, bend them, and weave them effortlessly together with the conventions of other genres.  He questions them pretty severely too, like in the scene in which Pai Mei, a supposedly ageless Kung Fu master, is poisoned by his vindictive pupil Elle.  And why not?  Pai Mei is a vulnerable human just like everyone else in the story, he’s just not thought of as such when figured into the genre conventions of a 70’s low-budget kung fu film.

It’s this type of irony that is so satisfying, and that the film utilizes to show us just how great movies can be.  Movies can make ordinary men and women into ageless Kung Fu masters, or vengeful Bride assassins, or menacing crime-boss pimps.  Films are where fantasy becomes reality, and vice versa.

Love,

Adam

1. Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)

Adam,

Now for a movie I’d seen that you hadn’t seen.

Since I’ve in fact seen Kill Bill: Vol. 2 quite a few times and could talk about it at quite a length, I’m going to TRY to focus my discussion by opening with a relevant quote:

“In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with David Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He’s found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it’s smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption.”

That quote comes from David Foster Wallace.  I’m very curious to know what you think of it.  For me, as much as I want to honor the graveness and moral urgency with which Wallace undertook his role as cultural commentator, I think here he is totally wrong.

Irony is a terribly misunderstood idea, too often construed as a lack of caring rather than as an alternative mode of caring.  That’s why it’s a mistake to regard Tarantino’s work as the result of a cynical or affected or opportunistic detachment, as DFW does. On the contrary, the kind of irony practiced by Tarantino is not only compatible with sincerity, it’s what makes a true, deep, committed sincerity possible.

The basic impetus behind Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is love—the most sincere, least constructed of emotions.  The movie brims over with it.  Love for cinema, love for genre, love for ‘70s soul songs and comic books.  And what you might miss if you get too hung up on how irreverently Tarantino expresses his many loves is that, at heart, Kill Bill is itself a love story, a fact established in Kill Bill, Vol. 1, but whose emotional resonances only become fully clear in this second volume.

In spite of the heightened circumstances surrounding it, the relationship between Uma Thurman’s Beatrix and David Carradine’s Bill is played emotionally straight.  They’re two characters with history and baggage, not unlike any other couple.  (It’s also worth noting that Kill Bill initiates a string of movies in Tarantino’s filmography that all deal with the theme of revenge.  But unlike Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained, Kill Bill deals with revenge, not as a social or historical phenomenon, but as a personal relationship between individuals, romantic love being the most intimate and high-stakes of that kind of relationship.)

My favorite sequence in the movie is the Esteban Vihaio scene, featuring a terrific, sleepy-eyed performance from Michael Parks as the courtly, quietly menacing pimp/crime boss.  When Beatrix arrives to question him about Bill’s whereabouts, she is surprised to find him all too accommodating.

“How else is he ever going to see you again?”  It’s an unabashedly romantic idea.  Giving someone else the power to kill you simply because you love them.

When Tarantino takes a fairly standard tale of wronged love and explodes it to mythic proportions, embellishing it with samurai swords and truth serums, he’s taking advantage of the capacity of art to understand situations through metaphor.  He takes something that could read as cliched or overly familiar and, by making it unfamiliar, renews its impact. 

Because who hasn’t had or known of an ex that you wished you could just annihilate?

One last scene, which SPOILERS BELOW occurs at the end of the movie, during Beatrix and Bill’s climactic encounter:

“You’re not a bad person.  You’re a terrific person.  You’re my favorite person.  But every once in a while, you can be a real cunt.”  If that isn’t the perfect summation of irony and of love: multiply valanced, full of both humor and hurt.

Love,

Victoria

2. Once (2006)

Adam,

It’s fitting for this project that the first movie we chose is one about a couple taking pleasure in art through each other, and in each other through art.

Unlike you, I had never seen Once and knew nothing about its aesthetic going in.  It’s useful to start talking about the film then, as you did, by talking about that aesthetic, which in many ways does emphasize minimalism and authenticity.

But in spite of the realism that you point out, there is a powerful element of fantasy in the movie.  The scene where the jaded record producer perks up, moved by the protagonists’ performance, is every artist’s most fervently hoped-for reaction.  It’s a kind of wish fulfillment, one perhaps even more potent because it is framed as plausible within the naturalistic world of the film, and one that also extends to the romantic plot.

Now, this isn’t intended as a criticism so much as a contextualizing, but the film’s perspective is decidedly male.  Unlike the Guy, the Girl isn’t treated to a home video montage to illustrate her past.  The only real insight we get into her feelings about her former relationship is delivered in unsubtitled Czech.  Her role is to be nurturing, supportive—singing harmony in both her musical and dramatic scenes.  For a certain kind of sensitive, hard-luck, ever-so-slightly narcissistic guy, she’s just about perfect.

So maybe it’s even more extraordinary that while the movie flirts with the idea of a flirtation between these two, in the end it commits even more firmly to an honest execution of its premise.  The Guy and the Girl don’t get together.  While idealized in certain ways, the Girl is just as fragile and uncertain as her male counterpart.

Ultimately, I don’t mean to say that Once is any more an exercise in fantasy than an exercise in realism.  What’s special about the film, to me, is its uniting of the two.  Or perhaps more accurately, its recognition of how reality (what usually happens) and fantasy (what we hope will happen) can sometimes intersect.  And that the film accomplishes this in the context of genre—through its alternating adherence to and upending of those genre expectations—is especially interesting.

In the traditional musical, that most fantastical of genres, outbursts of song and dance seem miraculous because they are so far-fetched.  Once understands that every song ever written, even when not choreographed to within an inch of its life, really is a miracle, a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of the exact right people at the exact right moment.  The fantasy scenario of meeting your ideal partner, romantic or otherwise, is in fact not so unbelievable at all because it happens every day.  It really does.

Love,

Victoria

1. Once (2006)

Victoria,

Our inaugural film viewing out of the box, as you know, was the musical Once.  This was my second viewing of the 2006 feature, and I found myself enjoying the movie despite having already seen it.  I must confess, I only remembered vague details going in - this may speak to the quality of the film, or it may say more about my fading ability to recall information.  Neither is a great conclusion.

Ailing memory aside (and my disparaging opener too), there is some cool stuff going on in this movie.  I like to think about this movie as the anti-musical musical.  Sure, there are people singing throughout, and, in keeping with the genre, there are people working through their emotions in song.  Unlike musicals from the past, like Singing in the Rain, or more modern musicals, like Dreamgirls, this film seems intent on subverting all of the things we identify as recognizable tropes.  Gone are scenes in which people sing the narrative to each other, backed by a thirty piece orchestra.  In its place are two unnamed singer-songwriters (Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova of The Swell Season) explaining their impoverished, emotionally battered existence to each other, backed only by a guitar or piano.  Gone are elaborate set pieces with dazzling camera-work and hundreds of dancing extras.  In its place are a couple of patiently set-up jam sessions, filmed with what is (I hope) a knowing disregard for the conventions of visual composition.  The fun thing about all of this is that, though it looks and feels very different from a typical musical, it also looks and feels weirdly the same.  Yes, the film is romantic, insofar as a guy and a girl find each other and build a connection over the course of the movie.  The ending is decidedly unromantic though, in that both characters choose to forsake this connection and attempt to reconcile with the former partners at the epicenter of their song-generating angst.

I particularly like the conclusion, actually, because it marries romance with responsibility.  This is its most radical departure from the traditions of the movie musical, and its most satisfying move as a film.  The ending asks us to think about this story as existing without discrete boundaries.  These characters have a real chemistry, yet they have lives that extend both backwards and forwards beyond the opening and the rolling of credits.  The untold stories, some of which are glimpsed in the home video montage during the song “Lies,” carry just as much, and ultimately more, weight than what we see on screen.  This suggests that there are limits to the power of romance, at least as we are used to seeing it in movie musicals.  The limiting agent is responsibility, demonstrated most powerfully through the presence of the Girl’s daughter Ivanka.  There are times when the Girl can’t go make music with the Guy - she has to work and provide for her child.  In the end, both characters memorialize their romantic connection by making a demo tape of songs, and then respectively do what they are, as human beings, responsible for.  There is a particular beauty, however stern, in this presentation.

Thoughtfully, and with love,
Adam

The Conceit

Welcome to Film Crate!

Our hope is that, over the next few months/years, this blog becomes the site of some lively discussion about an odd assortment of movies.

Who are we, you might ask?  We are Adam Sweatman and Victoria Le, an engaged couple recently bequeathed an interesting gift: a giant box full of DVDs.

Our next move seemed obvious - watch every single one and write reviews to each other about them (this is what people do, right?)

There will not be any particular rhyme or reason as to what we watch or when we watch it, other than that it has to come out of the box.  Our hope is that the reviews will be dialogues with each other about the films, rather than just straight-on critiques.

Of course we want to involve you too - feel free to watch along and comment!  Ideally our reviews will be a jumping off point, and your comments will be a continuing discussion.

So enjoy!  We look forward to hearing what you have to say.

<--This is us!