Punch drunk love

From Aileen (who does not have access to blogger but who will email her reviews):

Hi readers. hihihihi. I've been away for a long time, but now i'm back. A friend of mine lent me 30 dvds. I will try to watch and review two movies a day for the next two weeks.

punch drunk love

I haven't watched a comedy in a long time. Not sure if Punch Drunk Love is a comedy, but it made me laugh - really laugh - maybe once every 5 to 10 minutes. It's about a guy with a lot of (understandably) repressed anger. When he lets it out, we feel good for him, but also a bit nervous, because this guy always seems to run into trouble, mostly because other people don't understand him. The dialogue and the shots are consistently surprising (which produces emotions, if predictability dulls the senses). Adam Sandler and Emma Watson are very sweet in this movie.

Next up will be There Will Be Blood - by the same director, Paul Thomas Anderson. Also, Dogville - because Emma Watson was also in Breaking the Waves directed by Lars Von Trier, who directed Dogville.

-Aileen

i've fought it for long enough

I fought it for a long time, this whole Ellen Page craze. You're probably thinking--What Ellen Page craze? Well, semantics aside, I've fought Ellen Page. Too contrived, I thought. Too hip, I intoned. She's a one trick pony! She has no range!

I was wrong and I'm not afraid to admit it. (Cuz no one reads this blog and I'm writing under an assumed name.) She's great. I wanna go get french fries with her and gossip about pop culture.

It's Christmas morning and I just finished watching "Whip It." To be fair, I watched the last third of it but I could tell what was going on based on the falling action. The denouement is where it's at. It was so good. Drew Barrymore directed and Ellen Page starred. It's fairly predictable, but a pleasure to watch anyways. Small town Texas girl discovers roller derby in big, liberal Austin. Becomes part of scene. Parents don't know about it. In the end she must choose between a pageant and the roller derby championship game. I could've described the movie in about 30 fewer words. This is no knock on the film; I think many great stories are really really simple and formulaic. When the form is set the substance can get juicy. Marcia Gay Harden is good as the well intentioned pageant mom and Daniel Stern plays his role of supportive father well. But this is a movie that knows its audience and the audience knows that the real action between a teenage girl and her parents is really all about the mom/daughter relationship. When you're sixteen your mom's opinion means so much to you but you cloak that importance in this robe of indifference. It's a weird tension and I think that Barrymore captures it quite well. All you want is her approval but at the same time you don't care at all just not one bit what your mother thinks. This is the life of a teenage girl. Page and Harden have a good dynamic. There's one scene that is especially good. It's when solipsistic Page realizes that her mother is a person. You know, she had a life before her daughter was born, she has thoughts that resonate outside of the home. It's good.

The love story is not the central focus of the film. She likes a boy, she gives herself to boy. Boy acts like, well, boy. She decides she doesn't want boy. I think teenage girls need to be shown more movies like this. It reminds me of one scene in Roseanne (best show ever, please see past entries) when David, Darlene's boyfriend is pressuring her to have sex. They're in high school and David is horny and impatient. Darlene says something to the effect of : "We'll have sex when I'm ready so until then cool it." I squealed when I heard this. I know not all girls are in the position to say these things. There are pressures to have sex. Girls feel ready at different times. Girls can be the aggressors. I know I know. But it's important to have these characters in mainstream media who assert themselves without shame or artifice. There's not really an equivalent scene in Freaks and Geeks but I like Lindsay Weir so I put her up there.

So, I had a point. My point is that I like Ellen Page. "Whip It" was fun to watch. Kick ass teenage girls are important to my emotional well being.

Untamed Heart

At the end of the movie, Stand By Me (made from Stephen King's short story, The Body), the writer writes on his computer screen something like, "I never again had friends like I did when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?" Well, that's sometimes how I feel about movies. The movies I saw between the ages of 11 and, say, 14 were (and remain) the most profound of my life. I guess it's because I was asserting my real identity that was some-what independent of the role my family had given me. My favorite movies at that time always had a female lead character in her twenties. And, inevitably, I identified with her. Like, I WAS her. It sounds like my ego was gigantic, but, really, I was just looking for someone with whom to identify as I was coming into my own.

That age was really lonely for me because my parents were divorcing and, really, my whole life was changing. I had no control over it. Looking back, I held tight to some principles (such as women's rights and pro-protest, Joan Baez music). I thought that by latching on to a movement or a cause, I could feel a part of something while giving myself an identity that seemed to be slowly slipping away. Well, one of those characters that I really loved was Caroline from Untamed Heart.

Marisa Tomei played Caroline, a waitress/beauty school student, in winter-time Minnesota. She was in her twenties and lived at home with her mom and step-dad. Her family used to buy a real Christmas tree every year. They stopped doing that. Caroline and I were so much alike--both female, both living in snowy places, both living with our divorced moms, both uncomfortable with all the change in our lives, both not knowing how to go forward, but both coasting okay. Yes, Caroline was a cigarette-smoking waitress who could barely afford a car, and I was a 12 year old who swam two hours per day just to calm her racing, sad mind. But, I understood her. I understood that she was a person just trying to find her way in this world that kept on disappointing her.

I know. I know. I'm not talking anything at all about the plot. Sometimes, one performance really makes a movie, and the rest is just filler. Well, she meets Christian Slater. I guess he represents a sort of fragility that was lacking in Caroline's world. She responds to his goodness. She loves him; he loves her. He teaches her that she does deserve such care and love. It was a nice lesson--a lesson a 12 year old girl really appreciates, especially when the world seemed kind of cruel to her.

Beautiful Girls

No. No. Just no. This movie is so awful. I feel so betrayed because I've gone through most of my life believing that I liked this movie. I watched it a long time ago. I thought it was good, maybe a little boundary pushing. Maybe I put myself in Natalie Portman's shoes--precocious, bad haircut. But this movie SUCKS.
It's not even gonna be a movie review. Just bullet points. This movie does not even deserve sentences. Only fragments.
- Martha Plimpton is one of the only good things about this movie. She's not on the cover. Of course.
- It's really creepy to normalize a 28 y/o guy lusting after a 13 year old.
- Every line coming out of Natalie Portman's mouth makes me want to vomit. She can't handle those lines. No thirteen year old could handle that witty, flirty banter.
- Just another movie worshiping at the altar of almost 30 something men cheating, hedging and ignoring their gorgeous girlfriends and wives. Suck it. Just suck it.
- Uma Thurman says all it takes for her to be happy with a man is four little words: "Good night, sweet girl." Wait--what? Really?! So your boyfriend could cheat on you, fart under the covers, not take out the trash then whisper "good night, sweet girl" and you'd be HAPPY?! If I sound like I am panting and screaming it's cuz I am. That is just so ridiculous. Ludicrous. Here's what I want in a relationship: Respect. Reciprocity. Mutual adoration. Intelligent conversations. Steamy s**. Good night, sweet girl. GAH.

Vision Quest

I know what you're thinking, and you're right. Vision Quest is, like, 25 years old. I'm stuck in a time warp--in a time I was really too young to even appreciate. You're right. You're right about all of that. But, I cannot control which movies were relentlessly on t.v. when I was growing up, or which movies my sisters and brother loved. I was the youngest, the ghost in the room. No one remembered I was there, so no one could tell me to not watch an R-rated moved at age five or to go to bed before 10 p.m. And, oh, did I use it. I am not claiming that I wasn't loved--far from it. But, I was sort of invisible when it came to television/movie censorship and designated bedtimes. It's okay; you can be jealous. Oh, and don't think I didn't know how odd this all was. I had to always pretend to my fellow first graders that I had no idea what Coming To America was (you know...starring Eddie Murphy and a whole bunch of curse words and sexual innuendos). Freddie Krueger movies? Please. Piece of cake. So, anyway, I couldn't control what movies affected me as a child or what movies still keep a hold on me. All I know is that I love (still! To this day!) Vision Quest.

Matthew Modine (Louden) is young and cute and completely in his prime. He is a high school wrestler who is determined to go down a weight class in order to wrestle someone on a rival team: Shute. He has to drop weight, and go from something like 190 to 170. When I was a little kid, I didn't really understand what that meant. Now I know: that's a lot of weight, especially because Louden's pretty tall. What I did understand, however, was that it took a ton of discipline to lose all of that. So, Louden goes on a sort of Vision Quest to wrestle the undefeated Shute. And, in the midst of all of that, he meets a traveler, the gorgeous Linda Fiorentino, who ends up boarding at Louden and his dad's house for a bit. She's hot. He's hot. They get it on. That little love story is not the best thing about this movie. What has made the movie good then, and what makes it hold up now is the palpability of Louden's raw determination.

Louden has to lose weight. He is obsessed with it. He cuts way back on calories. He jogs in a sort of rubber suit. He exercises at every moment he can. He climbs the cork board at wrestling practice, which is one of THE best scenes in film history. But, he's also a hemophiliac, which makes him kind of fragile. Believe me, you root for him a little when he breaks his diet one time and stuffs a doughnut into his mouth. You cheer him because it makes him human and it reminds you of all of his self-inflicted sacrifices. It's so hard to be a human who wants to feel, and who chooses deprivation as the most physical manifestation of such a thing as wrestling the best (and fulfilling a vision quest).

Hannah and Her Sisters

Sometimes, I think about moving to New York City. Well, I don't think about moving there; I think about living there. Like, really living. Being in it. Having my family there. My friend(s). Wearing great vintage clothes. Shopping at hole-in-the-wall bookstores where gems are found. Auditioning for Broadway plays. Having holiday dinners with a piano in the corner and my drunk parents playing to the crowd. Basically, I want to live not only in NYC, but also inside the movie, Hannah and Her Sisters.

Hannah and Her Sisters is my favorite Woody Allen movie. The characters live in upscale Manhattan. They wear post-Annie Hall, pseudo-men's wear with heeled boots, and an unnecessary amount of layers. No one really has friends. Instead, they have their family. And, by family, I mean they have or are somehow connected to the sisters (Hannah, Holly, and Leigh). Hannah (Mia Farrow) is sort of the glue of the sisters because she's married with kids, has an impressive acting career, and she has money to hand out to help out her wavering sisters from time to time. Holly (Diane Weist) is the former coke-addict/actress/caterer/screenwriter. Leigh (Barbara Hershey) is the youngest sister, the pretty one that Hannah's husband is crushing on, the one who lives with a much older man, and who sporadically takes classes at Columbia.

It's fair to say that I'm drawn to the sisters because I have two sisters. Well, more specifically, I'm drawn to that relationship because it is an honest portrayal of the "sister" relationship. I know someone who only has brothers who is always saying something like, "oh, how I wish I had a sister." It's hard for me to totally understand her romantic notion of sisters. I mean, it's not always easy having sisters--especially if they're like Hannah's or mine--because they are always sort of in each other's business. You didn't choose them to be in your life, but they are there. And, they know you like no other because you are all born to the same crazy parents, and you've all been exposed to each other's insecurities and strengths, and, well, it can be a lot. Woody Allen is so good at writing because he never romanticizes these women and their reactions to each other. He's pretty honest. And, I like that there are these men in the movie who sort of weave their way into the sisters' lives. They're not the center, but a privileged few who get to hang out with these women. I like that. I like it because that seems the only thing men CAN do sometimes when it comes to people like Hannah, Holly, and Leigh. But, understand--it's so important that you do--it's not about the men. It's not. It's about the women. And, the men are, well, like door prizes. Like, it's a nice surprise if you receive a good gift, but they're not the reason you go to the dance. You go for the women--to see their style, to engage with them, to hear them laugh and talk. That's why dances are fun. That's why these women are GOOD.

Oh, and it's all so funny. Like, Holly is so great when she's trying to sound all intellectual when she flirts with an architect. And, Woody Allen, of course, puts himself into the mix. He couldn't resist, and he shouldn't. It's sort of a side story from the primary one of Hannah's, but when Woody thinks he has a brain tumor...it's the funniest sequence of scenes. It's like life, I guess, but better. Better because they are rich and they live in hip New York and they have these beautiful dinners and crazy parents and crowded, used bookstores and they make tea on rainy, cold evenings. Oh, I just want to be IN their world. Maybe, the appeal is that, if you've got a sister or two, you kind of are in Hannah and Her Sisters. Well, a poor woman's version.

I totally surrender to them

This blog was my idea. My creation. Some of my html handiwork. But Kathleen has made it her own. She is faithful to it in a way that I am not. Her honesty and humor, ugh. How is she so good? And Aileen--of course. She of the brilliant sentence fragments. She who writes so casually but so URGENTLY. I bow to both these women. So maybe it's not even my place to write about not movies/not books/not art. But I long to talk about other things. So that's what I'm gonna do. Readers (all two of you), I'm sorry. Movie reviews aren't moving me right now. But words and how these words cohere to make sentences...how these sentences move to tug at my soul...that is everything.

Found poetry is the best for beginners. Brilliance is so easy. So accidental. I remember one of my first encounters with found poetry--making a poem out of the Lord of the Flies text in English class. My poem had the refrain "Because the rules are all we've got!" To me, at tender 15, it was so true. So frustrating. So repressive.

But the best found poetry is in my email account. Because my friends are brilliant and exist on wavelengths...They are not even of this world.

"DON'T try to be [a] pretty girl. that is soooo regressive!! you just can't win. I mean, there are a lot of pretty girls. i totally surrender to them. but i feel like i have more, you know?"

And if I made this into a poem--well, obviously the refrain would be: "there are a lot of pretty girls/i totally surrender to them"

And this

"You're really really attached to your family. it's a fact. Just try and break away from them. Just try."

And, my favorite--when my personhood is compacted into a small explosive ball. When i feel like I will unwind, unravel, implode. I re-read this line. Re-commit it to memory.

"sometimes im just mad at the whole world...but always always its maddening because you're mad with yourself too. for being impatient, helpless, hypocritical, sensitive"

And sometimes the day is really warm and the water is really cool -- so this:

"the world was immediate
and ours"

And

"I think insanity is the correct nomenclature. I think, in many ways, work (all day every day all year every year just to pay RENT? Can anyone say SHAM) is a type of hell, it's like rolling a boulder up a hill, watching it roll down, rolling it back up, day in and out."

Oh god...I feel like some caged animal/human who finally has an ear to listen andIcan'tstop this typing. These words, these women, they move me. They make me.