is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Margot, Old Men, the law.
Heidi, Liz, Gus and I saw Margot at the Wedding the other day, and it was the perfect film for the holiday season. So forget Fred Clause and seek out Margot instead. (It's the second film by the guy who did The Squid and the Whale.)
Doesn't matter how high or low the family pressure is this time of year, it seems certain that all of us will have gone through some trying times or some funny-because-trying times with family and loved ones. And that's what the film is all about: the ways in which we are all capable of saying things and doing things that are really hurtful to people we know really well and love a lot. The movie handles it well, so that most of the time you laugh at it instead of feeling depressed. I liked how different people in the audience thought different parts were especially funny, because the different reactions seemed to depend on how anger and conflict gets handled in different families. So I laughed really hard at random pointless displays of anger, while others laughed at simmering passive aggression (not that I didn't laugh at THAT, too. No avoiding that in family life, and my, how HILARIOUS it all is). The acting is all really great (notably Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicole Kidman, and the young actor who plays Kidman's son... even Jack Black who is stretched just a bit beyond the limits of his capability by the role).
The parts where adults are showing their dysfunction are really funny. The parts where parents can't help but damage their children are harder for me. I can't find it funny to see relatively helpless victims picked on or, well, created as victims. But it's a good, good movie.
Yesterday Gus and I saw No Country for Old Men. The funny thing is that we could not decide for the longest time, yesterday, whether we wanted to see Walk Hard or No Country for Old Men, which indicates our mood of ambivalence, since you would be hard-pressed to find two more different movies.
However, I'm convinced we would have been happy with either choice, so perhaps ambivalence is appropriate.
No Country is good, but not as good as I thought it would be. All I mean by that is that it isn't perfect. It also isn't as violent as I thought it would be, for which I was thankful. But it's Cormac McCarthy, and the Coen Brothers, so it's no walk in the park. It's dark and brooding and slow-paced, but far from boring. I'd say it's worth seeing just to see how the shots are set up, but the aspect of the film I liked most was tracking the various male characters in the movie�it's really fascinating to gauge their motivations and observe how they reason their way into their various actions.
I'm not sure I understood the ending. At all. Feel free to explain if you like. I'm guessing it must have been faithful to the book in a way that was dropped in other sections of the movie. There were also some narrated threads established at the very beginning that I didn't feel were fully addressed by the film.
Then, while we were on Muni discussing various ideas about the film, Gus got in trouble with the law. Ha. He forgot to take a transfer when we got on Muni at Powell Street, and then got pulled off the train for a lecture when we were subjected to one of those random fare-check searches. At first the cop was really hard-ass and I thought G was going to end up with a $100 ticket. And I felt bad because it's such a random lame thing to happen to an out-of-towner who doesn't know the rules. (Gus lived here for three years in the late 80s, back when you didn't need to carry proof of payment on Muni, so it was a disorienting combination of familiarity and being struck by new rules.) (We tried that out-of-towner angle on the cop but she wasn't having it because she saw another transfer in his wallet from the day before, so she thought he knew the rules and was trying to get away with something. Ugh.) But then she made an abrupt change (mostly because we just cooperated and listened instead of protesting) and let us go on our merry way. Sometimes you just have to take abuse from authority figures (or people with power but not authority) as a form of "payment" for having made an innocent mistake. It's like some kind of tame metaphor for the movie we had just seen. We needed bourbon then. So we had some, and all was well.
12:28 p.m. - January 02, 2008
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