My first mister
My first misteri is the definitive, exquisite encapture of lost (female) youth. This is what they are, this is what they do, and how they do it, and why exactly ; and there's uncounted, uncountable millions of them. Alienated if eager -- the fictitious heroine depicted braver than most (though not all, far, far from all) but otherwise as thoroughly representative an icon as fiction could ever be squeezed into -- but alienated as prime substance, as central, essential quality. Young females are made of alienation like blocks of wood are made of cellulose, that's what they, substantially, areii ; everything else (including "apathy") a layer painted on top if not simply feigned atop (and in the case of "apathy" very much an' quite universally feigned if "present", yes, of course).
The problem, as you perhaps expect (and eminently brought to life by J. Goodman but otherwise subtly omnipresent and quite transparently visible throughout) is that everyone folds way the fuck too quickly, too easily, way way too fast in any case (and this includes the film's lesbauthors, though I don't want to spoil it for you, at least not beyond saying that yes, young women are quite as openly, plainly, pointedly an' fundamentally inheritable, of course they are).
All in all this is a delightfuliii if slightly AEsopic piece -- but then again, AEsops were never malum in se ; they're just as a rule terribly done by the marauding idiot party, which tends to give them an (undeserved) bad name more generally than can ever attach. You definitely should see this thing ; though unless you can see it with a woman half your age you're probably wasting your time. I don't mean, "you're probably wasting your time watching it" ; I mean you're probably wasting your time outright & altogether.
———- 2001, by Christine Lahti / Jill Franklyn, with Albert Brooks, Leelee Sobieski (John Goodman also plays a minor part, which is how I even found this thing in the first place -- or rather I should say the torrentmistress found it). [↩]
- Because the Japanese adolescent didn't merely not know how to do her hair before her husband showed her, but she actually didn't even have any hair, at all, it's just not a thing for her to have, of her own, by herself. Non so se mi spiego. [↩]
The Polish chick in the vignette to the right (Liliane Rudabet Gloria Elsveta Sobieski, no shit) is particularly deserving of the epithet.
That bitch can act.
Do you realise she appears fat, somehow, throughout her screentime ? Yet she's not fat, she just acts it, as if to answer a question from the uninvolved public (that nevertheless would very much like to be actresses but also very much aren't, at all).
Too bad nothing came of her career (unless, of course, you count Cecile in Dangerous Liaisons [the made-for-TV miniseries] as a something). Speaking of which, you got any idea whatever happened to Alyson Hannigan ? You know, the "one time, at band camp" chick that was pretty much everywhere in the early 00s ?
Bitches really needed an agent, like, a real one, huh!
[↩]
Friday, 11 September 2020
Upon meditation, it's unavoidably regrettable that for some reason those involved in creative endeavours are reliably convinced that the depiction of "Bob", of the mediocre, planktonic subhuman is somehow relevant to cultural discourse.
I expect the misconception seeps in through second order effects of French revolution-era naive notions of "reason" and "man as arbiter of all things", whereby if the mouthbreathing extra's "in charge" of expending his stick of gum worth of cvasi-money to acquire the equivalent, indisolubly equivalent stick of gum, then therefore depicting said mouthbreathing extra on the stick of gum might get some more, or at any rate faster movement of gum tokens exchanged into gum objects.
Naively extending this proposition (whose truth is never nor was ever actually evaluated, to any standard, let alone such an exacting standard as'd permit the sort of demanding extension contemplated here) they then forcibly write mediocre nobodies into great stories, such that Bob the nobody gets some screen time, which he absolutely should not, ever ever get, while the dominating male must be a store manager. He can't be, say, a contract killer, though think of how much better this story'd have played if indeed the case was that just as R heard on the phone that the impossible had indeed occured and now his life's forfeit he looks up, and there's J. So now he confronts a question that's for once fucking interesting, a question the viewer-me -- the only viewer that in any conceivable retelling could ever possibly matter -- actually doesn't mind considering. Would you take a virgin seventeen year old female with you on the lam ? If you were me, I mean, of course. If it was her. Well... would you ?
And then, later, when she awakens, and she confronts, it's not "you don't talk to people, real people, you talk to magazines", what the fuck "magazines". It is instead, overpoweringly, most strongly self-evidently "you talk to phones". To phones, contrasting her carnal presence right there, soft and round and yielding and feminine. Magnetic.
All in all, wouldn't this apocatastaticaly inverted retelling of Harold&Maude work a lot better were it played closer to what Leon aimed (and failed) to be instead of the very Juno-esque lesbian-marxist fanfic, still tryna jack it to the same trite, deplorably trite, utterly expired nonsense ? I think it would've ; and you don't get a voice.