Blue Valentine

Deb 9 Me 3 (+)

This is all my fault. I read the synopsis and it said skin, language, blah blah blah and a beating. So I love the skin part and hate the beating part. But I’m thinking a little skin might override the beating so I reluctantly go see the movie. The first twenty minutes or so I’m ready to leave. From the first scene I’m thinking is this person gonna get beat up, that person, will they be the beater or the beaten? I’m totally fixating on the pending pounding that someone is going to get or give and I’m not really watching the movie, just anticipating the thrashing. So the stuff that’s going on may or may not have been worth watching, I don’t know, I’m just waiting for the beating. Eventually there is a pugilistic exercise, but I’m thinking, “that’s pretty light, there must be a beating coming up soon”. So the rest of the film I’m still distracted thinking the real beating is yet to come. So I never really saw the movie. Sitting right there for 114 minutes and didn’t see much of anything. There was skin, but I gotta tell you, I’ve seldom seen such joyless skin in a movie.

I have a feeling this was a pretty good movie, not a light-hearted romp through these people’s relationship, but probably heartfelt. I’m not sure why they felt they had to have a beating in the movie. It wasn’t a huge plot point and didn’t really offer any more insight to the player’s motivations. I’m glad the synopsis mentioned there was a beating, it’s my fault that I couldn’t look past that one element and see the rest of the movie. So I think it sucked, but it probably didn’t.

Somewhere

Deb 2 Me 6

Okay, let’s look at Sophia’s track record. The Virgin Suicides was pretty good. I went to see Lost in Translation but ended up in the first row so the film got lost in the pixilation and I really didn’t see a thing. But Bill Murray was in it so I’ll say it was good. Then came the Marie Antionette film; the most boring coffee table book of a movie I have ever seen. So this one comes along and I figure it’s a shot at redemption… not sure she hit the target here.

The key to the movie was subtle. The main guy drives a Ferrari 360 with paddle shift. The paddle shift transmission is a very aggressive high-performance feature that most everyone sees as one of the car’s main virtues. It also has an automatic mode, for passively cruising around town. This guy drives the entire movie in the automatic mode. And that is an effective allegory for the entire movie.

She uses the old Jim Jarmusch technique of letting a scene play out for longer than what feels natural and it works well in the scenes with the Ferrari, but nowhere else. Where Jarmusch used this tool effectively, she only made film longer. As it is, it’s only a tick over an hour and a half, could easily fit in a half hour TV slot.

But one of the themes was drudgery, the inert time between glamorous assignments, and the viewer felt the boredom. It was driven home, not in a Ferrari, but in scene after scene of wealthy good looking people being drug from one place to another, then vacantly waiting for the next thing to happen to the star. Nice looking people who are about as deep as a birdbath with little shot at redemption. I kinda liked it.