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.