Movies

Sunday Film Review – Numb


And this is as good as it gets and it’s probably one of the most uninspiring trailers for a film I have ever seen.

It was an impulse grab. I was at the library after my writing group Thursday night to pick up a book on the history of The Fort (another page turner to go along with the dvd series we are watching on the history of Canada – and just as yet another aside, we American kids have been grievously misled on the role of Canada in the new world) and I saw it on the new release shelf. It had Matthew Perry prominently figured with the words dark, romantic, comedy, and even though that usually means – widow film – I took the bait.

The film began with a voice-over describing the main character’s descent into a perpetual state of feeling disconnected from himself – literally. Considering this man was a borderline OCD who was definitely emotionally raked over as a child by a slightly wacked out mother, he didn’t have far to fall, and when he got there, it was hard not to give him the same advice his father gave him,

“Son, just pull your socks up and get on with your life.”

Advice, not so strangely, that finally saves him in the end when he comes to the conclusion he is the only solution to his problem. Came as no surprise to me that the we are the answer to our own questions, dilemmas and upsets, but it sure took a long time for the filmmaker to get to the point.

As we watched the opening scene, or rather listened – and let me say I find voice-over distracting in a tell rather than show way – Rob remarked,

“Are you sure he isn’t widowed?”

But the widow connection streak was kept alive by the protagonist’s love interest, who it seems was dating a man who killed himself.

I love Matthew Perry even though he is a fat bastard now with no chin. I even watched that awful tv show he did with the guy from West Wing – you know, the one who is married to the mom from Malcolm in the Middle? I watched at least three intelligence insulting episodes, just because Perry is good. Even when the material isn’t.

But he didn’t rise above this one. Kevin Pollack steals every scene he is in and the Mary Steenburgen stuff, painfully awful.

If you see this out somewhere, run away. Far away.

Monday Memeing


So we watched another widow movie entitled Smart People with Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, that girl from Juno and Thomas Haden Church. I really don’t know why I like widowed people movies so much – the comedy ones in particular. Perhaps it is because I equate my experience as a dramedy rather than a Lifetime Movie for Women. I had as many up and really surreal and satirical moments as I did sad grief-drenched ones. Read Full Article

Becoming Jane


I lured my husband into watching an uber long film about one of the many possible scenarios for the tragic long affair which put author Jane Austen off the idea of marriage. As if the early 19th century views of women as chattel and marriage as a financial arrangement wouldn’t have done that without any help from a failed romance.

Having watched Pride and Prejudice not long ago, I have to say that Austen is not for those who prefer mono-syllabic dialogue or characters who, when they insist on speaking in sentences, do so using very small words. Austen makes my brain hurt. It’s like an episode of Gilmour Girls with better diction, grammar and word usage.

One thing that struck me over and over again during the movie was how much it sucked to be a woman. The only thing we were good for was marriage and then motherhood. In fact Jane’s reverend father practically begins the film with a lecture to his congregation on the virtues of a stupid woman because being clever will bring all women to misery.

In the course of the story Jane, whose prospects are portrayed as poor despite the fact that at least three men are panting after her, falls in love with a young man who is dependent on his uncle for university and eventual career. Since the young man’s mother had married for love, he is their only financial assistance and hope. Farming out one’s children to wealthy, childless relatives was a common practice. I wonder why that stopped?

Jane and the young man are eventually forced to run off, which is scandalous for her, but she decides in the end not to marry her love because his family depends on him and she can’t live with their ruin and her own too.

As I thought about it, I realized if the social structure of that time had survived my dad would have had three daughters to marry off and one son who wouldn’t have been able to hold on to any inheritance he was left. My younger sisters were pretty and complacent and wouldn’t have posed much of a challenge, but I would have ended up a dependent old maiden auntie.

Rob though would have simply forged a trail of his own. All that handymanlyness he possesses would never have saddled him with the onerous task of sucking up for his keep.

This made me wonder about Jane’s young suitor. He had a new world to flee to and start again, but he let her convince him to stay within the confines of a social system which was designed to assess people monetarily and cage them within polite expectations of family, neighbors and community at large. How sad.

She at least was able, mostly due to her modest gentry origins, to maintain her freedom and pursue her writing, but what about women who hadn’t “talent” or tolerant family? What happened to them?

It was, as I mentioned earlier, a long movie with ear grinding dialogue and unless you enjoy pondering the larger questions of sexism and societal impositions on personal choices, it is a movie better left alone.