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Just like the movies
I was going to do that meme that's been running around my friends page. I managed to get at least halfway through it before it drove me insane. Seriously, who writes these things? "Usually always?" "Proficient on a musical instrument?" "Way too much time on the computer than on anything else?" "Unpleased?"
* I have played strip poker with someone else before.
No, I usually play all by myself.
* I believe abortion is murder & wrong.
No - I think abortion is murder and right.
Go finish high school. The internet will still be waiting.
That said, I did mean to update. Undoubtedly![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
talumin will be doing the same thing in the next day or so, but since I picked the movies we watched tonight, I thought I might as well review.
For every generation, there are certain things that define them. For Generation X, there were a few movies that fit this purpose. Reality Bites was one; Singles is another. Written and directed by Cameron Crowe, who reached a new level of Gen X-esque self-referentiality in Almost Famous, it follows a group of single friends as they search for love.
Singles is very definitely set in the early nineties. (Oh, my God, the hair.) I liked it when I saw it then, and I like it now, but, like Crowe's other genre-making film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, it hasn't aged well. Partly, this is because Singles was aimed directly at a particular generation, at a particular time in their lives; now, it applies well neither to the now late thirty-somethings who were once early twenty-somethings, nor to the current, Generation Y batch of twenty-somethings. Partly, though, it's because all those things that were so new when Singles was made are commonplace, or cliché, now, which puts most of the film somewhere between "average" and "dated."
(On a more filmic note, I thought it was interesting to see the film hover between modernism and postmodernism. For all that the characters switch between talking to the camera and to other characters, like the newer postmodernist technique of confusing digetic and non-diegetic sounds, the Chekhovian-modernist "plate-breaking" scene, were it not for Crowe dwelling too long on it, would have been beautiful in its simplicity.)
If you didn't see Singles in the 90's, you probably won't love it now; if you did, it remains a good film and, if nothing else, provides some great nostalgia.
The second film we watched was Imagine Me and You. I've been wanting to see this film since I saw an ad for it in Cosmopolitan, for one fairly obvious reason. Honestly, though, I wasn't expecting to love it.
(Spoilers below)
All my expectations disappeared sometime in the first few seconds, between realising that it was not American, but British, and that yes, that was Anthony Stewart Head. The film opens with Rachel (Piper Perabo) getting married, which is where she meets Luce (Lena Headey). The "Barbie-heterosexual" Rachel quickly develops a crush on Luce (who is gay), which puts a noticeable strain on her marriage to Heck.
The film has more than a few similarities to Kissing Jessica Stein, which surprised - and pleased - me. I had been anticipating a "girl meets boy, girl meets girl, girl is torn, girl eventually returns to boy, thus restoring the natural order of things" storyline. What I got instead was a "girl meets boy, girl meets girl, girl is torn, girl eventually chooses girl, thus reinforcing that you should always follow your heart, no matter how difficult it is" storyline, which, up to the end of the film, I hadn't been expecting. Needless to say, it made me very happy.
It wasn't only the novelty of the ending that I liked, though. In the end, of course, Rachel leaves Heck - or rather, he leaves her. The film doesn't completely ignore the consequences of this, and the ending is intentionally bittersweet; not as bitter as it could have been, and it does go some way toward making it right in the end, but at least it's acknowledged. I can even forgive the last, "patch-up" sequence, if only because it contained one of the funniest lines in the entire film.
In the end, I really wasn't sure who I wanted Rachel to end up with. If I had to choose, it probably would have been Heck; but as a film, the fact that she chose Luce is why I love it, and why it's going in my collection.
* I have played strip poker with someone else before.
No, I usually play all by myself.
* I believe abortion is murder & wrong.
No - I think abortion is murder and right.
Go finish high school. The internet will still be waiting.
That said, I did mean to update. Undoubtedly
talumin will be doing the same thing in the next day or so, but since I picked the movies we watched tonight, I thought I might as well review.For every generation, there are certain things that define them. For Generation X, there were a few movies that fit this purpose. Reality Bites was one; Singles is another. Written and directed by Cameron Crowe, who reached a new level of Gen X-esque self-referentiality in Almost Famous, it follows a group of single friends as they search for love.
Singles is very definitely set in the early nineties. (Oh, my God, the hair.) I liked it when I saw it then, and I like it now, but, like Crowe's other genre-making film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, it hasn't aged well. Partly, this is because Singles was aimed directly at a particular generation, at a particular time in their lives; now, it applies well neither to the now late thirty-somethings who were once early twenty-somethings, nor to the current, Generation Y batch of twenty-somethings. Partly, though, it's because all those things that were so new when Singles was made are commonplace, or cliché, now, which puts most of the film somewhere between "average" and "dated."
(On a more filmic note, I thought it was interesting to see the film hover between modernism and postmodernism. For all that the characters switch between talking to the camera and to other characters, like the newer postmodernist technique of confusing digetic and non-diegetic sounds, the Chekhovian-modernist "plate-breaking" scene, were it not for Crowe dwelling too long on it, would have been beautiful in its simplicity.)
If you didn't see Singles in the 90's, you probably won't love it now; if you did, it remains a good film and, if nothing else, provides some great nostalgia.
The second film we watched was Imagine Me and You. I've been wanting to see this film since I saw an ad for it in Cosmopolitan, for one fairly obvious reason. Honestly, though, I wasn't expecting to love it.
(Spoilers below)
All my expectations disappeared sometime in the first few seconds, between realising that it was not American, but British, and that yes, that was Anthony Stewart Head. The film opens with Rachel (Piper Perabo) getting married, which is where she meets Luce (Lena Headey). The "Barbie-heterosexual" Rachel quickly develops a crush on Luce (who is gay), which puts a noticeable strain on her marriage to Heck.
The film has more than a few similarities to Kissing Jessica Stein, which surprised - and pleased - me. I had been anticipating a "girl meets boy, girl meets girl, girl is torn, girl eventually returns to boy, thus restoring the natural order of things" storyline. What I got instead was a "girl meets boy, girl meets girl, girl is torn, girl eventually chooses girl, thus reinforcing that you should always follow your heart, no matter how difficult it is" storyline, which, up to the end of the film, I hadn't been expecting. Needless to say, it made me very happy.
It wasn't only the novelty of the ending that I liked, though. In the end, of course, Rachel leaves Heck - or rather, he leaves her. The film doesn't completely ignore the consequences of this, and the ending is intentionally bittersweet; not as bitter as it could have been, and it does go some way toward making it right in the end, but at least it's acknowledged. I can even forgive the last, "patch-up" sequence, if only because it contained one of the funniest lines in the entire film.
In the end, I really wasn't sure who I wanted Rachel to end up with. If I had to choose, it probably would have been Heck; but as a film, the fact that she chose Luce is why I love it, and why it's going in my collection.