I've been a fan of the TV show Scrubs since it came out because it is such a tight show in every respect: the acting, the writing, the direction. So when I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind what feels like ages ago and saw a preview for Zach Braff's Garden State (Braff being the star of Scrubs), I knew I'd want to see it.
It took forever, it seems, to finally get around to being shown around here. I was surprised that here in Orange County, California, the only place it was being shown was the indy theater over by UC Irvine. When we showed up, there was a huge line extending around the building just for Garden State, and the theater ended up being packed.
Garden State is the story of Andrew Largeman, an only slightly successful actor in L.A. who comes home to New Jersey when his mother dies. "Large" has been psychologically medicated in some form or another since he was a child, and the movie is about his decision to use his mother's death as a spring board to break away from that and feel everything, both good and bad, and really experience life for possibly the first time.
The movie was beautifully directed, and while I already felt that Braff has exceptional comedic timing as an actor, I now know that translates into his directing, too. The trailers don't convey at all, really, how funny this movie actually is. But even while it's very funny, there is this overarching sadness to it that the movie slowly erodes as you watch. The only criticism I'd have here is that sometimes the audience was laughing at jokes that were right up against important dialogue, and so the timing sometimes was a little too tight, it seemed.
Like Lost in Translation, the movie felt very real to me, as if Braff really had gone home and just had a cameraman tag along, assuming Braff's 20-something life is like most other people's. There always seems to be a signature 20-something movie for every generation, and I think Garden State is the current one. You've got the 20-something struggling actor trying to survive on his own in L.A.; you've got the 20-something guy who's singular invention allowed him to buy a mansion with no furniture (and this could easily be an internet millionaire as well); you've got the 20-something high school friends who are still living with their parents and smoking pot all day. And then you've got that interesting and awkward transition, where you've moved out, but you meet someone who's still living at home, sort of in limbo between high school and finally becoming an adult.
All of this felt very real on screen. And the actors were terrific. Natalie Portman's talent really shined in this film -- I'd gotten so used to seeing her in Star Wars that I'd forgotten she can really, really act. She was so natural, and she managed to be such a cutie and so sweet without being overpowering at all. It was a balance that's hard to imagine other actresses pulling off successfully.
The best part of the movie is something I don't want to go into too heavily because it will spoil surprise moments in the plot. I think it's this part that really hit home with me. It can be summed up with one of Large's lines: "So, you still want to compare fucked up families?"
I've done this. I've had moments sitting around with my friends, just like Large does around the fire at the mansion, talking about life stories with people I've known for years, but to whom I've never told the really ugly parts to. Until that moment -- that one moment where suddenly you are a whole different person in their eyes, where all they can manage to say is, "God, I had no idea," because they're too embarassed or awed to say anything else. The look on Large's face and the slightly hyper tone in his voice when he says, "I know, it's amazing how much of my life has been determined by a quarter-inch piece of plastic," was a moment where I could identify with the entire film in only ten seconds of dialogue and a brief facial and vocal expression. Anyone who can identify with this knows that this is exactly how your voice sounds when you're telling your story, and they know that that embarrassed smile and the little laugh you give is all you can think to do to break the ice when people are looking at you with a weird mix of pity and embarrassment. It was amazing, for me. Watching this key moment on screen was like watching parts of my own life transposed onto other characters.
The only other criticism I have of the film is that it seemed to ramble in parts, but I get the feeling that was intentional. When you're back in your home town for a few days, that's how life is. You keep running into people you haven't seen in years, and they insist on taking you out, so you go out, and then you end up going somewhere else...it's pretty true to life. But even through the rambling, there's a very strong constant, and that's Large slowly, but evenly, coming out of his medicated psychological coma. Braff pulls off this transition very well.
It's odd, but three tiny scenes in the movie really stuck with me, and they all have to do with touching. In the first, Large is on the couch during a drugged-out spin the bottle game. When the anonymous girl sits on his lap to kiss him, the camera flashes briefly to his hand, which squeezes her thigh a bit, but very nervously. There was something very real about that and I liked that there was a focus on it. You can see how nervous Large is about the idea of even touching another person, nevermind kissing them (anonymously). The second was the hug that Large gives Sam's mother. He just sinks in, and for a brief second you see him almost ready to cry, as if he'd never been hugged before and is just now realizing how good it feels. The final scene is where he reaches out to put his hand on his father's chest. It's a very confident movement but his father flinches just a bit. It's as if each of these three moments is a progression that shows him coming out of his emotional shell. It's nitpicky, but I really liked that.
I recommend trying to catch the movie if it's playing somewhere near you. It might be hard to find, but it's well worth it.
I consider myself to be politically fairly center. Most people will snicker at that, because who is really truly moderate? And the problem with being moderate is that you can never find a political figure that embodies everything you believe in. And whenever you disagree with someone -- and you will, because you're moderate -- you will always be accused of being either a pinko liberal or a Bush-loving neocon. It's a lose-lose situation.
So that said, I went and saw Fahrenheit 9/11 today. I walked in with a bias against Moore from the get-go. From his previous work, I've come to see him as a propagandist. He is to the left, in my mind, what Limbaugh is to the right. The only difference is that the message he's trying to get out these days largely fits my own political beliefs on Bush, his administration, and our foreign policy (which is to say that I think Bush is a dangerous president who absolutely needs to be voted out this November). I dislike Moore's tactics, because I feel that he twists his presentation to elicit a response that might be "right" depending which side of the fence you're on. But when those responses are achieved with slight omissions over several different facts or emotional twists that don't quite tell the whole story, I believe those responses are based on a dishonest foundation, and that's bad.
I've come away from the movie with a whole spectrum of thoughts and feelings, more than I thought I would. I'm surprised at how I feel about it, and surprised that the moments I've read so much about where I thought there was a lot of obivous bias are in fact not as biased as I thought they were, and that some moments that few have highlighted (whether for or against Moore's movie) I felt were really biased.
I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, for the most part. I rolled my eyes a few more times than others have said they did, and I found myself finding much more to like than I thought I would. The middle third had me struggling to maintain interest for reasons I'll get into. The movie mirrored beliefs and feelings I've had about the Bush administration since before I was ever even aware of Moore. I felt it was really powerful in spots, and it was definitely entertaining. And even in enjoying the movie I still stand by my feeling that Moore is a propagandist and that this movie is also propaganda. It just happens to be entertaining and informative propaganda that mirrors my own beliefs and is doing the excellent job of getting information in front of people that should be seen, questioned (on both sides of the issue), and discussed. It's well-filmed, interesting, entertaining, and completely slanted and biased, more than I'm comfortable with, but informative enough that I will continue to enjoy discussing what the film says. I don't feel this was a documentary in the true sense of the word, because it's too biased to fit the traditional sense of the word. I feel it's an informative, entertaining op/ed film.
I wish I'd been able to take notes during the movie because there were specific things about it I know I'm going to forget that I wanted to talk about.
First, the 1.4 billion dollars number. There's been a lot of discussion in numerous articles that say Moore is being deceitful in claiming that the Carlyle group received $1.4 billion dollars from investors, and that you have to know the whole story about the investments. Now I can say that I think Moore used the number in an acceptable way. All he says is this: "when the American people pay you $400,000 a year to do your job, and the Saudis pay you $1.4 billion over a number of years, who are you going to like more?" I think that in saying "$1.4 billion over a number of years" Moore isn't trying to lead the viewer into any erroneous assumptions here. That said, I still think it's good that people are discussing the details involved in this number. All it does is uncover more information that people should know about and discuss. But I now disagree with the articles that claim he used this number in a misleading, deliberately or not, way.
In saying "when Bush was governor of Texas" in regards to the Unocal pipeline, Moore is subtly manipulating the connections in the audience's mind in his favor to create a direct association that is not that direct. It may seem small, but as I've said and as I still believe, done enough times these things add up to a conclusion that was achieved dishonestly.
The movie is at its best when it lets the footage or the people in the footage speak for itself. Even with a healthy dose of "can this sound byte be taken out of context?" when you view it, the way Moore contrasts some of the comments made by the administration with other footage or the reactions of average Americans in situations that come about from those sound bytes, it's good stuff.
Some of my favorite parts of the movie:
The footage of Bush reading in the classroom when he heard about the attack. You can believe that Bush was immobile because he didn't have someone to lead him around, as Moore suggests, or you can believe that the man was in shock, or you can believe that when his eyes are scanning the room and he's nodding his head slightly, he's thinking really hard about what to do next, because his next action is going to be one of the most important damn actions in the modern history of the US and he'd better think really hard about what he's going to do. No matter what your interpretation, it's fairly powerful footage. But I didn't completely buy into Moore's talkover leading me down the path of believing that Bush was a dullard who didn't know how to react until someone told him to. I think it's a combination of all the possible reactions above. In this case, I think people can watch the footage and come to their own conclusion rather than just buy Moore's talkover.
The opening of the movie. I went to see this on the 4th of July with a pretty full theater. During the 9/11 footage there were plenty of sniffles, and it was hard to not be moved by this myself, not just because of the footage and remembering what it was like on that day to watch what happened, but to be in a theater full of others who saw this, too. Seeing this on the big screen with tons of other people...there are times when an emotional scene in a movie will move people, but this was real, and watching it on the screen with all of these other people who were surely remembering it along with me felt really powerful.
The Oregon trooper. Again, Moore let the footage speak for itself here, and it was good stuff. He didn't talk over it and hold my hand and lead me to the conclusion he was trying to elicit from me, as he did during the Bush-classroom footage. I loved it when he said, "no one's sent me a manual on how to catch a terrorist. I'd read it if someone would send me one."
There were other good small bits in the movie I enjoyed. Moore has a knack for entertaining.
Some parts of the movie had me wondering if the audience was laughing appropriately, and I think they weren't because I think Moore was off-target in the way he filmed it vs. the reaction he was going for. The small town of Tappahanock scene. The audience was laughing, but I never once got the sense that they were laughing at the ludicrous idea that the FBI would pin this small area as being a terrorist target. I felt that they were pointing and laughing at the hicks that Moore chose to put on screen. I guess Moore can't control the response here, really, but I felt like he was mis-directing the audience's response here to something that was distracting from the original intent of the scene.
I got another sense of this when he was highlighting the Fresno peace group. "They eat cookies. Sometimes, they have two." The audience seemed to be laughing at the fat rural hicks. But we're not supposed to be laughing at them. The point is to laugh at how stupid it is that the Sheriff's dept. would send someone to infiltrate this group. I felt like there were a few awkward juxtapositions in this movie like that that released the laugh tension before we were supposed to, just in time to actually miss the scene's point, which was unfortunate. It's a small detail, I know.
Now for the main problem I had with the movie...the entire middle third, from the point at which he begins talking about the poor and undereducated being the true victims here, and culminating with the scene of the mother who reads the letter from her dead soldier son.
At this point, Moore swerves wildly -- at least to me -- from a really strong and noble focus on the problem of the rich and powerful controlling the world for fun and profit to highlighting how the war affects the poor. Then this segues into a Vietnam-era-like polemic about how war is bad. Eventually, near the end, the movie comes back around to its original focus of why the Administration needs to be kicked out of office because they're unethical and they're toying with foreign policy on the backs of ignorant citizens for profit.
Near the end of the movie, Moore says something akin to, "The majority of people that sign up for the military are poor and uneducated. They sign up to fight so that we don't have to. And all they ask of us that we only make them risk their lives when it's absolutely necessary."
Obviously, that's a statement that's easy to agree with. But when Moore starts into the segment of the movie devoted to the poor and uneducated signing up for the military, this is where I couldn't help rolling my eyes sometimes. Now, I'm not a heartless bitch; at least, I like to think I'm not.
The problem here is that he makes this statement at the end after he spends a significant amount of time showing us that it is always the poor and undereducated that get the shaft from the military, when all they wanted when they signed up was to go to college. Moore is basically telling us the obvious here, but he does it in such a way that I get the feeling from the film that he expects a medal for removing the ignorance from our eyes. I'm sorry, but ever since there has been a military, it has been the job choice of the poor and undereducated. This isn't exactly new information and has always been fairly obvious to most people. But he spends a huge portion of the movie, the entire third to almost the second half of it, telling us, "war hurts the poor." Well, no kidding. Did we really need that much time spent on it?
Not only that, but did he really need to spend the emotional drama on it? This is where the movie excels at being propaganda, because with this film he is deliberately linking the Iraq war to the plight of the poor common American, and to things like the unscrupulous behavior of Marine recruiters. Recruiters have always been as unscrupulous as car salesman. Back when I was going to join the Army in 1990, before the first Gulf War and during a time of peace in the country, my recruiter was doing everything he possibly could to get me to sign those papers. (It was only after a few months of working with him to get ready physically for basic training that I learned the MOS I was signing up for wasn't guaranteed and nearly everything he told me about the job I could get in the military was a lie, so I stopped the process.) Recruiters acting like this is absolutely nothing new, but Moore creates a connection in this film between Bush, the war, and a deliberate campaign to kill the poor by enlisting them. I find that intellectually dishonest.
You're going to call me a heartless bitch over this, I know. And that's fine. But my opinion on the scene where the mother who's lost her son in Iraq and is reading a letter is just the culmination of this portion of the film where I rolled my eyes. Not at her -- my heart absolutely went out to her -- but at Moore's use of her. And I felt bad, because the audience was sniffling and crying, and all I could think was, "this is a dirty tactic, Moore."
Yes, it's an emotionally moving scene because we're witnessing the personal loss of a child. But in the context of the point he's trying to make with this movie, it seems out of place, because he's having us focus so much on her individual grief for so long. The brief moment where she gets to the portion of her son's letter where he asks what Bush is doing is the key point here, but Moore spends so much time on her grief outside of that moment that it absolutely exceeds the confines of the movie.
His time spent on her says, "war is bad, m'kay?" We know this already. I feel insulted as a viewer that he felt he needed to take the time to preach that to me, as if I didn't already know it.
Now, the moment where she's in front of the White House...that to me was more powerful than the time in her living room. Where she confronts the woman who says this is all staged...my God. talk about a powerful scene. I don't know how she didn't lunge at that woman. I wanted to slap the woman who told her that. And when the mother breaks down emotionally in front of the White House, with its barricades that weren't there before the terrorist attacks, it brings the point Moore is trying to make in this segment of the movie into the sharp focus for a brief moment that I felt was lacking in the earlier scenes with her (although obviously we needed a bit of those scenes to set this up for us).
But in the end, the point that Moore was trying to make here mainly frustrated me more than made me empathize with anything. Because the fact is, there was a terrorist attack that put those barriers there, and there was and is action that needed and needs to be taken, and there were problems with our foreign policy and the administrations action or inaction that caused her son to be sent to Iraq...and instead of coming away with this strong feeling in my heart from this scene that said, "this needs to be stopped!", the feeling I got the sense that Moore wanted me to feel, I felt, "this is so damn complicated, and all I feel is frustrated that there is nothing clear cut that points to her son dying for a good cause." Maybe in the end that's the same thing.
This segued into my second major problem with the movie: the portrayal of the Iraq War as a completely black and white issue: the war is bad and that is that. Before you roll your eyes too much, hear me out.
I'm against the war. I feel that Bush went to war for all the wrong reasons. I feel he misled or outright lied to the country and that there is strong indication that oil and money has played a huge part in this, and I want Bush out for those reasons.
However, Moore's side of the war doesn't even attempt to take into account the atrocities that Saddam committed on his own people. Even within the constraints of his bias, if he'd just even attempted to address that issue at all, I would feel less like this movie was propaganda. Obviously the eradication of Saddam doesn't come close to justifying the war. But I almost get the sense here that Moore would apply this same lens to WWII, because he wants you to believe that war is only ever bad, even when a more powerful country attempts to liberate a country that can't help itself from the clutches of a dictator that gasses his own people. Again, it absolutely doesn't justify the decision process that Bush appeared to use to go to war, but Moore doesn't even address it, as if the issue of Saddam's actions on his people just don't exist when they should at least be discussed. I feel that his film would have been less propagandist if he'd at least addressed the issue.
In the end, I liked the movie and I'm glad that I saw it. Moore pulls some emotional strings here and there to get a gut reaction that is less documentary and more propaganda, but the movie was entertaining and informative, and more importantly, it's getting people to talk about things with this administration that absolutely need to be discussed. All in all, I'm glad to have seen it and just like any form of biased media, I hope people do see it and think about the things that Moore suggests and lays out.
Two mini-reviews today of movies we managed to catch in the last couple of weeks.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Eternal Sunshine is one of those movies that has finally confirmed for me something I've been wondering for a long time: that other people dream in the same, weird, messed-up way that I do.
First, though, Jim Carrey. I've never disliked him, but I wasn't really into the Mask/Ace Ventura/Cable Guy thing. I liked him a lot in The Truman Show, which I felt was a good baby step in showing critics that he could do roles with a little more substance and drama to them (I also liked him in The Majestic, but it got universally panned, it seems). Eternal Sunshine, however, proves that Carrey is more than capable of doing some really great non-comedic acting.
I originally wrote "dramatic" there instead of "non-comedic", but that might be too serious a word for this role. The movie is an interesting blend of both comedy and tragedy, and the entire premise of it can be boiled down to the axiom "it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."
Kate Winslet plays Clementine, and Jim Carrey plays Joel. They are complete and utter opposites, and yet they fall in love. Joel and Clem meet, fall in love, and things go sour like they do in many relationships, and one day Joel finds out that Clem has erased him from her mind. Not in a figurative sense -- in a real, literal sense, by going to a hole-in-the-wall doctor that uses a medical procedure to wipe away any traces of a loved one (or even a pet) from a person's mind so that they can more easily move on with their lives. Joel decides that the pain of having lost Clem like this is too much to bear and he opts to have the procedure himself. The rest of the movie is mostly a journey through Joel's mind as the process is occuring.
But during the process, he interacts with his own mind and his own mind's avatar of Clem, and he discovers that he would rather keep the happy memories of having been in love with her and her with him and deal with the loss than to erase her completely and forget that he was ever that happy. There is ensuing chaos as Joel -- asleep on a bed while the procedure is being done to him -- grabs his mind's representation of Clem by the hand and the two of them attempt to run away from the process that's trying to destroy all traces of her.
This sounds like a pretty linear plot, but one of the most incredible aspects of this movie is the way it winds back and around itself, completely disregarding, it seems, the notion of a time line. There is a constant feeling that we don't know if we're watching a scene being replayed in Joel's mind or a scene with Clem in the present (and Clem is part of his present in a way I won't go into because it would spoil the nice twists of the plot).
Carrey was incredible in this movie. Winslet was great, too, but Carrey was really the one who convinced the audience that he could make such a drastic leap. I actually forgot a quarter of the way into the film that I was watching Jim Carrey. His character Joel is subdued, shy, introverted, and...well, really a pretty boring person. Yet the movie and Carrey's protrayal of him made me care about him. One of my favorite scenes in the movie that I felt really nailed the realness of these characters and Carrey's terrific acting here was when the two are naked in bed, and Clem talks about how ugly she always thought she was. Carrey rolls closer to her and whispers how beautiful she is. A description of it makes it sound boring, but the way he whispered it and the way he seemed so natural in that moment really made me feel like I was watching real life and not a movie. It was levels beyond the most dramatic and romantic moments in The Majestic. This was far more real and grounded.
And back to the whole dreaming thing: I loved the way this movie portrayed dreams and memories, and the way the mind imagines things in that weird, warped way none of us can quite describe to another person. There is a scene where Joel is recalling the time he and Clem broke into a beach house during the off-season, and the memory is being destroyed as Joel is recalling it. The way the movie's creators chose to have Clem speaking as if she were yelling from upstairs while Joel spoke in a whisper was the one point in the movie that really captured the feeling of being in someone's head.
The gist: A great film that I'll be buying on DVD when it's out. Carrey's acting is at its best, and the plot, direction, and vision of the film are probably going to remain as one of the best this year.
What's it worth?: Full price ticket on a night out.
The Ladykillers
I like Tom Hanks. He falls into a category of actors for me that I go watch not because I think they're going to transform a character, but because I like to watch them on the screen.
Hanks plays a southern gentleman with a devious plan to steal money from a riverboat casino in a tiny town in Mississippi. He recruits a small band of misfits (yes, I'm trying to avoid the cliches but they're really the only appropriate thing here) to help him hatch his plan, which will be executed from the basement of a house owned by an old pious, church-loving Black woman who has no idea what's going on or what would happen when she rented a room to Hanks' character.
I've liked the Coen Brothers' films I've seen in the past (O Brother, Where Art Thou?). I sort of knew walking into the movie that I really only wanted to see it for Hanks' performance as an affected Southern fop. Unfortunately, that was really the only good part about the first 2/3 of the movie, which was really slow. And during that first 2/3 the movie suffered from the very thing that was supposed to make it fun -- at times, when Hanks' is delivering the "$9 sentence when a $2 one will do" kind of lines that make you chuckle in the beginning, you're begging for the scriptwriter to just get on with it already. There are scenes in this first 2/3 where they're clearly trying to establish a reparte between Hanks' character and the old lady that's rented him his room and it just feels long and drawn out.
Have you noticed yet that I haven't used the character names and instead keep referring to the actors? That's because I can't remember the characters' names. They didn't make that much of an impression on me.
But the movie didn't completely fail -- the last 1/3 of the movie was great and clicked along with a lot of laughs from the audience. It was worth the set up from the first 2/3, but not enough for a theater ticket.
The gist: Hanks gives a good performance but its over-the-top nature gets tiring, and the movie suffers from a lack of characters that you really find yourself getting interested in.
What's it worth?: a renter.
Building off our recent interest in foreign and independent films, Len and I went to see Kitchen Stories tonight, a Norwegian film about an absurd post-WWII Swedish study of the kitchen habits of Norwegian bachelors. The study is done to increase knowledge for designing a more efficient kitchen space, and the movie becomes a showcase for the idea that the act of being observed changes things, and that sometimes the observer becomes the observed.
Kitchen Stories features a home researcher named Folke Nilsson who is one of a handful of researchers sent to the hinterlands of Norway to study the kitchen habits of single male Norwegian farmers. His host, Isak, is an old man who clearly has no interest at all in having some strange person sit in his kitchen and observe him (he only signed up for the study for the free horse, which turned out to be a toy horse). In this bizarre and surreal study, the Swedish observers sit in high tennis referee-like chairs in the corners of the kitchen and are given strict instructions never to interact with their hosts so that they don't disrupt the routines they're trying to study.
Isak clearly doesn't like having someone in his kitchen observing him, and this very fact immediately disrupts his routine; he begins cooking his meals in his bedroom, and after the rare times he's actually in his kitchen, he very pointedly turns out the light on Folke, who's finding it difficult to do his research with such a host.
But after a mishap that requires Folke to interact with Isak, they begin talking. Once the floodgates open, the two become friends. Soon, Folke's all-too-serious boss begins berating him about disrupting the study. And all the time, Isak's friend Grant observes the growing friendship and begins to get jealous of Folke, and dangerously so. Folke soon learns that Isak has been observing him as well, and Folke's colleague Green, who has a host down the road from him, shows up at his trailer one night in a drunken stupor ranting that one cannot properly observe another human without interacting with them.
There were really two stories in Kitchen Stories. The first is the friendship that grows between Folke and Isak. The movie is a comedy here, and I remember what Len told me the night we looked at the poster and decided to see it: "Norwegians aren't funny!" Now I know they are, but they're just very subtle about it. Very, very subtle.
The other sub-story educated me a bit on the relationship between Sweden and Norway, something I'm completely unfamiliar with. At the beginning of the movie, Folke's boss is describing his disgust at having to drive on the left as he goes from Sweden to Norway, and how it made him want to vomit. It sets the tone for the broader scope of Folke and Isak's relationship, that of a Swede and a Norwegian. At one point, Isak casually comments that the Swedes were casual observers during the war, too, which in the setting of the movie had only occured maybe a decade prior. There is clearly tension there, and Isak and Folke occasionally run up against it, but their friendship smooths out these bumps. This part of the movie made me want to learn more about the relationship between Sweden and Norway, both the political one and the cultural one.
Both Len and I really enjoyed the movie. It was a very sweet movie with a bittersweet ending I won't give away (I had hopes that the movie would end slightly differently, namely that Folke would return before the critical moment). The comedy was very light and subtle, and the drama was as well. At the risk of getting too melodramatic here, it had a lilt to it that was very much like the Norwegian language: rolling ups and downs that sort of take you along gently.
I've learned a little Norwegian in my life, some from my grandfather when I was a kid and some as an adult when I began studying it on my own, and I had such a hard time understanding the Norwegian in the film (it was subtitled in English). I can read Norwegian pretty easily, but something about the spoken language escapes me — I have difficulty discerning words, even in sentences I would know immediately upon reading.
So the accent just eludes me. I was expecting that here, but I'd hoped to be able to at least understand some of it. I wondered if my inability to understand at least some of it was due to the fact that Isak was a remote farmer, which I'm guessing would be like a non-English speaker trying to understand someone from the Appalachians. I also noticed that Folke said "Jo" when he said "Yes" instead of "Ja" as you say in Norwegian; I wondered if the Swedes in the film were speaking Swedish and the Norwegians were speaking Norwegian. This would be about right if what I learned is true, that the two languages can be understood easily by their speakers, almost as if they were dialects of the same language (which I don't think is far from the linguistic truth). This also would have made it difficult for me to understand about half the dialogue in the movie.
I recommend you see the movie if a calm and gentle comedy/drama is your thing. We certainly loved it. Next on the list is Intermission, which we're going to have to see before Thursday if we want to catch it in the theatre.
Len and I really wanted to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind this weekend, since it looks really good, but instead we opted to wait until next weekend on that one and this weekend we took in a foreign film at our local indie artsy theater. That film was Goodbye, Lenin!. It was a German film subtitled in English, and we loved it.
It's the late 80's, and Alex is a young East German man watching his country flounder in the death throes of socialism. He and his sister contend with a mother who, after being left by her husband, throws all her energy into the socialist regime, becoming an ardent Party member and doing her part to further the socialist cause. But one evening during a protest, Alex's mother witnesses him being arrested by the cops; she collapses from a heart attack and goes into an 8-month long coma.
When she wakes up, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik is gone. Germany has been united and socialism and the Berlin Wall have both fallen. The doctors warn Alex and his sister, however, that even the slightest shock could kill their mother. So in order to protect her, Alex decides that she cannot learn what's happened to her beloved East Germany. He takes her home and ensconces her in the bedroom of their flat, and sets about recreating the DDR, complete with neighbors who are in on the act.
There are two wonderful things about the movie. The first is the comedy that comes from Alex's attempts at maintaining the old socialist regime and finding it very difficult to do. There are the constant appearances of things from the West that intrude that he has to explain away. There are the cravings his mother has for old East German "delicacies", like Spreewald pickles, that are unavailable (prompting him to find old jars from the garbage, sterilize them, and repackage the new food in the old jars).
The second wonderful thing about the movie is the satire. Alex isn't just recreating the old DDR. He's inadvertently recreating the DDR that his mother (and he) would have liked to live in. It's a strong DDR that people from the West flock to in refuge from capitalism and greed (at least, that's the explanation he gives when he's pinned by a discovery of his mother's of the outside world), not the weak DDR that buckled under the weight of the encroaching West. It culminates when Alex has to do what we've known through the whole film must come: he has to find a way to break the news to his mother. Rather than tell her the truth, he and his friends and family manufacture a "proper" send-off for the DDR that's infinitely more kind than the one history gave it.
Now, this sounds like the movie is making the political statement that capitalism = good and socialism = bad. It really doesn't. It's very neutral on the subject, showing the bad sides of both, but we sort of come to identify with Alex when he longs for a time where his mother was first and foremast happy and healthy, and things elsewhere in life were at least stable.
The only negative to the movie in my opinion was that it tried to be all things in one movie. It was comedy, satire, love story, and family story. There are two subplots that felt unnecessary: the love story between Lara and Alex (although it certainly added some dimension to the film, she didn't appear to be as integral to the story as I'd thought she'd become), and the subplot involving Alex's father (which I won't spoil; suffice it to say that the revelation about Alex's father is critical to the movie, but the later actual involvement of his father really wasn't). These parts didn't detract from the movie for me, they just didn't add anything to it and made it a tad longer than it needed to be, I felt.
I really recommend you catch it if you can. There's another movie playing at the same theater called Kitchen Stories, and it's a Norwegian comedy. I told Len I wanted to see it before it left the theater this Thursday, and he insisted that Norwegians are not funny, which prompted me to defend my genealogical honor. Now we've agreed to see it, and let me tell you...my people better be representin'.