tartysuz

Tonight I saw a drama about a drunken ex-marine's sons who are given to shedding single perfect tears of man-pain and shouting things like: "Sam! You're my brother! You're my family!"

But it wasn't as good as Supernatural.

( Brothers )

This is an odd time-travel movie, one that pretty much removes all consideration of the mechanics of time travel. One of the characters actually says that the process is more like magic.

I think that's fine. Not every time travel movie needs to refer to hard science. The emphasis in this movie is on the metaphor. It calls to mind the Taoist notion that you can never step into the same river twice.

In that respect, I liked how this movie concretized the notion of revisiting your past. I've had a lot of occasion to do that of late. Watching this movie, I thought of all the times in recent months that I've revisited myself at different ages interacting with Gilbert at different ages. And when I talk about these meetings or incidents, it's not really like reliving them.

( There's a hole in this movie: spoilers )

Random Notes:

The young Henry is played by Alex Ferris, who played the young Davis Bloome on Smallville and the six-year-old Sam Winchester on Supernatural. This kid is good. One day he will grow up and play a character that he has all to himself!

Clare is played the up-and-coming Canadian movie star Rachel McAdams, and Clare's mother is played by the great Canadian stage actor Fiona Reid. Yay, Fiona!

Broken Social Scene is the out-of-place wedding band that plays a sad-boy version of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" as the opening waltz. At the screening I attended, exactly one person (*ahem*) laughed at this. (How can you be a sadder-boy than Joy Division? You take out the dance beat.)

Today is the 40th anniversary of the first walk on the moon.

To mark the occasion, I highly recommend seeing Moon, the new science fiction thriller starring Sam Rockwell. Besides spinning a taut yarn, Moon tackles issues of human uniqueness, purpose and sense of self. It's also this summer's best movie so far.

My non-spoiler review of Moon is in this week's edition of Sequential Tart:
http://www.sequentialtart.com/reports.php?ID=6703&issue=2009-07-20

I hope there's a recording out there of a producer selling Easy Virtue to a studio executive as "Merchant/Ivory meets Wedding Crashers," because that's the kind of inanity that would explain how a Noel Coward play could turn out to be such a dull and semi-zany movie.

Jessica Biel plays a post-WWI American adventuress who, after a whirlwind courtship, marries into the Whittaker clan, a family of landed English gentry. Does the liberated American woman shake up the hidebound English twittery? Yes! Does the harpy matriarch (Kirsten Scott Thomas) get her comeuppance? Yes! Does the depressive patriarch (Colin Firth) regain his spark of life at the appearance of his shiny new in-law? Yes! Do their useless adult leeches children get a lesson in how to live life from the spirited outsider? Is the long suffering, phlegmatic domestic staff ecstatic at the chance to work with the new mistress of the house to get their revenge on the old mistress? Are there balls and fancy dresses and fox hunts? Yes, yes, and oh yes and how!

( Ben Barnes as Biel's husband: I have never so desperately wanted a movie character to be killed since Jar Jar Binks )

 What happens when the most intense relationship in your movie is between the two male leads that you cast for prettiness? Self-writing slash!