I’ve Loved You So Long & The Duchess

I’ve Loved You So Long is set in modern day France and follows the reentry into everyday life of Juliette Fontaine after serving 15 years for murder. The Duchess is set in late-1700s England and follows the entry into high society of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, after her mother oversees a match with the Duke. The settings and circumstances couldn’t be more different, but both movies are essentially about the same thing: the lengths to which a mother will go to care for her children.

Things you should know:
Both movies are excellent.
Each features a starring lead from The English Patient.
I loved The English Patient.
Keira Knightley is more talented when she’s wearing a bustle.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but I’ll still love The English Patient.
Ralph Fiennes adds another well and true bastard to his resume.
Do you really think your snickering is going to make me cave after all these years? The English Patient was great. Back off with your newfound backlash courage.
ILYSL is in French w/ English subtitles, “look at the big brain on Kristin, acting in a second language!”
The English Patient.

Elegy

Love, mortality, selfishness, cynicism, the gilded prison of marriage. What themes of my middle-life aren’t rummaged through here? I can remember reading Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King in high school and thinking these old man anxieties seem a hundred years away. Turns out twenty was enough to get me there.

Ben Kingsley plays a scared man of sixty-something, facing the grave, his back on his life, trying to fuck his fears away. As usual the women, including the young, naïve ones, are more intelligent and realistic about what’s gone before and what’s possible from now on. When will I learn?

Choke

Sam Rockwell? Chuck Palahniuk? Sign me up. Open humanism disguised as cynical misanthropy? Sheep, get out of those wolfskins.

"You're my best friend in the whole world. But this girl, she's like the only nice thing that's ever happened to me. So do you think you could resist the impulse to piss all over it, just this once?" For you Dignan? Yeah.

Milk

Wow. The best news is Gus Van Sant might be back from experimental film school. I’d read something similar after he made the little-seen Paranoid Park, but I guess I was still numb from the shell shocked loneliness of Gerry and, to a lesser degree, the softcore slaughter porn of Elephant, which actually kind of hooked me in the same way it’s hard to turn away from roadside car crash aftermath, and finally that Kurt Cobain meditation, Last Days, by which time I’d thrown up my hands.

But those films made it easier to forget Van Sant was the same career-making fever dreamer who blew it up with Drugstore Cowboy, which might be the underappreciated James Legros’ (best) biggest picture (try out Living in Oblivion if you’re interested), which begat My Own Private Idaho and featured the still interesting pre-Speed Keanu Reeves (come on: River’s Edge, Parenthood, I Love You to Death), which begat To Die For and made Nicole Kidman, which begat Good Will Hunting and made a couple of B-listers you probably wouldn’t recognize, and which, coupled with Finding Forrester, might have been the mainstream material that sent our boy into the wild. I could go on, but time’s up.

Though I’ll say this, Sean Penn won this year’s game of pretend for a reason.

The Other Boleyn Girl

Strikes me as Cliff’s notes on Henry VIII vs. The Boleyn Family: an emotionless by-the-numbers survey of Anne’s rise and fall, the dissolution of Henry and subsequently England’s ties to Rome, and the ruination of the Boleyn family, check, check, check and check. And the usual tease-all, show-nothing, bee stung, deer in the headlights character work of Scarlett Johansson; see also Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, He’s Just Not That Into You, etc. Empty but strangely satisfying, like a Twinkie.

50 Words or More

In an effort to resurrect this thing, I'm making a New March's resolution to write at least 50 words or more about each movie I see. So pieces are going to be (even) less finished and more like notes from a ratty spiral bound.