| Overall Grade: |
D- |
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| Story: |
F |
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|
| Acting: |
A |
|
|
| Direction: |
F |
|
|
| Visuals: |
F |
|
|
Spoken sours
by CynthiaP (movies profile)
Feb 1, 2008
22
of
33 people found this review helpful
I know if you're hip, deconstructing the road movie must seem like an oh-so-cool endeavor. You can say "Look at me, I'm so clever, you won't catch ME asking that a story have resolution, that coincidences have purpose, that the series of events called a plot have some cumulative, transformative effect on its principal character."
Well I'm not hip. When I plunk down my $7, I want something to happen that's different from my ordinary life. Yes, I know that life is mostly like Broken Flowers--we, like Mr. Johnston, don't find the answers to our questions, and sometimes we can't even be sure the questions themselves aren't bogus.
But when I step off the sidewalk and into the movie theater, I'm making the journey into The Other Land, the world of stories, a realm as old and as human as our ability to speak and our habit of burying our dead. I want a Story.
I know what it's like to lie on the couch and watch dead petals dropping from a purtrifying arrangement. I've been there and done that. (Though, apparently unlike our aging Don Juanston, I had the good sense to get a prescription for an antidepressant.)
When I go to the movies, I'm choosing to take a trip into a shamanistic environment where I live something bigger than quotidien reality.
I do not want to watch a moviemaker demonstrating how painfully clever he is. How he can rub audiences' noses in every expectation they bring with them to the theater. How he's risen far above the requirement that he have something to say to us other than "This is a road movie--NOT! Ha ha! Fooled ya!"
Well, as Broken Flowers' Lolita would say, "Go sit on a popsicle, Mr. Fancy Pants Movie Director!" |
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