I’ve been getting a heaping pile of culture lately. I’ve seen a few movies, plus the play God of Carnage (with Jimmy Smits! And Annie Potts! And two other people who were also excellent, but who’s names don’t do the same rhythmic thing) and Avenue Q again (still one of the bestest musicals ever, especially if you grew up with Sesame Street as a child). One movie I saw is called Intimacy, and it is, well, very European. I’ve always said the French truly know how to make sex look terrible, and here they succeed with flying colors. The film, directed by Patrice Chereau, is about a guy who looks like a woeful elf (Mark Rylance) and has left his wife and family and lives in the crappiest house in London (I could smell it through the television, and it smelled like mold spores and old books and sour milk) and there’s this woman who looks like a normal Plain Jane housewife (Kerry Fox) and she comes over every Wednesday and they go at like raccoons in your backyard next to your trash bin. There are no words exchanged, we don’t know how they met, they just pant and claw at each other and bump their pale bony British uglies and she leaves. He develops an interest in knowing stuff about her (like, I don’t know, HER NAME), so one day, he follows her and he learns about her husband and her kid and blah blah. In the end, because he knows about her life and develops feelings for her, they can no longer rut like pigs and their relationship dissolves. Here’s the deal: the movie (which is actually very good, but only if you like long depressing discussions about the emptiness and loneliness of life, which I don’t) got a great deal of press because the actors pretty much have real actual sex. And it is so not sexy. I would actually prefer to watch raccoons mating beside your trash bins. I definitely much rather watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A7uFSbRJ5w
This was the kind of movie I watched a great deal of in college and then had to write papers about. Now that I am not in college and not forced to do that, I try to avoid films like this like the plague. So I saw another film that I liked very much, and that was:
Monsters vs. Aliens!
Yeah, I’ve come a long way since college. I didn’t have very high hopes for M vs. A, but the voice-over actors were all ones I like (Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Hugh Laurie, Rainn Wilson, Stephen Colbert, Will Arnett), and the plot, while not really super-fleshed-out, was believable and it was a good time. There are monsters, kept by the government in a secret prison! But then there’s aliens, bent on attacking the earth and taking it over! So the government releases the monsters, and they fight the aliens! It’s made by a not-Pixar movie studio and it’s no Pixar film, but not every animated film has to be. Sometimes they can just be fun and funny. So if you have a choice, avoid the sad gray intercourse and go with the brightly-colored animated characters.