'Serenity'
A place to talk about movies--Old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Picking JR over Maggie Gyllenhaal is crazy. Picking JR over Natalie Portman is equally crazy. And yet, and yet.
Cate Blanchett would have been SO much better for JR's part in Closer. Her I can see choosing over Natalie, after three years of living with the girl.
And MG was all sexy and wild, whispering dirty suggestions in his ear and stuff, and her skin is really beautiful.(I'm not saying anything about Julia's complexion here...MG just has a nice one and it really got my attention.) What guy wouldn't like that? Especially since I've never thought of JR as particularly sensual, despite photographing well for the most part. NSM with the chemistry-generating. I'm not sure why.
Picking JR over Natalie Portman is equally crazy. And yet, and yet.
Let us recall that, for both men, JR was a pile of weeping silly putty, whereas NP tied them up in knots and then tied up the knots. JR was just less of a hassle, emotionally -- figure out her buttons, beep boop boop and you get what you want.
And while I find it irritating that the NP character was this standard kinderwhore wise-stripper type, I do like that she had power, and both men recognized that, and could neither take it from her nor assert a counter-pattern of power over her.
I'd have liked the movie as a whole rather more if the whole premise weren't "Lie, cheat, and steal your way into happiness!" But, given that premise, NP is the one who came out on top.
I'd have liked the movie as a whole rather more if the whole premise weren't "Lie, cheat, and steal your way into happiness!"
You thought any of them ended up happy?
Well, for extremely cynical definitions of "happy", yes.
If she was happy, she was certainly no more happy than at the beginning. That was the point of the parallelism of the ending, I thought.
I saw the premise as "people lie, cheat, and steal in order to get happiness, but it usually fails miserably."
If she was happy, she was certainly no more happy than at the beginning. That was the point of the parallelism of the ending, I thought.
.....
They changed the ending from the play, didn't they?
Yes.
I can't remember if "Alice" died at the end of the play version I saw, or if it was just that Dan found out she'd assumed the identity of the dead girl from the memorial. But the character struck me as way more damaged and out of control of her own life when I saw it live .
Might want to spoiler-font some of that, Matt.