Will Ferrell - amazing how funny he can be while playing a serious role and only smiling a few times in the whole movie.
Maggie Gylllenhall - perfect casting and match for Ferrell; beautiful, sexy and smart.
Hoffman - hilarious dialogue and perspective, brilliant.
Thompson - apart from appearing highly disheveled throughout the movie, still a very appealing character. Her character's blend of twisted perversion, clever story telling and vision seems to sum up the key messages of the movie.
The movie delivered some very valuable life lessons, but did it while disguised as a nice light hearted story.
Hoffman's simplified explanations of literature are fantastic sound bites that I'm hoping I can use at some point to explain or understand my life or those of people around me. Does literature or screenwriting do enough to shed light on our lives, or are there too many elements that fall between the gaps and cannot be so easily explained ?
I'm going to save this as a draft and watch the movie again before giving final reviews and scores.
[Thursday] Lots of great quotes in the movie, including Eiffel's closing voiceover...and we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days, are effective for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives.
I guess this revisits the old notion that it's all the small little things in life that matter most and make it all worth while. [cross-reference here to the joys of routine - Very Zen; Routine versus Progress). What are the little things that can make your day and just feel happy to be alive: food; your morning coffee, the feel of the street when you walk to work; watching your children; an embrace with your wife; a shared memory with a friend; writing.
One thread I also really liked was about comedies versus tragedies; and the relative endings (love versus death). What more reason is there to smile, have a laugh and try and approach life's biggest challenges with a sense of humour and a smile. Actually when you think of modern entertainment today, there are rarely just romances these days, they are either romantic comedies (say, portrayed my weird combinations of beautiful women and odd blokes) or tragic lost loves sung by acoustic guitar softies. Perhaps we should try and search out the good stuff in between as they may better relate to the lives of normal folk, like you and me, like this new hit single from Johnny Faith:
We got up in the morning, one grumpy, one a little horney.What life are you living out ? I hope a comedy !
Kids were playing difficult again, man, forgot that meeting at 10.
Life flashed by, trains, cars, planes in the clear blue sky.
Little things embraced, personal touches and a long-lasting taste.
The movie: definitely a keeper. 9/10. My life: a comedy; appreciated more and more: 9/10.
3 comments:
Are you calling my James an acoustic guitar softy?
Hmmmmmmmmm....
While my life is filled with many comedic moments, many of which come at my own expense (!), I think of life as more of a "dramedy". As with anything, we can't appreciate the humour in life without having a bit of the dark for balance. I absolutely loved that movie, and thoroughly enjoyed Will Ferrell in that type of role for a change. And, um, "my James"??????
well, he's not my James (Blunt) anymore, now that I got more tickets so Phil will be with me at the concert.
I gave up on the movie the first time around...went to bed. Phil raved about it, and raved about it, and again, so I figured I'd give it a second chance. I ended up really liking it, so I'm glad he was persistent.
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