Me and You and Everyone We Know

[fflo]

So. Who's seen this movie and wants to talk about it? homovegetarian, have you? Humphrey and I watched it tonight, and I venture to say it was a novel experience for both of us. Though he slept through much of it, which is nothing new.

Most curious, this film! I'm struck right now with how greatly it seemed to lack pretension, given how off-beat it is. If there was a veneer of self-conscious hipness, I didn't see it.

Much stuff in it didn't work the way similar stuff usually works in movies (even good ones).

I think I'm going to have to see it again before sending it back. Not that I didn't enjoy those episodes of "Frasier" and all. (Also out from Netflix right now: Rain, with Joan Crawford, 1932.)

Comments

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's a big part of what's fresh there---the childhood sexuality with no layer of salaciousness nor moral disaster overlaying it. Matter-of-fact. Existing in the milieu in which we know there are "dangers," and acknowledging the fear of them, but allowing the bulk of how sexuality works with the kids to be just discovery, without the disastrous results.

For me one of the best choices in the film was to include the false sighting of the 7-year old who's walking home alone in the bad neighborhood. That's such a convention in film---his thinking he'd seen his son & then realizing it wasn't him after all would mean, in most any other movie, that the kid had indeed fallen into some more threatening situation. Same thing with how the park bench plays out.

The adult characters having or seeking their internal childlike wonder isn't a terribly new theme, though it plays out in ways in this film that I've not seen before. It's the kids as just younger people that's so rare in an American movie. They're also not magically wise beyond their years or anything like that, but they're not caricatures of childhood either. And they're dealing with making connections with others in their particular worlds in ways that don't stand in great contrast to the ways the adults are.

That pipeline thing is SO cool, btw. A piece about that way of connecting would be quite the fit for This American Life. We had the "ghost number" in Kansas---played a weird, ghostly sound. Don't remember any child-culture secret phone numbers in Maryland.

The larger context of what you're talking about is the real story, though, of course. Finding a way to explore & develop one's sexuality within the constraints of the day and of our own circumstances. Fat being a pretty freakin' significant aspect of one's circumstances, for sure!