Palindromes...Madam, I'm Adam.

As a rule, the more I'm looking forward to seeing a movie, the more it's going to suck. Such is Palindromes, the lastest steaming pile of crap from Todd Solondz. It took me forever to find Welcome to the Dollhouse in a video store; no one carried it. I remember being disappointed, and that's about it. I should have known Palindromes was going to suck because it has the thing that virtually guarantees a movie to suck: a gimmick.

Palindromes follows Aviva, a 13 year old girl who is determined to get pregnant so she'll have someone to love, as she runs away from home after her parents force her to have an abortion. The gimmick is that Aviva is played by 8 different people (including a 6 year old girl, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and a boy), all pretty much equally bad actors (and not in that "so bad it's good" way, paraphrasing Ghost World, it was so bad it went past good and wrapped back around to bad).

There was lots to be uncomfortable about in this movie - 13 year olds having sex, pedophilia, a young boy dumpster diving for aborted fetuses... I think a lot of it was supposed to be shocking or thought-provoking, but most of it was just too over the top. There were a few scenes with the Sunshine family that were funny, but they were hit or miss. My favorites were when Aviva tells Mama Sunshine "My parents were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I loved them very much", and the Sunshine singers (the Sunshines have adopted a trove of disadvantaged kids, included a mentally retarded boy, a blind albino girl, a girl with no arms, and a gay teenager) singing in the basement.

I wanted to like this movie, but I just couldn't. Trolling the imdb message boards (something which no one should ever do), I see I'm in the minority opinion. I will chalk that up to I Heart Huckabees syndrome (my renaming of The Emporer's New Clothes syndrome).

I haven't been having very good luck with movies lately, and that's made me switch to renting tv on dvd. I'm finding I like tv more because it gives characters a chance to develop, and offers continuing story lines. If I like something, I can rent several seasons of it. If I don't like something *coughCurbYourEnthusiasmcough*, I don't have to invest two hours in it. Right now I'm catching up on Nip/Tuck, and I've discovered Six Feet Under. Next I'd like to start Lost from the beginning. I've gotten sucked in this season after seeing an hour where they reviewed the entire last season. As an aside, Lost fans are crazy, both for being completely obsessive, and for complaining about the slow, overlapping pace of the show (if they explain everything, there is no more show). Where was I going with all this...oh yeah, Palindromes sucks.

Happenstance...like Sliding Doors, except not so much

This past week I rented Happenstance, because I have a thing for Audrey Tautou. Not that kind of thing, I just think she's adorable and I'd like to display her on my lawn so she could give that impish smile to the passerbys. Anyway... The description of the movie pretty much sounded like Sliding Doors, right down to your life being changed by the shutting of a subway door.

The basic plot is this: A woman on the subway reads Tautou's horoscope and it says she's going to find true love, but she has to be patient. The rest of the movie shows how the characters interact causing Tautou to meet her love.

Audrey Tautou is in this, so it must be whimsical, right? Not so much.
Tautou's character mopes around the entire movie with an "I'm sad" look on her face. The character interactions aren't very interesting, and some of them weren't even that instrumental to the story. I like the concept of Sliding Doors better where you see how her life changes due to one event (also that little Scottish guy is adorable), where here, we know what the outcome is, we're just seeing all the factors going into the result.

I was pretty much just bored by this movie. I think it's my least favorite Tautou one (this, or God is Great, I'm Not). Now I'm in the mood to watch Amelie again. Or He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.

Spellbound....h-i-l-a-r-i-o-u-s

I rewatched Spellbound this weekend, and I must say, it was much funnier the second time around. The filmmakers did an excellent job at picking personalities and representing sterotypes. My favorite part was meeting the families. There's the girl whose parents are illegals from Mexico and don't even speak any English; the Indian girl who studies constantly and plays the violin; the rich white girl who actually hates spelling and only does it because she wasn't the best at singing or riding horse, who was upset because her family didn't bring the au pair to the bee; the outcast boy that lives in the sticks (and won his regional bee because the other boy started to spell mayonnaise with an "a"); the rich Indian boy with the psychotic parents (Latin, French, and Spanish tutors) who was shown doing military style pushups, and who I'm sure was severely flogged after he got out of the bee (just as he will be when he only finishes 3rd in his class at Harvard medical school); the girl with the completely unaware parents ("my stationary says 'bee happy', with two e's!") who descibes her other hobbies as riding roller coasters, being vegetarian, and drinking coffee; the black girl from inner city DC; and of course, Harry "does-this-sound-like-a-musical-robot" Altman, ADD poster child.

My second favorite thing about Spellbound is the times it subtley shows spelling mistakes the adults make (a sign outside a restaurant, one child corrects her teacher). And the third is hearing from the past champions (especially the guy who says winning the bee didn't do much for his love life).

The lengths the kids go to are fairly scary. Having language tutors and reading the dictionary were not my ideas of fun as a child. Sometimes it's hard to see how much of the desire is the child's and how my is the parents', but a lot of the kids express relief when they get out or once they get too old for the bee. Either way I love this documentary. The bee sounds boring, but it's really nerve racking (I've found myself watching it on ESPN), and the back stories are really what makes it interesting.

The Sea Inside...

Well I was wrong about Born Into Brothels being the feel good movie of the year. The Sea Inside (which also proclaims to be uplifting on its jacket) is the actual feel good movie of the year about quadriplegics who want to kill themselves. Yay! Paralysis! Suicide! What could be more uplifting?!

Apparently 2004 was a bummer of a year.

The Sea Inside is the true story of Ramon Sampedro, a Spanish man who was paralyzed from the neck down when he broke his neck diving into shallow water. He then spends 30 years fighting for his right to die, since he can't do it himself. Again, I'm not quite sure where the uplifting part comes into play. He somehow manages to acquire a harem of women, and his family loves him and takes care of him, and lots of people are fighting for him, but he loses every court battle, and the bottom line is that he thinks life as a quadriplegic isn't worth living at all. I guess this movie is a celebration of the right to choose: choose how you want to spend your life, or even if you want to live at all. But damn, this was sad.

My favorite scene involved a quadriplegic priest who goes on tv to offer a view opposite of Ramon's (that life is still worth living). He says he'd like to be able to talk to Ramon in person to try to convince him to live. He visits Ramon, who stays in his bed upstairs all the time, and refuses to come downstairs to talk to him. The priest's two helpers try to lug him in his wheelchair up the stairs, but they can't, so the priest tells one of the guys what he wants to tell Ramon, and the guy has to run up and down the stairs bringing messages back and forth.

No more "uplifting!" movies for a while. I re-rented Spellbound because I know the worst thing that will happen is that someone will spell succedaneum wrong.