I think I may have written this sentence last night: "I'm not going to tell you how highly I value this movie, mostly because anything I recommend seems to underwhelm almost everybody else (not because I'm some kind of supercool movie hipster, mostly because I value plot and dollar bills so much less than most, much to my continually frustrating dismay)."
Jeez. I sound like a twat. Teen angst never disappears for long. It hides out, but it never goes away completely. I am actually surprised at how many of my friends pay attention to my recommendations, and I know lots of people who don't care about dollar bills and less (but still a lot) who don't care much about plot, either. Some of my friends even read my childish rants. Voluntarily! I am a lucky guy in some ways.
Four more things I like about The Science of Sleep: 1) Gondry works from his own script this time and there's so much enthusiasm evident onscreen when the director is also the writer. 2) Alain Chabat is so goddamn funny. I'm glad this movie introduced him to me. 3) I like the mixture of languages (English, Spanish, and French) and the unfixed, casual way the dialogue ping-pongs between them, complementing the film's unpretentious commingling of dreams and reality. It's not one of those movies where you're asking, "Is this a dream? Is this really happening?" unless you're Richard Roeper, who was stuck in "Eternal Sunshine" mode and stupidly tried to impose that film's structure on this one. It's really a film about how our real and fantasy lives constantly butt heads. 4) I love the tonal shifts in dialogue in Bernal and Gainsbourg's scenes together. These scenes are so honest about how romantic couples can move from playful camaraderie to brutalizations of each other to tenderness (or any random permutation of this sequence) in just a few minutes of conversation. Most movies have such black and white misunderstandings of living. This one doesn't.
3 comments:
That's not all that's red.
What's intersting to me is that I find the trailers of "Science of Sleep" to be the most unappealing thing. Ever. I am, and I do not mean this non-literally, repulsed by the image of the film they are portraying.
I actually have been thinking about this, because most movie trailers only spark mild disinterest in me at most. I have three guesses about this phenomenon:
1) the guy, his surroundings, etc., look exactly like the helpless, 20-something, post-adolscents I'm surrounded by every day.
2) said group aggressively apes the weird Kroft, bad-claymation, and shaggy hair, Europe in the 1970s, aesthetic that I didn't even live through, let alone people 8 years younger.
3) i'm pretty tired of romanticized portrays of madness
That said, I will now go see the movie, since my complaint was merely with its marketing appendage. But I am curious about a trailer that so repulses some in order to unite others. My god, I even felt included in the goddam Rock football movie.
I've read many times that movie trailers are representations of the films the studios/financers/producers wished the director would have made instead. That's the case here. I was not repulsed by the trailer, just bored, but I can understand where you're coming from. It is packed wall-to-wall with indie rock "hits," none of which are in the movie. The animation is presented out of context and packed together, one after the other, so what in the actual movie is playful and sweet comes off sickeningly precious in the trailer. The trailer also misleads you into thinking madness is being romanticized, while in the film, madness is not even an issue. And in Gondry's defense, he is a 43-year-old European, so at least he grew up when the claymation/shaggy-hair aesthetic was actually happening. I love the movie, you may hate it. I don't think any movie deserves a consensus of love or hate, and deserves as many responses as there are people who see it. Whatever you make of it, the trailer does not accurately represent it.
Yeah, "sickeningly precious" hits it just about exactly. I'm not really sure when infantilized masculinity became hip, but I'll even take total knuckle-walking misogyny over it anyday.
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