It’s a basic screenplay, one can tell from the jump just about what will happen and it unfolds more or less exactly as the blueprint dictates. Payne stylizes the movie like some kind of a Hal Ashby facsimile.
But like a great pop song that’s crafted just right there is something more going on besides three chords and the verse chorus versing and the simplistic and obvious rhyme scheme of the lyrics. Something extremely special that I’m not smart enough…
Writing a moment wherein a trans woman is interrupted during the ‘against self-slaughter’ speech from Hamlet by another trans woman who comically tries to pull the speaker from her morbid and tragic thinking and out of her written and tragic reality into a real reality (that may be equally as tragic, but perhaps not) is a very beautiful and needed sentiment in this cold, dirty, ridiculous and cruel (and if I can editorialize stupid) world.
——-
“But she dies!”
“Dies…
This is normally not my type of movie, but my ten year old and eight year old wanted to see this. So I spent a couple weeks watching all 26 episodes of the anime series, then getting to see my first subtitled, foreign film with my kids!!!
We had soooooooo much fun together.
I’ll never know if this is a good film or not because the incredible high feeling I have right now has very little to do with the film.
This and Eyes Wide Shut would be a wonderful double feature on the assumptions that men have about women and how those assumptions serve to only hurt the male ego, which in turn makes men feel they have permission to hurt women (or wildly indulge in male fantasies that justify his careless and bad behavior so that the man can even out the pain he believes the woman has put him through).
Akerman is a genius and slowly becoming my great love.
This could have been called ‘As You Like’ or ‘I Know Why the Cage Bird Sleeps’.
