It's been snowing lightly but persistently all day, so that we now have quite a covering outside. It's just about the coldest it's been so far this season, too, so naturally the radiators in the building (which on warmer days keep the place so hot I can hardly breathe) have all switched themselves off. Those of us who have hanten get to carry their own toasty little climate around with them, though.
Today I finally made it out to the cinema. I went to the Esquire to see Margot at the Wedding, directed by Noah Baumbach (who did The Squid and the Whale). Before I went I looked on Rotten Tomatoes to see what the critics thought, and since they seemed divided down the middle I thought it might not be bad. I liked it. As with The Squid and the Whale it didn't leave me stunned - but it was worth a Saturday afternoon.
The film begins with Margot and her pre-pubescent son going back to the family home, now owned by her sister, for the sister's wedding. A fight has stopped them talking for some time past, and when they talk now it's a continual tightrope-walk between camaraderie and indirect attack. The sister is marrying an unemployed and unsuccessful musician, and among other things Margot sets out to undermine the union (he's "not good enough"), while it becomes apparent that she herself is in the middle of leaving her husband, and is having an affair with a writer and collaborator who lives near the sister. Meanwhile a battle is developing with the more overtly dysfunctional redneck neighbours across the fence.
More than one of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes remarked that all of the characters in this film were unlikeable, but it isn't entirely true. All of them are flawed, certainly, but of the central characters only Margot is almost entirely without a sympathetic side - and yet her unpleasantness to everyone around her seems so compulsive and self-destructive that to me she came across as someone perhaps more in need of sympathy than anyone else in the film.
It's a somewhat rambling film that doesn't tie much up at the end. About three quarters of the way through I was suddenly bored, unable to see that there was anywhere else worth going with it - it didn't last, though, and I liked the inconclusive ending very much, along with an earlier coda when the son sees the mother and son of the dysfunctional neighbours on the same ferry, evidently leaving home, the mother physically comforting that son who has earlier been encountered only as violent aggressor.
From the above account it might not sound it, but it's also very funny.
Today I finally made it out to the cinema. I went to the Esquire to see Margot at the Wedding, directed by Noah Baumbach (who did The Squid and the Whale). Before I went I looked on Rotten Tomatoes to see what the critics thought, and since they seemed divided down the middle I thought it might not be bad. I liked it. As with The Squid and the Whale it didn't leave me stunned - but it was worth a Saturday afternoon.
The film begins with Margot and her pre-pubescent son going back to the family home, now owned by her sister, for the sister's wedding. A fight has stopped them talking for some time past, and when they talk now it's a continual tightrope-walk between camaraderie and indirect attack. The sister is marrying an unemployed and unsuccessful musician, and among other things Margot sets out to undermine the union (he's "not good enough"), while it becomes apparent that she herself is in the middle of leaving her husband, and is having an affair with a writer and collaborator who lives near the sister. Meanwhile a battle is developing with the more overtly dysfunctional redneck neighbours across the fence.
More than one of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes remarked that all of the characters in this film were unlikeable, but it isn't entirely true. All of them are flawed, certainly, but of the central characters only Margot is almost entirely without a sympathetic side - and yet her unpleasantness to everyone around her seems so compulsive and self-destructive that to me she came across as someone perhaps more in need of sympathy than anyone else in the film.
It's a somewhat rambling film that doesn't tie much up at the end. About three quarters of the way through I was suddenly bored, unable to see that there was anywhere else worth going with it - it didn't last, though, and I liked the inconclusive ending very much, along with an earlier coda when the son sees the mother and son of the dysfunctional neighbours on the same ferry, evidently leaving home, the mother physically comforting that son who has earlier been encountered only as violent aggressor.
From the above account it might not sound it, but it's also very funny.
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