Ten Something Pretty Well Spent
After a walk in the park with M. and a futile search for L. in Chinatown, I went to see "A History of Violence." I thought this was a pretty good movie. But it was very slow and sort of disjointed, and the audience seemed to find it a bit funnier than it perhaps was intended to be. At least nobody laughed during the preview of "Brokeback Mountain" this time. I'm not saying it's not a stupid preview, just it's even more embarrassing when people laugh. And I hope to have some choice words soon about Jake Gyllenhaal's homophobic quotation in Us Weekly, but for that you'll have to read my column. Both of you.
Anyway, the Times thinks "A History" is "ornamented with ghoulish comedy," so that's good. After one particularly violent scene, when much of the audience was laughing in a horrified way, the person behind me commented with relish, "We're all laughing."
Maria Bello was fine. She stared a lot, teared up and cussed. But in her role as an utterly normative small-town lawyer mom, she is simply too skinny. (Plus, the agonizingly long close-ups makes it seem like she has an enormous head.) Everybody else in town is a normal size, but Edie Stall is so frail-looking that, instead of "That nice Tom Stall and his sweet family," you imagine the townspeople talking about "That nice Tom Stall and his abnormally thin wife." HOLLYWOOD! STOP THE MADNESS!
Before seeing this movie, I did not know that William Hurt could do such a killer Philly accent.