Big Night was great...(There are spoilers, if you can spoil a ten-year-old indie)
especially considering the flukey way I picked it.
I have to admit to being halfway primed by a lifetime of TV watching to expect the famous guy to show up and make everything all right--in fact better than all right, with Primo and Secondo being huge enough for a fleet of Cadillacs.As American tropes go, it's the tropiest...the come-from-behind victory with seconds on the clock.(And probably accounts for the smattering of disappointed reviews over at Netflix. But it's okay with me...despite spending much of my childhood watching it, I no longer expect every piece of entertainment to be "Happy Days".) It was so beautiful, and loving and about feelings that people really have that I related to it though I'm not Italian and a writer instead of a chef.(I'm not clear why the other guy screwed Primo over...did he get competitive, or was he exaggerating his connection to the celebrity?)
Sorry about going on about this, but y'all know I'm having a tough time right now and in that case, well, sometimes it's hard to know what movies to rent. Sometimes mainstream Hollywood stuff is too happy...watching Sandra or Julia or even Jen Aniston(although she is my favorite of the America's Sweetheart chicks)bouncing from plot-mandated 'crisis" to crisis while looking fab and being nominally employed and never having to say "accessible".(Incidentally, by the end of Gilmore Girls, I sort of resented Rory for her effortless path through the World of Media. I'm over it now, but I still think they should have given her more to handle...what makes a better role model than Muddling Through With Aplomb. And by "aplomb", I don't mean Grandpa's connections, which in their own way were as bottomless as Fred's vaudeville trunk in "I Love Lucy,") But you get where I'm going with this, right? And then you can go too far the other direction...I've been moving "Hotel Rwanda" and "An Inconvenient Truth" around my queue for ages. I don't know if I will ever feel well enough to watch them, but I will feel like a bubbleheaded Paris Hilton clone if I take them off the list.
I have to admit to being halfway primed by a lifetime of TV watching to expect the famous guy to show up and make everything all right--in fact better than all right, with Primo and Secondo being huge enough for a fleet of Cadillacs.As American tropes go, it's the tropiest...the come-from-behind victory with seconds on the clock.(And probably accounts for the smattering of disappointed reviews over at Netflix. But it's okay with me...despite spending much of my childhood watching it, I no longer expect every piece of entertainment to be "Happy Days".) It was so beautiful, and loving and about feelings that people really have that I related to it though I'm not Italian and a writer instead of a chef.(I'm not clear why the other guy screwed Primo over...did he get competitive, or was he exaggerating his connection to the celebrity?)
Sorry about going on about this, but y'all know I'm having a tough time right now and in that case, well, sometimes it's hard to know what movies to rent. Sometimes mainstream Hollywood stuff is too happy...watching Sandra or Julia or even Jen Aniston(although she is my favorite of the America's Sweetheart chicks)bouncing from plot-mandated 'crisis" to crisis while looking fab and being nominally employed and never having to say "accessible".(Incidentally, by the end of Gilmore Girls, I sort of resented Rory for her effortless path through the World of Media. I'm over it now, but I still think they should have given her more to handle...what makes a better role model than Muddling Through With Aplomb. And by "aplomb", I don't mean Grandpa's connections, which in their own way were as bottomless as Fred's vaudeville trunk in "I Love Lucy,") But you get where I'm going with this, right? And then you can go too far the other direction...I've been moving "Hotel Rwanda" and "An Inconvenient Truth" around my queue for ages. I don't know if I will ever feel well enough to watch them, but I will feel like a bubbleheaded Paris Hilton clone if I take them off the list.