So last night I watched two movies. I was curled up on my couch with a quilt, drinking my white tea, box of tissues beside me and a roaring fire to keep me company. If I didn’t feel like I had breathed in radiation poisoning, and my body was dying a slow painful death — it might have been really pleasant.

Anyway… I watched Bridget Jones Diary II. Cute flick, albeit a bit predictable. But you know, most good chick flicks are predictible. They are little visual relationship “what if” problems. And sometimes you are in the mood for something where you know all the answers. But sometimes, you want to be challenged. Bridget was the easy test and Closer was the challenge.

I love defining moments. In the Bridget movie, the moment was when Bridget composes herself in the bathroom to contemplate her choice before she goes for a romp with Hugh Grant. When I saw this moment, I silently cheered. She was going to make the right choice in spite of the sexually charged circumstances. You don’t see that too often in the movies. And let’s face it; it would be a bit hard to turn down Hugh Grant. But no, the opportunity for self awareness is lost in favor of predictability. She comes out of the bathroom and gets sucked in… letting her humanness pull her under the riptide of emotional neediness and passion. So it feels very anticlimactic for me that she does eventually make the right choice. Why? Because some Thai prostitute knocks on the door and she has a moment of clarity about Hugh?! Why couldn’t the moment of clarity come in the bathroom about herself and what she WANTED? Why couldn’t they have made it a moment where she experiences a little growth? No, they waste the moment with her simply realizing that HE is a jerk. The defining moment was just a bit too simplistic. Wasn’t elegant simple either… it was just flat.

Then I watched my favorite movie of last year. Closer. I do love the characters in this movie. They are complex. They are not predictable. They are manipulative. They keep you guessing. I truthfully can’t even boil down all the undercurrents in a blog post. I hope that just talking about it a little bit will make you want to go watch it. It’s really a masterfully done characterization movie.

An example of the unpredibability is that you start watching this movie thinking that the main “complex” characters are going to be Law and Roberts. They are the stars, but they turn out to feel more like pawns. It’s in the supporting roles where one finds depth in the darkness of relationships and human sexuality.

Portman, comes across at first as young, naïve and emotionally needy. Turns out she’s not as needy as she appears. There is strength there. She’s only showing you what she wants you to see – and naïve people aren’t that compartmentalized are they? By the end of the movie you are amazed at the inner strength she posses in hiding her truth. The whole movie is really about her finding truth and making the lies her reality. By the end of the movie, when she decides that she can’t tell the truth and she can no longer lie… you feel a sense of profound sadness. That somehow, if she could just make a choice either way… she might be happier. Like real life, detachment can make you feel strong at the time, but is ultimately unsatisfying.

Owens character seems simply like a sexually addicted male. No depth. No understanding of human motivations or relationships. It’s all about the sex. It’s not till the end when you realize that Owens has made his choices not because of the sex, but rather because he completely understands human responses to sex that you realize what a manipulative master he truly is.

And now I have to figure out what I am going to watch this afternoon. At least my little movie reviews are better reading then me bitching about how horrible I feel.

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