Tell Us What You Really Mean

I've been seeing trailers for Evening for what seems like the last twelve months. It's one of those half-period dramas (flashbacks to the 50s, mixed in with present day stuff) about A Family Secret, with a breathtaking cast (Glenn Close, Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep, Natasha Richardson, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, and Streep's own daughter Mamie Gummer, playing her mother's part in the flashbacks). One would think, just on pedigree alone, that this would be a film I couldn't miss. But it's exactly the sort of weepy film I avoid--curiously I love old women's pics from the 40s and 50s--Letter from an Unknown Woman or Madame X or the King of all Dopey Weepies, Magnificent Obsession. The olden weepies had no pretensions about what they were: cathartic multiple handkerchief movies. Nowadays--well, the closest to the form I've seen in the last couple of years was Bridges of Madison County, and I think I wept there because the film was so much better than its source material that I cried in gratitude. But when I see Meryl Streep intoning "We are such mysterious creatures" in the trailer, I want to run. The film looks like it's going to fall over from the weight of its own imagined prestige.

So this morning I came across the NY Post review, which is so much more deliciously catty than anything I could have thought to say, that it just thrilled me:

"This weeping ladydrama -- this cinematic doily, this chintz wing chair from a P-town antique boutique -- takes us to the oxymoronic world of WASP emotion. It's overstuffed with boring Protestants, understuffed with story and beset by hysterical (in both senses) acting. I'm not going to name any names but ... OK, Glenn Close, Vanessa Redgrave and Hugh Dancy: I've seen more grace and subtlety from a cat tossed into a swimming pool."

It almost makes me want to see it, but only at home, where I can properly MST3K it.

Double Feature

SG and I went to see Ratatouille and Sicko tonight, a weird double feature, perhaps, but a good one. Ratatouille is charming, a goofy take on Cyrano that is also an extended allegory about what it takes to be a creative artist of any kind. I cried (but then, I do). Sicko is vintage Moore--not as funny as the ads suggest (hell, the ads make it sound like the second coming of Airplane) but enormously effective. SG came out very depressed; I came out wanting to vote a whole bunch of people out of office.