Falling slowly...

I will wholeheartedly admit that I am the first in line for summer blockbusters. I've blogged in other places about all the movies I've been excited to see, all the sequels that I'd hoped would be better than their predecessors, all the special effects that would transport me to fantasy worlds and spy espionage and good old fashioned car vs. helicopter blowy-uppy scenes.

But every now and again a film will quietly step out from the shadows and wrap its way around your eyes and ears and heart, leaving you enriched and fulfilled in ways that outlast the flashy sensory overloads of its' far-more-expensive counterparts.



"Once" came highly recommended and Christina and I went to see it on a whim. The story tells of two amateur musicians whose chance street encounter turns into a deeper friendship, told through songs that the actors themselves wrote and performed. It was simple, clean (cinematically speaking, though it's rated R for language, so I cannot with full conscience recommend it to those of you that censor your movie choices), and stripped of the falsities that plague our society today. I didn't even view the actors as 'actors', seeing as they are real life musicians who wrote the songs specifically for the movie, truly fell in love while filming and are currently touring together today. The movie was simply an 82-minute glance into their ongoing lives... It's like those stage shows where a pre-filmed video shows on the screen of the performers doing something bizarre or thrilling, and then suddenly they appear on stage looking like they just came from the screen.

The soundtrack is one of those few that almost outshines the movie itself. I may not vociferously demand that you see the movie, but I DO proclaim that the album is one of my best musical purchases in a long while and I would strongly encourage you to give it a whirl. The title track caught me from the third note and the scene where they learn to play it together was absolutely mesmerizing. There is something about pure, unfettered emotion directed through the medium of music that cuts straight through to the soul and speaks in a way that words never can. The melodies soared and stretched and bent the rules of decorum that the two protagonists couldn't express verbally or physically. As the director himself said, "a three-minute song is worth ten pages of dialogue."

As Rolling Stone reviewed, this was "a gift of a movie" and my life is all the much better for it. It opened in March and is still going strong even today. So now I'm in an indie mood and want to know: what underdog cinematic gems can you recommend to enhance my movie-watching experience??

All's well that ends well

The Bourne Ultimatum, frankly the perfect end to a practically perfect trilogy. I found a refreshing cyclical feel as the final threads were tied off and the whole pattern revealed itself. So often a movie franchise will deviate so far from the original concept that you are almost always left wondering how it came to this. How did things get so far off track? I submit into evidence: Batman. Of course, now with the Christian Bale installment, we’re getting back on track, but still, Joel Schumacher, what faulty model of beer goggles were you sporting when looking at final edits for Batman 3 and 4?

Apologies for the digression, but it had to be said. While I fully concede that it is important to venture beyond the original framework of a movie and delve deeper into the world of fantasy in later chapters that were created with the first movie, it is always nice to be reminded of where you have been and what you’ve experienced as you the viewer accompanies the characters along the way. In this latest part of the story, we find Jason Bourne almost just as we left him, limping along in Moscow, and we can receive a little closure on that end. All too often we find characters at the beginning of a sequel or trilogy months or years later and must be told through plot development what happened in the past. Here, we see exactly what happens step-by-step.

Furthermore, this movie refers on numerous occasions back to the first movie. The plot here centers around an operation called Blackbriar, which for those true Bourne fans (if you didn’t pick up on this instantly, I can hardly in good conscience validate your self-proclamations of ‘die-hard fan’) will evoke memories of Director Abbot giving testimony in front of a Senate oversight committee at the tail end of The Bourne Identity.

One of the greatest connections in my mind is how the scene at the end of The Bourne Supremacy plays out in the third movie where Jason Bourne observes and contacts Pamela Landy in her New York office. This knowledge of this conversation creates some discord at the beginning of the third movie, because Landy states she hasn’t received and information about Bourne sightings after Moscow. This conversation is replayed exactly in the third movie and the viewer receives both closure from the second installment and learns there is much more to the exchange than originally anticipated. This brings these two movies so close together they may as well have been filmed at the same time.

Other connections: Nicki Parsons (Julia Stiles) dies her hair dark brown and cuts it off in chunks exactly like Bourne did to Maria in the first movie. Bourne looks at an assassin and says, “Look at this. Look at what they make you give,” a word-for-word repetition of Clive Owen’s last words to Bourne before his death in The Bourne Identity. Bourne jumps into the East river in NYC and is seen floating lifeless just like the very beginning of the first movie.

When all is said and done, we find ourselves with both an in-depth knowledge of Jason Bourne and the world he was trying to remember and escape from at the same time and a clear view back to the beginning of this journey through these connections. As my friend Cheryl said on the car ride home, “It’s definitely a guy movie, but a great one.”