the last movie i saw (part one)

I don't know if you're the type of person who reads movie reviews before you go to see a movie (I'm not), but this is not a review.

When my favorite movie partner started school this past fall, his schedule got busier, his purse got emptier, and the list of movies we wanted to go see got longer. One of the ones we kept putting off seeing was Lars & the Real Girl. It looked like and was billed as a kind of quirky comedy. I don't have anything against quirky comedies -- in fact, I love them; Junebug, one of my all-time favorite movies, is a quirky comedy.

And it's not because I didn't think Ryan Gosling, the star of Lars, couldn't handle the job of a comedy; I've seen him play everything from a young Jewish neo-Nazi to a crack-addicted inner city school teacher, I think he's an amazing actor (I'm sure he'll have an Oscar eventually, maybe several) and knew he would have no problem with the role of a quiet guy who buys a lifelike silicone doll over the internet to be his girlfriend.

So, I really don't know why we kept putting it off. But I went to see it last night, at the Alamo Ritz (my new favorite theater because it's brand new and because it's the Alamo, so I can drink good draft beer and eat usually yummy food -- the fries were a little stale last night -- and because it's a twenty-minute walk from my house).

I'm thinking the audience got the memo that this was a comedy; they seemed to yuck it up throughout the movie, in strange places, I thought, while I sat there quietly sobbing through most of it. I laughed too; it's a funny tale, but it's also very sweet -- maybe more sweet than funny. I saw it as a movie about social awkwardness, and I've got me a little of that.

Oh, and the fact that Patricia Clarkson was the co-star, well, I would walk an hour to see the combination of the two of them on the screen!