I woke up singing that Paul Simon song, "Diamonds in the Soles of His Shoes" -- well, no, not really, because I don't really know the song, just barely a tune that goes along with the title -- because I had a dream that I was wearing bowls of kumquats for shoes. I had on a regular shirt and khaki pants, and it seems the purpose of the dream was to go around asking people if I looked all right, if what I was wearing was okay. People in the dream would say, "Yes... yes... No!" That's kind of where I'm at in my life right now, I guess.---
Yesterday I saw two movies. The first (Film #2) was called The Lost Coast, which I mostly liked. Here's how the website describes it:
High school friends reunite for Halloween in San Francisco: Mark, who is now gay, and Jasper, who is straight and soon to be married, are forced to confront their unspoken sexual history in this haunting, spare look at the subtleties of sexuality, friendship, and loneliness.
Now that I just reread that, I'm confused. The Mark character was more obviously gay (personality-wise), but I thought he and Lily were a couple in the film. It was a dreamy, murky film, beautifully shot, taking place a lot in the dusky and nighttime hours of San Francisco (Golden Gate Park, etc.) where the characters were wondering around in costumes that were possibly sort of symbolic.
Except for that confusion -- which didn't ruin the film at all; I thought it had some very good points -- the thing that bugged me most about the film was that one of the characters started out by writing an email to his girlfriend, which is okay, but we kept coming back to that again and again. It got kind of tedious and really pulled me out of the story; it seemed very much like something they went back and added to the film later to clear up confusions about the story. I think I would rather have been confused.
Film #3 was called Then She Found Me.
Adapted from Elinor Lipman's novel of the same name, Helen Hunt makes her feature directing debut with a touching story of schoolteacher April Epner and her very unlikely path towards personal fulfillment. Following the separation from her husband and the death of her adopted mother, April is contacted by her apparent birth month, who turns out to be local talk show host Bernice Graves. As Bernice tries to become the mother to April that she was never able to be, April seems to find solace in the arms of the parent of one of her students, only to find that the mystery to life's questions cannot be solved by a simple revelation.
Helen Hunt was there in person to introduce the film. She is still as sexy as ever, aging gracefully and gorgeously; I almost started crying when she walked out onstage, just because I had such a crush on her when she was on "Mad About You." (S and I used to watch that show religiously, back when it was on the air, back when we had a TV, back in NYC...) Unfortunately, she wasn't there afterward -- or didn't come out anyway -- for a Q&A, which seemed a little odd. My thought was that maybe she wasn't completely satisfied with the movie. She asked if there were any filmmakers in the audience (and of course there were quite a few) and she said, "All I can say is don't give up; this film represents the past ten years of my life, trying to get it made, making it..."
There were a lot of boom microphone shots in the first half of the film, which is very distracting to me. You don't see that in Hollywood films, and I kept wondering -- as the black mike (or silver one in outdoor scenes) kept popping into view and pulling me out of the story, screaming IT'S A MOVIE! IT'S A MOVIE! -- where were the technical people who were supposed to not let this happen? I still loved the movie, it had a great emotional pay-off, me and the chicks in the room were sobbing (I guess some of the men were too), so I would highly recommend it, but as S likes to say, "I'd watch her take a dump!"
Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, Colin Firth were in the cast; it was a good cast (though I'm not sure I'd watch Bette take a dump!). I felt wiped out after it was over, just the big emotional release; I really could have stood Helen coming out after and letting me know she was okay.
Outside, waiting in line before the movie started, the people in front of me were talking about the movies they've seen so far in the festival, what they liked or didn't like about them, even telling the entire plot lines of the movies they'd seen. Fortunately I didn't hear any spoilers because they seemed only to be seeing movies I'm not interested in, but I did pull my hoodie over my head, plugged the ear on that side and buried myself in my book I'm reading so I wouldn't get a spoiler. But before I did this, before I realized what they were doing, I heard one woman say this about some film (I don't know which one):
"It was like a poem...if you like poetry. It was like film...poetry. It could've used something...in the editing or something, I don't know."
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