Movies, mostly

I mostly celebrated my birthday by completing my applications for grad school--mailed, submitted, paid for, finally, at last. Now for the waiting game.

Bit Torrent lives, and we recently watched a couple of movies we'd heard good things about, one after the other.

Garden State (which we actually saw second) was a bit of a disappointment. The movie sported a good variety of quirks, funny scenes, and moments of interesting character development/exposition--sometimes shown all-in-one, viz., some quirky aspect of a character's personality is revealed in a way that is humourous. These were all really nice touches. I just wish Zach Braff could've found a real script in which to incorporate these tidbits of wonder, because they would have added some real flavour to that script, if only it had existed.

It was such a disconnected mess that when the main character revealed his deep dark secret, I was left entirely unmoved--despite the extremely terrible deepness and darkness of said secret, which I readily recognize.

Some exasperating bits. #1: There was a throw-away gag near the beginning about some girl in a Vietnamese restaurant asking futilely for some bread. The thing is, bread is quite common in Vietnamese cooking. #2: The ending, which had my eyeballs rolling nigh out of their sockets to escape the corniness.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, on the other hand, was much, much better than I had anticipated from the hype, and I'd heard quite a bit of hype. Everything about this movie (acting, script, cinematography) was great throughout, but what really sealed it for me was the ending: the most authoritative smackdown on the idea of "happily ever after" that I've ever seen.

-OK.
-OK.

Brilliant!

Well, maybe it doesn't make so much sense out of context.

Best part: as Kate noticed, Bilbo's in the cast of one of the movies, and Frodo's in the other.

Anyway, Bit Torrent, don't fail us now! High hopes remain for I (heart) Huckabees.