Okay, I watched The Savages and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly today. The Savages was a good movie, but overall maybe just a little too "real" for me. There's no good guys or bad guys, just a couple of regular people facing a fairly common problem and just trying to do the best they can. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney were both great in their roles, but they were basically both just playing ordinary people. It's billed as a tragicomedy, but the comedy wasn't really that funny and the tragedy was really that tragic, it was all just life. And like real life, there were a lot of loose ends and unresolved subplots and characters at the end. It's a good movie if you're looking for a down-to-earth movie about family, but I just wasn't feeling it.
I started out hating The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The first thirty minutes or so are shot from the perspective of a man totally paralyzed. To represent this, the director decided it should be shot with a lot of rapidly jerking camera movements, blurriness, and moments of darkness when he closed his eyes for a second. It's an interesting idea, but it was also on the verge of making my psychically ill. Once we got past that part though, I found myself slowly beginning to be sucked into this movie. The thought of being trapped inside your own body is horrifying, but seeing it from the perspective of someone facing it and watching as he coped with his condition, how he tried to battle though it and still stay active and productive was really fascinating. It's based on a true story that was written by the guy (dictating by using his only means of communication with the outside world, his left eyelid), and knowing that it really happened makes it even more incredible.
Overall, I give my day's movie going experience eight million, seven hundred and fifty-two thousand, four-hundred and eleven dancing Drinky Crow cats
out of fifteen Christmas Gerstmanns :gerstmann and two Drudge Sirens.
