Interesting piece here about suicide rates and the 2000 election. Worth a look.
I don't know when I actually started coding this page, but it must have been more than six months or so ago because everything I had written was pretty out of date. In any event, I have a new, more descriptive 'about' page done. Let me know if it looks funny in your browser or has broken links or whatnot.
On paper, We Don't Live Here Anymore looks like a great movie. It features four actors with great resumes: Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watts, Peter Krause, and Laura Dern. It's based on two novellas by Andre Dubus, the man behind the story that inspired the heartbreaking film In the Bedroom. I think some of the promise of the film is lost in execution.
Dubus wrote the novels in the 70s, which I didn't know going into the movie and helps explain some of the stuff that seemed really odd, including the fact that the two women are housewives and exert no intellectual or vocational independence--they accept their lot in life with no real fight. The movie centers around two couples, one played by Ruffalo/Dern, and the other by Krause/Watts, and both men are local college professors.
The movie centers around an affair that the Ruffalo/Watts characters are having, yet I found it hard to believe because we see none of the beginning of the relationship. One wonders, how did it get to that point? Furthermore, one suspects that the film is trying to make a point about Love, but as far as I can tell, the characters are primarily thinking about Sex. The resulting movie is a divisive movie that is garnering some of the most mixed reviews I've ever seen.
For a directorial debut, Zach Braff's Garden State is pretty darn good. It's a little precious at times, and takes a good twenty minutes to really get its footing, but after that it's quite good. Braff is good in the starring role, but is outacted by Peter Sarsgaard and Natalie Portman. A lot has been made of the soundtrack, but fairly so, it's really good. Sure, it's a lot of kind of hip/formerly trendy stuff, like The Shins and Coldplay, etc., but it fits. I mean, it's a movie about New Jersey, a place well known for co-opting the formerly trendy from NYC a little bit late.
I also expected Garden State to be more depressing than it actually was. Often I have the opposite experience at the movies, so it was nice for it to be a little less desolate than I expected.
There were also great previews: Vanity Fair, The Motorcycle Diaries, and Neverland (or Before Neverland or what ever the Barrie biopic is being called now), all of which look quite good.
Having been caught up in all that's been going on in my life since June 1 (moving, starting graduate school, etc.), I've neglected to keep wakingslow.com updated in terms of what I've been reading. Way back in June I read A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.
It's another gripping addiction/recovery memoir, less poignant than Augusten Burrough's Dry, and far more harrowing. Some might find his cadence and punctuation (he uses a minimalist style of little punctuation and strange pagination) pretentious and at times he comes across as a little arrogant, but I think both work in the terms of the story being told. It took me a little while to get into the book, but by the end I was really into it. I think one of the strengths of the book is the numerous people other than the narrator the reader gets to know and hear about--I found myself more interested in them by the end than he who told the story.