Rachel Getting Married

Jonathan Demme (2008)

The good sister is getting married and the bad sister is ready to take the scene in this intense family portait.

After spending 9 months in rehab Kym ( Anne Hathaway), comes back home for the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). Her arrival home starts a landslide of emotions: love, hate, guilt, and conflicts never solved. She is an addict and her present and past behavior has affected the lives of all her family members. Rachel’s deep feelings for her troubled sister explode in a terrible argue where we are reminded just how words can cut even deeper in family fights. The absent mother, a great Debra Winger (welcome back!), is a woman that is not able to be a parent anymore, and maybe was never capable. The heroic moving figure of the father (Bill Irwin), is a man that sacrifices himself and his pain to keep his family united.

Jonathan Demme returns to fictions and mixes his passion for documentaries with a personal hand-held camera Dogma style and lets us be guests at this family reunion and gives us a moving, honest and beautiful film. With Demme we enter into a big Connecticut house and assist in the wedding preparations, dances, conversations, conflicts, pain, and witness a lot of love.

Writer Jenny Lumet (Sidney Lumet’s daughter at her first script) writes a complex female character that Anne Hathaway brings to life with an astonishing performance that will be remembered.

Jonathan Demme gives us another exellent movie, and his talent reminds us of what makes American cinema so extraordinary.

Away we go

Sam Mendes, 2009

People try to put us down, the Who lamented in 1965, I feel Sam Mendes is trying to do that.

His new comedy Away we Go is the journey of Burt and Verona (John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph), expecting their first baby. They live in Colorado, in a creaky little cold house, near Burt’s very wealthy parents (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara) who decide to move to Europe to enjoy life and are indifferent to the coming birth of their grandchild (who does that?). Burt and Verona, feeling a lack of roots, start a trip around North America to find the right place to raise their child. In this journey the couple meet old friends and family members, like the funny and neurotic Lily (Allison Janney), and her dysfunctional family in Phoenix, complete with dummy husband and overweight kids . Or the new age fundamentalist and unpleasant Ellen (Maggie Gyllenhaal) in whose over incensed and communal bed roomed house, one of the funniest scene of the movie takes place. Yes, this movie can be very funny. John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph’s characters are adorable in their sweetness: they are funny and clumsy, the two actors genuine performance is the good part of the movie, but unfortunately it’s not enough.

The banality of the representation of our society with all its clichés and the way this film underestimates the thirty something generation is unforgivable. Our generation is more complex than that. Also it’s time to say NO to the abused indie-folk romantic music used to emphasize emotive moments but ends up being irritating, forced and out of sync, like a more expensive Grey’s Anatomy’s episode.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Directed by Michel Gondry.

Forget the love stories you have seen in films, Eternal Sunshine of the Spottless Mind, directed by the acclaimed French director Michel Gondry (Human Nature) and written by the talented screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) is one of the most touching, stylistically original and bitter sweet romantic movies of our times.

This is the story of Joel (Jim Carrey) who is suffering through the end of a two-year old relationship with Clementine (Kate Winlset) and finds out that she erases him from her memory thanks to Lacuna Inc, a small medical center’s new outpatient process. Joel is desperate and hurt by his ex girlfriend’s drastic choice and after talking to the inventor of this procedure Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) he decides to do the same, to erase Clementine from his mind. Joel’s memories progressively disappear but during the procedure Joel changes his mind. He doesn’t want to forget his love, he now desperately wants to remember her and starts to fight for his memories. We follow Gondry into the labyrinth of Joel’s brain by reviewing some of his strongest recollections. And inside his brain he fights against Dr. Mierzwiak and his crew (the very good team of young actors Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood) to keep Clementine in his memories.

Michel Gondry’s fast, innocent and almost homemade directing style and Charlie Kauffman’s inventive and schizophrenic writing are perfect together. They show us an interesting reflection on love and memories: without our memories we are empty, we don’t exist. This is what happens to Joel and Clementine, with no more memories of each other love, they move around empty until they find each other again.

This movie is an unpredictable, exciting and original fairytale and love story. The two main characters Joel and Clementine are wonderful together and leave us wanting their love to last forever.

The majestic interpretation of the two protagonists, Jim Carrey (interesting in a dramatic role) and the stunning Kate Winslet, one of the best actresses of our times and their chemistry makes them one of the most interesting and sweet fictional couples in Hollywood.

It’s impossible not to mention the great music of this film: the melancholic instrumental soundtrack written by Jon Brion, who has worked with director Paul Thomas Anderson and heartbreaking cover of The Korgis’ song “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometimes” performed by Beck.

This gentle, elegant and simply beautiful movie shows us in a simple and genuine way the complex meaning inside the poem written in 1717 by the British poet Alexander Pope that inspired the title of this movie.

“How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;”