I have no partiality to disco music and know next to nothing of the genre or the culture, and yet I love Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco. Why? For many of the same reasons that I love his other films: unique, memorable, talky characters, delightful acting, and Stillman’s clear love of language, discourse, and dialogue. Consider the characters’ discussion about the Disney movie, Lady and the Tramp, embedded below. Notice that that the conversation isn’t just about the typological characters in the cartoon. The glances the speakers and listeners give to one another, the subtle and not-so-subtle emotions they display, and the sides they take in the debate reveal that the conversation is really about some of them. It works on its own while also working to develop the characters and advance the plot. Stillman performs the very literary technique he has characters discussing. As much as I enjoy Quentin Tarantino’s witty reference-heavy dialogue, I say Stillman tops him.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes from the mind of Charlie Kaufman and takes place mostly in the mind of Jim Carrey. The comedy actor, here displaying reserve and quiet desperation, plays Joel Barish. After learning that his girlfriend Clementine, played perfectly by Kate Winslet, has had the memory of their relationship erased from her mind, decides to undergo the brain-damaging procedure himself. The story follows Joel, inside his own consciousness and unconsciousness, and now regretting his decision while the technicians (Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood) pinpoint and erase memory after memory, fleeing with his memory of Clementine, desperately searching for a remembered place the two can hide so that she is not forever lost to him. Time, identity, memory, and loss are so poignantly portrayed, I’m not sure I could watch it right now, so soon after the loss of my daughter Vivian. I was actually reminded of this film in the brief time of her life, knowing we had fewer and fewer moments remaining before she was lost and memories began to fade.
I can’t stand didactic movies, especially the type in which everything from the plot to the characters serves merely as a means to propagating a message or moral. David O. Russell’s Three Kings in unabashedly political, but Russell, while not hiding his views, doesn’t let his story become slave to them. His concern is with his characters, the difficult moral decisions they have to make, and what consequences those decisions have for the plot. At the end of the Persian Gulf War, U.S. soldiers looking for some action go in search of gold they believe might exist after secretly confiscating a map taken out of Iraqi prisoner’s rear end. Their search brings them into the lives and deaths of Iraqi civilians who are prisoners to Saddam Hussein’s troops. Three Kings refrains from making a sure statement about the justice of the war, instead focusing thematically on the materialism and consumerism that pervades across cultures.
Pages
