Jul. 29th, 2003

fajrdrako: (Default)


I got this movie from the public library because it is a Johnny Depp movie from 1993. People who have seen it told me it was 'sweet' or 'charming'. This filled me with trepidation, but hey, it's Johnny Depp, and I am currently besotted by a certain scoundrelly pirate.

I see the movie is only ten years old - ? That seems incredible. I thought, from the story, from Depp's acting, from all sorts of clues, that it was much older than that.

I thought I would have to return the movie unwatched to the library because (as usual) I was too busy to watch it, but I woke up early with menstrual cramps and it seemed just the thing to get my mind off my misery.

There are essentially three characters in the movie, maybe three and a half: Benny (Aidan Quinn), a guy with who devotes his life to his car-repair business and his schizophrenic sister; Joon, the sister (Mary Stuart Masterson); and Sam (Johnny Depp), a cute non-verbal and mostly-illiterate stranger who wanders into their lives. The half-character is Ruth, a failed actress whom Benny might be having a romance with if Joon didn't preoccupy him all the time.

The movie is light and whimsical and I kept wondering if it was trivializing the problems of mental illness, and if it was, whether I thought that was a bad thing.

The central dilemma of the movie is: how can Benny get a life (i.e., a girlfriend) and still adequately care for Joon, his increasingly-demanding responsibility? Note that schizophrenia is my diagnosis of her condition, since the movie never mentions the word; but she's temperamental, sets fires, does 'weird things' like try to direct traffic with a ping pong bat, and she hears voices sometimes. The doctor wants to put Joon into a 'group home' (which she makes sound Utopian, and easy to get into). Benny doesn't want to shirk responsibilities.

Joon wins Sam in a poker game - someone else's unwanted mooch of a roommate. He keeps house (a great reason to keep him around, besides his general cuteness), makes grilled cheese sandwiches with an iron on 'rayon' setting on an ironing board, and knows all movies by heart, while playing a gentle Buster Keaton with hat-tricks at every turn.

Sam likes Joon. She likes him. They have sex. They tell Benny, who kicks Sam him out without so much as asking a few pertinent questions, like, "Did you use a condom?" Joon and Sam try to run away together but Joon has a psychotic episode and ends up in the hospital. Benny and Sam join forces, and stage a Mission-Impossible like break-in to her hospital room to talk to her. Joon thinks Benny hates her because he keeps trying to control her life.

Everybody agrees to see if things will work out if Joon has her own apartment. Benny gets to date Ruth, Joon and Sam get to iron their sandwiches into the sunset (if you'll forgive a mixed metaphor), and that's that.

Nobody ever asks the really important questions, like: "Is she taking her meds regularly?" and: "Who's going to pay the rent?" (Benny, of course. And Ruth is supporting Sam on a waitress's salary?)

Despite all my quibbles and my inability to suspend disbelief, I thought the movie had three great moments:


  1. When Joon first sees Sam, he's sitting in a tree. When she next meets him, many scenes later, he's on the ground.

      Joon: You're out of your tree.
      Sam: It wasn't my tree.

  2. Sam has been doing a very athletic Charlie Chaplin routine that has everyone in stitches. Benny says, in admiration, "Do you go to school to learn to do things like that?"

    Sam replies, "I got kicked out of school for doing things like that."

  3. In the climactic scenes, Joon thinks she has scared Sam away forever, and is listlessly taking part in a conversation with Benny and the doctor about her fate. Then she sees Sam, swinging as if on a trapeze, past her hospital room window. This gives her heart to face the future. I cried; I love scenes where people think their love is lost or has betrayed them, and then discover that the lover is true, and has come back.


Bottom line: it's a waste to have Johnny Depp in a movie, and then make him non-verbal and one-dimensional. The movie had a good heart, but was annoyingly shallow.

fajrdrako: (Default)


I took a pile of books back to the library (and "Benny and Joon" too), grumbling to myself about their weight. Discovered that a pile of books I'd put on request were waiting for me, including Michener's "Caribbean" and Mary Gentle's book "Ash", and guess what? They weigh even more than the ones I took back.

I still have awful cramps. I feel terrible. The Anaprox isn't working. Grumble, grumble, grumble. I hate this. I hope it's over soon.

I don't feel like working, I just feel like grumbling. (Among other reasons to grumble, like pain, my LJ keeps disappearing. Don't do that!)

Because I was having a sugar craving, I went to Tim Horton's. No, I didn't get a donut. I got a small hot chocolate. I meant to take it down to the river to drink it, but I was on the wrong side - the west side - of King Edward Ave., and went too far north to be able to cross the street. I'd more or less forgotten you can't reach the river from that side. So I walked along Boteler to Cumberland, and discovered Cathcart Park, a nice shady spot of sildes, and climbing-ladders, and sand-box and the like, but no kids in sight.

Hot chocolate is a funny drink for a warm summer's day, but it was comforting.

I feel so miserable I'm toying with the idea of going to see "Pirates of the Caribbean" again tonight, so I can curl up in the dark theatre and forget everything for a while. Or just see Jack again!

fajrdrako: (Default)


I was just reading the e-mail on one of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" slash lists, where people are talking about how they have to hide their slash writing from their nosy mothers.

I feel sympathetic, but.... their mothers are probably younger than I am.

Sheesh.

I guess I should just feel glad that's not a problem I have to worry about.

fajrdrako: (Default)


Everyone knows how I like poetry-based slashfic.

I am thrilled to see that [livejournal.com profile] isagel and [livejournal.com profile] lyra_sena have posted a challenge to write e.e.cummings-based Smallville fic.

I am so excited - what a great challenge!

Can I write more than one story?

I've instantly gone searching for cummings poetry on the Net. I found anyone lived in a pretty how town and Buffalo Bill's and the following:

the cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls (which might be one of my favourite titles ever)
Chansons Innocentes: I - this one is new to me
i sing of Olaf glad and big
maggie and milly and molly and may
my father moved through dooms of love
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r, which would be difficult to do, but not impossible, never impossible
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
Spring is like a perhaps hand
why must itself up every of a park

Then there are a whole bunch of his poems here and here including some of my favourites like next to of course god america and i like my body when it is with your body.

This feels so wonderful self-indulgent, just looking at cummings poems and rereading them. Such wonderful lines, like:


    my mind is
    a big hunk of irrevocable nothing

or:

    I will bring you every year

    something which is worth the whole,
    an inch of nothing for your soul.

and:

    they believe in Christ and Longfellow,both dead

What a brilliant man he was, and I really don't know much about him.

Smallville and cummings - two of my favourite things together. Thank you, [livejournal.com profile] lyra_sena and [livejournal.com profile] isagael!

fajrdrako: (Default)
I just read the poem with this wonderful line:

    you pays your money and
    you doesn't take your choice. Ain't freedom grand


fajrdrako: (Default)


I went to see "Pirates of the Caribbean" again tonight.

I had such a rotten, crappy day that about 4.30 I phoned my friend Lyn - whom I knew hadn't seen the movie, and wanted to - and dangled the possibility of seeing it in front of her. She snapped at the bait. How I love it when my friends are corruptible!

I enjoyed it as much as ever - of course.

I wish more characters had names, for the sake of writing fanfic, but that's okay.... Perhaps I should say, I wish I knew who all the names in the 'cast list' are actually referring to.

I wish I had a transcript of the movie.

I love every moment Jack Sparrow is on screen, and every line he utters. I don't think he has any dialogue that isn't truly funny. Some of his dialogue is other things as well - touching or profound or double-entendres or whatever - but he makes every word funny.

Sexy too. I have to write more slash about him.

Afterwards walking home was sheer pleasure - a clear, cool, dry night, with lots of people on Elgin Street because it was such a perfect summer evening.

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