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Mistress America (2015)
Always a Mistress Never a Bride
This is a great movie experience.
Feeling trapped in her college freshman year experience, Tracy calls and visits her soon-to-be sister Brooke. (Their parents are about to get married.) Tracy becomes more confident and self-assured during the course of her interaction with the lively Brooke. But even though Brooke is Tracy's inspiration, Brooke has not found a way to successfully live her own life.
The movie has so much more richness and depth than its basic plot. The other characters are very well drawn, and include Tony, a college buddy who relates to Tracy's loser self; Tony's comically possessive girlfriend, Nicolette; Brooke's old boyfriend Dylan, who is excited by Brooke's passion but understands her fundamental limitations, and Dylan's wife Mamie Claire, who was once Brooke's close friend and feels threatened by Brooke on multiple levels. Even minor characters play an important role: Someone who only knew Brooke in middle school and approaches her at a restaurant, providing piercing insight into Brooke's flawed psyche; Mamie Claire's pregnant visitor, who, like a member of a Greek chorus, observes and comments on the proceedings.
Throughout the movie, lines zing by to reinforce the movie's themes, like
Tracy saying in a voice over that Brooke "has a face that makes you feel more pretty." That is, Tracy feels better and actually becomes better being around Brooke.
When tutoring Algebra, Brooke says "x can be anything, you can't pin it down," revealing as much about herself as about the properties of x.
Cold in July (2014)
Plot Lines Dropped
While the acting in this movie is very good and Sam Shepard's character evolves, there are major plot lines that just get dropped. It reminds me of Charlie's Angels episodes that don't make sense and we're supposed to not worry about that and just think they are cool. Same here.
The statements I'm about to write could be called "spoilers" but they are not really because they don't matter. The whole middle of movie is about bad cops that tell Michael Hall that he killed Sam Shepard's son even though he really didn't in order to draw Sam Shepard to town so that they can kill him. Do we find out why the cops did that? No. Do the cops get pay back? No. Later, there is a big deal made about the Dixie mafia and what bad asses they are. Do the characters confront or even see the Dixie mafia? No. And the big stated reason why Michael Hall needs to leave his wife and kid to help Sam Shepard is to find out who he really killed. Does he ever find out? No.
There is a main plot that I have not revealed, so there is something to this movie. But all this other stuff really seemed pointless.
Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Realistic
Other reviewers said that they cried. I am an adult male and I was very emotional watching the movie. Tears were streaming down my face. I had to hold myself back from sobbing. But why?
At various points during the movie, we find out the Lars's mother died when he was young, his father was quite withdrawn and his older brother left home. So Lars had no one.
Then Lars buys the doll. He says it is his girlfriend, but she's in a wheelchair, they sleep in separate rooms, and their relationship is completely friendly and asexual. I believe the doll represents his mother. The way Lars related to the doll reminded me of how people talk with their elderly parents. I absolutely loved the scene when Lars took the doll into the country, talking to it about his childhood and laying up in a tree house and singing. He felt that he could just be himself and the doll would accept him, just like his mother would accept him.
But as the movie goes on, Lars asks the doll to marry him and she says no. It is true for every man. A man cannot marry his mother.
Around the same time, he starts noticing the girl at his office. There is tension that Lars feels that maybe he's betraying the doll when he's noticing the girl. But still, he goes out on a date with her, bowling. She's athletic, hurling the ball, dancing when she hits the pins. He gets it. She's a real girl. So he struggles and slowly allows the doll to die, and allows himself to let go of his feelings for his mother.
I thought the movie was a terrific. The dialog fed this story so subtly and so well. It's interesting that much of Lars's growth took place in the doctor's office. The Freudian-based psychiatric process serves the same purpose, helping a man let go of his feelings for his mother, so he can find a new girl and get married.
As a viewer, if you accept the idea that an adult would actually buy a doll and treat it as his girlfriend, then the whole movie opens up. It is completely believable and realistic.
The only scene that "broke the spell" for me was when the whole town was at the funeral. While I could easily believe that the close friends at the church would go along with the Lars's fantasy, I have a much harder time believing that the guys from Gus's workplace, for example, would go along. The funeral scene was the most fake Hollywood-ish moment in the movie. Other than that, the movie was awesome.