My In-on-a-Saturday Nights
I’ve just finished watching My Blueberry Nights, a mix of indie roadtrip and girlie wheeze, with a cast of pretty good thesps that add up to less than the sum of their parts. If it were a bar, someone’s nicking from the till. I really do want to like it - the film has a breathy, amiable quality and a certain atmosphere about it, but at the same time the script is clunky and it plays like a teenager’s diary. One suspects the director was rather more ambitious than the writer, who simply wanted a teevee movie and a Christmas paycheck. Rachel Weisz channels Juliette Binoche and my guilty fave Emmanuelle Beart, whilst Natalie Portman shows off more impish charm than a chap can possibly handle. Even Jude Law is passable, and I can’t often watch him without taking an irrational dislike. As the film’s main protagonist and supposed anchor, wee songstress Norah Jones looks curiously ungainly alongside the real actors, possibly passing time between albums, who knows. She should know, however, that no singer has ever made a good film - the real money comes from making the gritty story of their boozy sozzled death, it’s Oscar gold.
There was something very romantic about the film, though - perhaps the best character in the film i s the backdrop of the USA itself, a vast continent into which anyone can lose themself, millions of lives and little vignettes co-existing in harmony. Norah crosses the road, as her character says, the long way round - but why not? I don’t think I would mind crossing the road the long way round if it meant a panoply of characters and things to talk about. I’ve got a roadtrip bubbling inside me, I can feel it - and gosh, to get paid to meet crazies and see things and then to tell people about it, that would be an enormous privilege. That would be the pre-life crisis solved.
So there - crap film, but it poked me somewhat.
Tags: dead cultural stuff