I loved “Wall·E”. It was a superlative and moving effort.
In the, surprisingly heartless, “Be Kind, Rewind”, Mia Farrow’s character proposes a toast to movies with “heart”. Well, “Wall·E” is one of those movies.
It explores, in touching, subtle, expansive movements, the experience of abject loneliness. It expresses the Heideggerian dichotomy between dasein and sein, of how distracting dasein is and how debilitating the long reflection of sein is.
It also expresses the jubilation of finding her. One of the best wedding sermons I ever attended was for my friends, The Dowiaks. In it, their minister described the moment of Adam seeing Eve as a moment of total jubilation. It wasn’t: “Oh, her” no it was an ecstatic exclamation of “There’s the one that is the match for me!”
I cite:
[19] And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
[20] And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
[21] And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
[22] And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
[23] And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
Gen 2:19-33
Even if you’re not particularly Judeo-Christian, if you’ve ever been in love, it definitely feels like that.
Can’t you just see it. Adam is there, in his peaceful idyll:
God: Adam, what’s this?
Adam: Zebra.
God: Adam, what’s this?
Adam: Uhm…is hippopotamus taken?
God: No.
Adam: Hippopotamus, then yawn
God: What about this
Adam: Def Leppard plays Woman! Guitar solo
I profoundly felt that moment of ecstatic jubilation when I watched Wall·E’s camera-lens eyes focus and re-focus to view the lady ( never mind that she’s a robot ) who set his dreams and heart a-flutter.
To have accurately captured loneliness, the story then captures the essence of falling in love. Not content to leave off there, it then captures: the tragedy of loving people as canonized in “Romeo and Juliet”. Wall·E’s bumbling attempts to make her see him ( and don’t we all feel that the other is so much more than us? ) as worthy of her affection are at the same time foreign, yet universal. The sweet and tender mess-ups, the self-sacrifice, the film captures it all ( often in the style of of the YouTube æsthetic, it looks like there’s some camcorder filming some of these awry moments ). And in the denoument we see just how transformative to the lover loving is. Said Hugo: “What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!”. Without love in our lives we truly do become automata; slaves ( for which the Czech word is robota ) to the quotidian.
And all that is before the bildungsroman truly gets underway: what happens when your love-interest is the vessel of the (re-) birth of human kind ( the Genesis parallel is particularly apt )?
In it Wall·E reminds us of just how fragile life on this planet it, and how it’s up to a more conscious generation to think of how to be better stewards of it, instead of being pleasure-addicted drones content to let cronies and corporations stuff their coffers in the short term, while unconcerned about the long-term direction.
Conservative morons have said that this movie is an indoctrination of Californian, Left-Wing lunacy. They are idiots. This movie is advocating responsibility and stewardship, virtues that real Republicans like TR espoused.
I thought Iron Man would be the best movie this summer, but no, sorry Stark, Wall·E is full of win.
While I lauded “Control” in the previous post, we also caught “Get Smart” and “Baghead”.
June, in the run up to the 4th of July hot zone of movies, seems to go through a doldrums just as the air truly begins to stultify. Left few other choices, we saw “Get Smart”. It wasn’t especially bad, but it wasn’t especially good either. I had the same feeling I had when I caught “Evan, Almighty”.
I wanted Steve Carrell to do well, and I wanted it to be funny, it just, well, failed to deliver. Not even the cute Anne Hathaway in ( I am told ) Chanel could really keep me interested. Steve, my man, get you back to Apatow lest you be relegated to Shamalyan-dom.
In what shall serve as a wooden circus-tent stake through the heart of Indydom, the Duplass Brothers’ latest film “Baghead” was also seen, and was deemed to be just about the same as “Get Smart” ( take that, indie film hipster scum ).
It was one of those movies shot on the cheap that professes to be a send up of LA types by being an indie movie about LA types. At the end we’re supposed to feel smug and Sundance-y, but instead I thought it was needlessly self-obsessed, self-referential, and self-reverential. This proves yet once more that if you stick around long enough, you too will be the enemy you once raged against.
Here’s the plot. 4 people in LA leave self-congratulatory indie film festival and decide to make their own movie—for real, no fooling around. They go up to a cabin with a ton of booze ( always a great start for serrrious work ) and plenty of latent sexual tension. In the midst of writing a story about a murderous “man with a bag on his head” they are beset by, uhm, a murderous man with a bag on his head. Thanks to the IndyScope jostleCam and badMakeUpVision, we get motion sick as the adventure(?) plays exhaustingly out. At the end, guess what, LA people are rubes obsessed with their own promotion and will do anything to break out of the rank of anonymous extra-dom. I restrain myself from sighing.
Not biting satire, not particularly insightful, just kinda, boring, really. I’d rather watch other peoples’ vacation slides.
Last night Lauren and I watched Anton Corbijn’s “Control”, the bio-pic about the late frontman from Joy Division, Ian Curtis.
Who knew that Maccleston also imported my site CSS file
You cannot explore the tangent to the late Glam Rock / punk / pre-goth fertile period of English music without coming across Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.
With its rich synthesizers, Curtis’ unintelligible Doors-influenced baritone, and driving bass work, it marks a shift that would move to richer, more ambient, more experimental sounds in the New Wave.
The film is short beautifully, Corbijn’s eye for composition showing off his years of experience in still-shot photo journalism.
In “Control” we see the mundanity of northern England’s post-war culture. Jobs exchange, economic stagnation, row-houses and the stifling need of the war generation to re-impose the burgeois Englishness that made the world post disaster make sense again. In this the iconic pharos of Aladdin Sane-era Bowie and Lou Reed serve to give the idle, bored, expressive souls a way to dream of a diferent path for themselves.
Ian, as if acting out the rules from a Pulp song ( “…dance and drink and screw, ‘cause there’s nothing else to do” ), asks his sweetheart, Debbie, to marry him at the tender age of 19. Samantha Morton’s character agrees and Ian is tied to the wheel of expectation and convention — something that he assuredly was never really going to rest peacefully with. As Debbie tries to be a good wife ( cooking, making tea, cleaning, and naively assuring him of her unending love for him ), Joy Division, Ian’s band, inexplicably takes off and suddenly Ian is introduced to a much larger world ( encompassing, at the very least, London and the Western European continent ) and the exotic Annik Honoré.
As the upswing to superstardom begins to approach the exponential, Ian’s shyness takes hold. He didn’t mean for superstardom to be so demanding, to be so large, for there to be so many people. At the same time he begins to experience grand mal seizures which agonize, embarrass, and humiliate him. To combat these he takes an array of pills potent enough to tranquilize elephants which fail to check the seizures, which put him further out of sync with the rest of society, and which increase his sense of isolation.
It was at this point in the movie that I noticed an odd similarity between Curtis and Kurt Cobain who, at the height of the rocket ride, began to experience intense stomach pain and frustration with having become quite so famous.
The two both follow the same path from there on out.
In some ways I wonder if there aren’t people in this world whose cling to the mortal coil isn’t just a bit too light. Their souls are too light for their bodies, too scared by noise and the weight of social expectation. When prompted with the choice of becoming heavier, of binding into the body, they choose to fight its demand for their souls to settle firmly there.
I am a completionist fetishist. I read all of Atlas Shrugged, I read the entire “Ender’s Game” series, and I stuck with the Vampire Chronicles through Memnoch, but I simply could not complete twisted animator Terry Gilliam’s pile of eye-pain known as “The Brothers Grimm”.
Perhaps most shockingly for a Terry Gilliam movie, it was entirely derivative. The steampunk machinery and effects? Seen it in “Sleepy Hollow”. What about the brighter than life set and costuming? Seen it, “Big Fish”. Assembly of hot, as-yet-unsee-by-American-eyes European actresses, well no one tops Terry in that.
Rachel McAdams starred in the “The Notebook”. This movie is the staple of “Girls’ Nights In” everywhere.
Later this year she will star as Clare Abshire in The Time Traveler’s Wife, based off of Audrey Nifenegger’s superlatively good novel.
Will she, in but a few years, seize the “weepy” crowns that have, for so long, remained firmly in the treasure-houses of Ali McGraw and Barbara Streisand?
In the world of comics there are the comics which are considered, well, kids-stuff by the non-initiated. In this silo fall the comics that they make blockbusters of: Spiderman, Superman, et. al.
Then there are the world of Literary Comics, the comics that those who shrug their shoulders at the œuvre of the first style know that they will be thrown out of hipster High for dissing ( nota bene: there’s some overlap in these two camps cf. The Dark Knight Returns, Death of Superman arc, etc.). Chief among these would be anything by Alan Moore but assuredly most embodied in his magnum opus: “The Watchmen”
The third silo would be “Serious Comics for Grownups”. This genre was assuredly ushered in by Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”, a grim recounting of the holocaust with Jews portrayed by mice, and Nazis portrayed by cats.
Among this latter category emerged, in my awareness, Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis”, in the early 2000’s. I remember thinking that the drawings were so simple and so plain, but the story of a young girl during pre-Revolutionary Iran was an immediate hook.
My only relationship to Iran had been a hazy recollection of badness during the Reagan years and then that they were a koo-koo theocracy.
Over the years, and especially during my years in California where I met Persians, I came to realize that it’s a country of incredible erudition, of incredibly beauty, and incredible complexity. Persia was the land of Darius, of Xerxes, of Alexander, of the gateway to India, to the place where, on the silk Road, Hindu met Christian met Buddhist met the Cult of Mithras. It’s truly the touchpoint of the philosophic east and the philosophic west.
I would so very much like to go and see that part of the world. If there’s a crossroads where Janus himself) dwells, it is assuredly in the countries of The Great Game.
“Persepolis” has just been made into a beautifully animated move which is, in measures, partly the recounting of teen angst + hijab, the sorrow of being an intellectual family and having loved ones jailed or worse, of being an Iranian who saw her neighbor’s home take a missile, and an education of how the CIA helped install a corrupt regime ( and educated the torturer class ) and how the West happily armed both sides in the Iran - Iraq war, making the atmosphere ripe for no(know?)-nothing theocrats to seize power.
Best intentions, eh?
In any case, this story is the tragedy of a broken land and of a girl’s heart breaking in the process. It’s the story of finding that pure pride of being from the land that kisses the Caspian in spite of the shambles, and bravely entering a world that will look down upon you for what they think you are. It is the story of being strong, of loving freedom, and of the sweetness that no one can deprive you of: the smell of jasmine and rich cigarettes.
The animated feature is highly impressionistic, fades in and out portrays clinical depression, homelessness, fury, death, and torture in a way that such they’re not required to be shown in order to be shocking.
A great bit of voice casting is real-life mother and daughter Catherine Denuve and Chiara Mastroiani voicing the protagonist’s mother and little “Marji” herself.
The soundtrack is also wonderful, Olivier Bernet’s strings manage to convey whimsy, depression, dreams, and tears in a way that perfectly complements the visuals. In fact, it distinctly made “Eye of the Tiger” seem to be an 80’s re-interpretation of the message of “We The Living” - and that’s saying something
It’s a lovely film, just as powerful and tragic as “Life is Beautiful” but rendered from
a Middle Eastern perspective.
If it’s playing in your town, do not miss the chance to enjoy this special film.
I admit, I procrastinated, I avoided the obligation and said that I, quite honestly, had nothing positive to contribute to the movie. Mr. Ransom agreed that I could take a con position. I took that offer and decided to re-watch the film and see if my perceptions had changed in the 10 years since I saw the movie. I can say they have not and I think that the movie is just as forgettable and insignificant today as I thought it was 10 years ago.
If any of the other contributors induce you to consider seeing this movie qua movie, let me be the first to say that its only merits in my book are to see the two primary protagonists give laudable acting performances of a high quality that will make you blink twice in surprise against your familiarity with the larger scope of their respective œuvres.
I speak of Bill Pullman and Ben Stiller.
Bill Pullman
Pullman executed a string of intense studies on men in very non-conventional relationships in this remarkable fecund period in the early 90’s. In fact, against several performances given between 1994 and 1998 Pullman’s role in the Summerstravaganza Crapfest “Independence Day” can be seen as an outlier.
Starting in 1994 he starred against the sexy “Wendy Kroy ( Linda Fiorentino )” in The Last Seduction. Having been manipulated by his scheming wife who sent him for condoms as she skips town with the proceeds of a lucky dope score, Pullman opened up a floodgate to exploring rage, fury, homicide, and seething frustration within the bounds of a relationship that was to pour over his next several films.
Between “The Last Seduction” and “Zero Effect”, Pullman continued his study in relationship-bounded fury in David Lynch’s Möbius murder-mystery “Lost Highway”. “Lost Highway” was the first film that the director himself, at the time, reported as “the perfect David Lynch movie”; the movie he had always wanted to make (for the record, this same theme was explored again, and much more compellingly, I’ll assert, in 2001’s “Mullholland Drive”).
In “Lost Highway”, Pullman does the research and experimentation that makes his portrayal of Zero so effortless. The protagonist believes himself cuckolded, marvels and wonders at his potential capacity as a murderer, and generally exists in a space parallel, but outside of the social mainstream.
In the character Zero, Pullman continues the detailed study of men undergoing psychological fugue between the men they are expected to be, and the men they know they are. It is a superb moment in Pullman’s career. Pullman closes this study in 2002’s Igby Goes Down. Somewhere the raging cuckold has morphed into an alcoholic, suicidal, Zen-like approach to getting a cricket bat to the face courtesy of life.
Pullman’s portrayal of Zero’s meditation on searching for things by not searching for them is reminiscent of the farcical method of flight described by “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as well as an artful delivery into the mind of the Holmes 2.0, the detective Zero. It’s the only thing that I really remembered as being enjoyable about this movie years on.
Pullman’s not been given the best source material of late, but his performance almost makes “The Zero Effect” worth watching — if only anything else happened in it.
Ben Stiller
In 1993 there was a channel known as Fox which was favored for showing edgy and daring comedy.
In the 5 or so years previous, this network had launched “Married With Children” and “The Simpsons” and marked a decided turn in the culture wars. America, en masse disagreed with President Bush and said, effectively: “No, we think the American family should be more like The Simpsons and less like that other show you talked about”. To prove their point they elected a president who had played a notoriously difficult-to-tune woodwind on The Arsenio Hall Show.
Fox took another risk by giving Ben Stiller his own show which featured his formidable comedic talents as well as the talents of Bob Odenkirk, and pre-yakuza-arm-sleeve Janeane Garofalo. There was also this un-funny douchebag named Andy Dick on it too.
In this role we saw Ben as an edgy and intense comedic talent. Naturally, the show would be quickly cancelled as reward for such innovation. Yet in the show we saw the talent that’s there in Stiller: a wry eye for satire and a mean streak which could take the absolutely piss out the Fox network with the mockery pilot treatment “Heat Vision and Jack”.
After being kicked to the curb by Fox, Stiller found his way back to mass entertainment and landed in “The Zero Effect”. Taking the Host of the Ben Stiller show and dressing him up in a suit was the perfect chance to show off the best of Ben Stiller, man, not actor. The likable personality behind the “Ben Stiller Show” was given another chance to become familiar to the viewing public.
Yet in “The Zero Effect” we also get a brief peek at the disaster that Stiller was to come to accompany: The narcissistic, whiney, rubber-faced-angry-little-bitch that would come to define his character portfolio up to the present. Like Darwin’s finches, every role of Stiller’s that is beyond a cameo is essentially playing a character slightly more or less little-bitch than Arlo in “Zero Effect”
Consider: Arlo, Stiller’s character, is perpetually complaining about not getting his due, is perpetually obsessing about his relative import ( or lack thereof ), or is being frustrated about his situation using the same 3 stock faces:
*”disbelief/angry”
or
*”disaffected/feeling that he’s not being treated like God’s special snowflake”
*”Grr! I’m Angry”
Does this not sound like pretty much every role Stiller has played since 1998?
A few traces should suffice to prove the downward trajectory.
The Arlo persona had its whiny-bitch-o-meter revved up in “Flirting with Disaster”: over-neurotic to the point of absurdity, narcissistic to the extreme, obsessed with external validation to a fault, etc. Stiller’s character’s single nuance of “unbelievable outright neediness” threatened to tank that film, were it not for Teà Leoni’s and Patricia Arquette’s balancing desperations ( Ms. Leoni’s ticking clock and Arquette’s armpit licking made Stiller’s neurotic individual stick out less ).
Stiller took the same identikit mix for the Neil LaBute squirm-fest “Your Friends and Neighbors”. Never have I enjoyed watching a character get humiliated quite like Catherine Keener’s ego-destroying “Buh” or “Should I write hold me?” to Arlo, er, Jerry in the third act.
The only addition that has come to modify the Arlo archetype is the “Stiller Rage Face” that calls to mind G.E. Smith’s What’s-that-smell? guitar style from 90’s era Saturday Night Live ( ironically a main character feature of his Mr. Furious in the utterly forgettable “Mystery Men”).
Since that time Stiller has basically played the same role with only minor deviations.
Sardonic cop with Gen-X cynical chic ( surely some grass-chewer in Hollywood scribbed that on the back of the head-shot ) = “Starsky and Hutch”.
That one where he’s in Mexico with the girl or something and he’s angry at the mariachis
These indictments should be sufficient to show that Zero effect marked the death of Ben Stiller auteur, thinker, and risk-taker to Ben Stiller, a guy in movies. It hurts, because goddammit Ben, you have the skills, we saw them accidentally escape in your cameo in “Anchorman”, but dammit man, the penis-inflation sight-gag from Dodgeball? What the hell is that? I thought Ben was going to fight the machine and do great things. With his connections into the Apatow mafia he still could. C’mon Ben, you’ve got the cash now, make those great things you dreamt about ( although leaving Andy Dick behind is entirely acceptable).
In conclusion, if you’re looking for the genetic ancestor of all Ben Stiller roles since 1992, you can look to “Zero Effect”. If you’re writing your master’s drama thesis on the fecund period of Pullman, look to “Zero Effect”. Otherwise pick up 7% Solution, by Doyle, its conceit is much more compelling – and there’s no open-mouthed gaping Stiller freeze frame that you will need to endure.
I’m well past the age of seeing movies that are terrible for the purpose of throwing back a few beers and marveling at just how horrible it is.
But I remember that Mr. Shoemaker, at the beginning of UT football season, and I were both kinda excited to catch Shoot ‘em Up. We thought that, from the trailers, the gratuitous love of bullets would be an unashamedly bullet-heavy, ridiculous action-fest.
Through a moment of loopiness at the RedBox DVD kiosk, I found myself watching this with Lauren.
Now on paper my man-crush, and Lauren’s more conventional crush, Clive Owen will be afforded opportunities to excel all things he’s good at:
Handsomely British
Gun-wielding
Jokey
Will drive a BMW ( and no one drives a BMW like Clive see the BMW “Driver” series )
And my conventional crush, no opinions from Lauren, Monica Bellucci will be afforded opportunities to excel at things she’s good at:
Being hot
Being hot.
Speaking Italian (although she really can act! See “Malena”)
And the movie doesn’t fail to deliver as a send up of the ridiculous action-packed thriller ( “The Transporter”, oh hell, pretty much anything with Jason Statham). It doesn’t fail to afford the gunslinger a mysterious past, a vendetta, and a quick ( carrots, seriously ). And in this, the movie absolutely succeeds. Bullet casings fly, seas of bullets are dodged and human limits of pain are ignored. In this sense it is funny and fun.
But on another level, a plot level, it’s as intelligent as an episode of “Walker, Texas Ranger”, which, in college-times, was a favorite mark for cruel assessments of ridiculous characterization, lousy direction, and un-necessary slow downs of Chuck’s roundhouses.
In short, watch it when you can tolerate an absurd laugh or two.
Lars is a very young, very lonely, and painfully shy 27-year-old man who lives in the upper wint’ry wastes of The Mitten. He lives in a small, meagerly-heated garage adjacent to the big house where his brother and pregnant wife live. He drives his winter-reasonable Toyota hatch-back from his “Office Space” ( action figures and stuffed animals, yes, humorous destruction of productivity solutions, no ) job and on Sunday Lars shows up to church ( while the brother and wife attend Keillor’s Church of Brunch ).
What makes a “quirky characters” movie work is that the characters have time and space to breathe, to expand, to talk about their situation, at length, and to let you find ways to identify with them. If they are merely “zany and like action figures” ( or luggage, or frisbee golf ) for no apparent reason without an intimate bond to the viewer, then the magic fails and you wind up with a Darjeeling Mumbledy. But, if, in their subtle and vulnerable invitation, you see a reflection of your own quotidian loves, foibles, and failures, then, my friends, the magic is on.
So when we let Lars breathe we see that he’s in a painful phase that, I’d wager, just about everyone who reads my little review can identify with: he’s horribly lonely. In a conversation with Patricia Clarkson’s Doctor / Psychotherapist ( “you have to be, this far North” ) he asks her if she still feels lonely since the death of her husband.
Some days I feel so lonely I forget what day of the week it is.
What young man moved away from the farm doesn’t know this? What divorcée, widow, brother, or husband, what ex-girlfriend, ex-boyfriend, the girl left on the train station platform back home? In short, we all are Lars, getting by in spite of the oppressive blackness of loneliness in whatever way we can. To condemn that fragile tendril of love that pulls us together because it’s “immoral” or “he/she’s not like us” is to damn a soul to the slowest death of all: death by disassociation.
But how to flesh out the subtle undercurrents of loneliness, what this private madness does to the heart and the mind? Soliloquy and invective are not the best media for his message. How can the depth and subtle nuances of loneliness be revealed in a new way?
Enter “Bianca”. That is, Lars orders a “Real Girl”. A real girl is a fully, uh, functional, anatomically correct, uh, partnership doll. We’re talking 150 pounds of incredibly realistic-looking female with a synthetic skin and go-go boots.
While the townspeople immediately ruminate on Lars’ sexual designs on Bianca, we see that it was not horndoggery that brought the two together, it was Lars’ deep abiding need to love someone, even if that love could not be given back in equal measure. And in this we see a new face of loneliness, as Monsieur Hugo said, that while it is fine to be loved, a far, far finer thing it is to love.
Further, we see that aspect of projection that is so deeply hidden in deep loneliness. Lars projects the life he dreams he and his dream-girl living. He doesn’t force Bianca to wear risqueée clothing Bianca was shipped with, he immediately seeks to clothe her in the demure jumpers of his sister-in law. He sees cute winter wear and thinks “Wouldn’t that look great on her”. He fabricates in her life story that she is half-Danish to be like the, I assume, Danish-Americans both he and his brother represent (Lars and Gus[tav] - chances are in my favor ).
He imagines so much more than just sex – he imagines life: trips to the lake, a heartfelt serenade, taking his best girl to church, and introducing her to his brother and sister-in-law.
Director Craig Gillespie, thankfully, never leaves Bianca’s inanimate form as a Weekend At Bernie’s sight gag. When Bianca flumps over she is set aright and tenderly covered with a blanket. When she needs a bath, Gus and his wife oblige. Her beauty and texture are realized to be an asset as she “models” in the window of a mall boutique. In short, she’s real because the world relates to her, because they relate to Lars, and out of their love for this home-town boy turned a little odd, they realize he needs this relationship to learn to re-connect.
Lars’ path is shepherded by the fantastic Patricia Clarkson, who plays the aforementioned doctor. Together these two talk about loneliness and help Lars begin to break his emotional ice. Lars is so shy that mere touching feels to him as burning, and that social interactions drive him to painful wincing and panic-attack. Ryan Gosling does a great job conveying the desperation and the shame interwoven into his character. I’d never seen anything the gentleman had done before and I must say I believe he will continue to do great things in future.
And the wild-card in the whole story is the incredibly sweet, warm, and loving Margo played perfectly by Kelli Garner ( incidentally, mad propz for being fearless enough to go lite on the makeup, simple on the hair, and un-chic on the wardrobe: believable and fearless ). A girl whose winter-ready Toyota hatchback might benefit from a warm guy checking its tires, a girl who, I felt, secretly dreams of a sweet guy walking her back to the car after she finishes singing in the choir, a man who will laugh with her when that beautiful throw turns into a gutter ball at the last second.
In all, at the end, I felt I knew Lars, I knew his world, and I appreciated his wonderful family and caring town. I felt good knowing that in their quirky Northern wastes they could count on each other and that love and brotherhood are always in the places where you least expect to find them.
The fact that I saw a few ladies walk out with Kleenexes proves to me that the message of the “Real Girl” is that true and abiding love we all recognize as genuine. Don’t judge this too quickly, or you may miss out on something insightful and true.
