Aussie indie flick LOOK BOTH WAYS is playing it's last show in its stint at the Brattle this evening at 7.30. Check it out if you can! It's a beautiful little film. I'd missed it at the Boston Independent Film Festival due to scheduling conflicts and thank the Brattle I got to make up for it this weekend. =) I saw it Sunday afternoon with maybe a dozen other patrons. I know it's not great for the theater itself, but I hafta admit, I do enjoy catching some movies in near-empty rooms there.
It points up all my inappropriate laughter.
Heh.
And lots of opportunities for that in this flick, which grows out of the intersection of a sweetly, almost inappropriately, rambling painter who happens to witness a man vs. locomotive fight (the man loses) on her way home from her father's funeral, and a thoughtful and talented photojournalist, at the scene of the accident, on assignment for the local newspaper just hours after being diagnosed with cancer. The jokes just write themselves, don't they?
Okay, they don't, really, but against the background of this conjunction of morbid situations, the way these two personalities trip into each others lives is kind of sweet, maybe even a bit magical, and creates moments for laughs, both dark and bright.
Mostly dark. =)
From time to time the audience is given peeks into these characters' heads, seeing what each is imagining, and each in their own "native" artistic language. The painter, Meryl, sees deadly alternate realities, of random assaults, terrible accidents, and shark attacks, in painted animated visions. The photographer, Nick, sees death on the move everywhere, but for him, it's through the camera's lens, from wide-angled natural disasters to the macro warning signs of toxic materials and radiation to the microscopic single-mindedness of cancer cells. Wait til you see where their imaginations go when the prospect of sex is raised. Good times! =)
I was surprised when the picture became more of a multiplayer story, one of those that follows several threads of plot and character touched or triggered by a person, event, or series of events. In this case, spiderwebbing out from the death of the man on the railroad tracks. Not quite MASSIVELY multiplayer, like CRASH, more... ensemble, like STATION AGENT.
I won't go into the details of the other threads, but will say they all lead to very thoughtful, quirky, entertaining, and crossover-powerful places. The movie springs out of these people's being confronted with death, but in the telling it's about how they live and want to live.
Also, Meryl becomes pretty adorable. That don't hurt none.
Keep on keepin on~
1 comment:
It is always interesting going to movies together, as we tend to laugh at the same inappropriate stuff... There were a few laughs in the Clerks II screening the other day where I think I was the only person gut-bustingly laughing, but it was okay because the small crowd was generally into the movie.
I guess I just find donkey sex funny. Real funny...
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