Blue Valentine

I finally got round to watching Blue Valentine, directed by Derek Cianfrance. I thought the film looked really promising and I’d wanted to see it for a log time. The film didn’t exactly break any box office records, but it had won a small handful of awards at American independent film festivals. Anyhow, I didn’t see how I could go wrong with a romance starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle William, two of my favourite actors. The film included improvised dialogue from the actors during the film, which is just one of the current and contemporary things about the film.

Blue Valentine is a film about a couple called Cindy and Dean. The film cuts back and forth from the early days of their relationship to its painful breakdown years later. The film shows them meeting when Cindy is a student living with her unhappy parents and looking after her grandmother, and Dean is working for moving and storage company. The couple rush into a marriage after discovering Cindy is pregnant, even though they are not sure whether Dean is he father, or if it is Cindy’s previous boyfriend. There is a strong contrast between their life as a young couple, when they are beautiful and effervescent, to the future when Cindy and Dean are older and their exhaustion from their relationship is all too apparent.

 The film is incredibly sad and somehow completely unromantic. It’s a completely realistic and unflinching love story. It is basically about a relationship where once they were devoted, and now one of them just has nothing left to give. The performances were, of course, stunning, as was the whole production of the film. The film included an excellent use of music, and I can’t usually hack it when songs have been written especially for a film, but I thought it worked really well on this occasion.

Blue Valentine takes a very alternative and simple approach to the almost taboo subject of falling in then out of love. I couldn’t fully get my head around it and I think that’s why it will stay with me for a long time.

Me and you and everyone we know

‘Me and you and everyone we know’ written and directed by Miranda July, received mixed reactions across the board. Some hailing it as ‘a quiet masterpiece’, others appeared to frankly detest the whole film. I have to say, I found watching the film not exactly a pleasant experience. As I did when watching Terence Malick’s ‘the Tree of Life’, I felt as though I was being excluded by the film by the fact that, ‘I didn’t really get it’. I often enjoy alternative films, but I just couldn’t see the emperor’s new clothes here.

The plot, a word I’m playing a bit fast and loose with here, focuses around Christine (Miranda July), a cab driver and video artist, trying to get her work displayed at her local gallery and Richard (John Hawkes), a shoe salesman and recently single dad. The two of them eventually end up together, after what seemed like a lifetime of their mishaps and struggles. It was enough to make me want me yell at them through the television screen to ‘get a grip’. The film included a whole other variety of characters though. There was Richard’s neighbour, a little girl who collects kitchen appliances for her ‘dowry’. A rather bleak sentiment, I felt. There was an art gallery curator who liked send dirty messages to whom she hadn’t realised was Richard’s young son (creepy). The was also Richard’s colleague at the shoe shop, a man who leaves sexual messages for two teenage girls to see, about what he’d ‘do to them’ (creepier). The art gallery served nicely as a metaphor for the film whole pretentiousness. Like the scene where an artist puts a hamburger wrapper on the ground and calls it art, they apparently filmed some weirdo’s stumbling around and called it a film.

Overall, I feel the film had an effect of indie blandness, the jokes weren’t funny and the characters had no likeability. I didn’t understand why the characters acted in such a bizarre acted way. For example, there was a scene in which Richard sets is hand on fire, this apparently an act to represent his turmoil into despair and his struggle to stay afloat, but wasn’t it just an incredibly stupid and irresponsible thing to do? The film especially awful, it just didn’t do it for me. It made me realise why I love socially realistic films, because they’re about real people, with real problems, and these are dealt with. However, this film won awards at the Cannes and the Sundance film festivals, so what do I know.

The Station Agent

When I first heard abut ‘the Station Agent’, directed by Tom McCarthy, I wasn’t exactly thrilled. The whole unconventional friendship genre, is one I feel a type of film that is often overdone, and just a basic plotline for directors, that end up being movies, that are often generic, laced with artificial sweeteners, fake sentiment, or worse, the main characters sleeping with each other at the end, as an apparently suitable conclusion to a story. I was concerned that I might find the whole film a little twee, definitely not suiting to my tastes. However I was a bit more than pleasantly surprised.
The film revolves around Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage), a dwarf who works in a toy trains store, his only real enthusiasm being for trains. Fin is withdrawn from society, wanting to avoid being scrutinised for his differences. His only real friend is the man who runs the store where he works, who, when he dies suddenly, leaves Fin an abandoned train depot, in the middle of nowhere, New Jersey. There, Fin meets Joe (Bobby Cannnavale), a Cuban American who runs his Dad’s refreshment van, and, despite Fin’s obvious desire to be left alone, is very talkative and relentless in his attempt to make friends. We also meet Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), a hapless artist, trying to cope with the loss of her son and the breakdown of her marriage. All three characters have their struggles, Fin’s difficulty to be seen as just a normal person by society, Joe’s life being blighted by his Dad’s illness and Olivia’s immense loss and grief. However, only when they come together do Fin and Olivia learn that instead of pushing people away, they can have a friendship that brings them joy for the first time in a long time.
Extremely rarely do you find a film with three such likeable main characters, which is what makes this a remarkable film. Fin’s stoicism is peculiarly endearing, though even better when he lets his hard exterior crack, and he gives in to Joe’s puppy like insistence on bonding, and the pair go for walks along the tracks together. Patricia Clarkson, as Olivia plays such a real and troubled portrayal of a woman devastated by loss its heartbreaking. For me, though, my favourite character had to be Joe, his attempts to befriend the other, making his own loneliness more apparent, which really tugged at my heartstrings, as well as his willingness to treat Fin like any normal person, regardless., makes Joe especially loveable. 
I think that this was a film about loneliness, and outsiders coming together. Only when Fin meets the others, does he discover that to be forever alone isn’t what he really wants. This was demonstrated in particular part of the film, where Fin waits outside Olivia’s house, just to see her when she won’t return his calls, unimaginable at the beginning of the film, and completely touching. This film really spoke to me, as I think it would to anyone who ever feels like an outsider, or sometimes chooses to be lonely over the strains of social interaction. ‘The Station Agent’ was such a simple film, yet was absolutely wonderful. Although it didn’t get itself caught in all the hidden meanings, it still spoke really loudly.

Lizzie