Bright Star

There are very few movies I would see twice.

This one qualifies.

Not to say it was the single most brilliant piece of cinematic craft I've ever seen. It is simple and beautiful yet ridiculously compelling. Ridiculously. What the Japanese would call "wabi sabi".

While painfully beautiful it is not devoid of human lightness, irony and humor- including a rather hilarious sequence involving a Valentine...well, at least hilarious to me. It's still up for debate whether Valentines ( or emotions) were really that insanely serious back then. But then again, I've seen and heard funnier things in this *ahem* most rational and exalted day. Bright Star shows that life was just as strange and invigorating, slow and fast, as it is today.

On another note- Jane Campion's cinematography, will you marry me?


Quick, seriously. Grab a date and go! Seriously! Go by yourself if you must! There is enough hot English chastity in this film to compensate for any actual hot American chastity you might be experiencing with a date.



Seperately, regarding "Let the right one in."- Swedish Film

Bright Star is much more romantic than "Let the right one in.", though it is also painfully beautiful.

"Right One" seemed, to me, to delve gently into areas of sexual ambiguity ,not of orientation but of actual organs. What is a person when you can't define them but love them? How does the ambitiousness change your relationship?

The Ambiguity theme carried on into the violence of the vampire child. Can two children share a tender kiss while one is completely covered in the blood of its last victim? Can you hurt someone simply by putting them where they are not invited? To the point of bleeding out of the ears, mouth and eyes? "Right One" challenged me with paradoxical images...at least paradoxical on the mainstream screen. Beautiful violent children. Humans making vampires bleed. A daughter sucking her father's blood and throwing him out of a seventh story window, out of love. A romance without sexual organs.
Dang, I haven't been so confused since the bound-to-fail dating techniques of Nosferatu.


Dang, I've got to go. I'm having people over soon!