08 November 2007

Last Life in the Universe

This movie was oddly stupid. It's a strange pastiche of features, like when you're trying to cook dinner with leftovers and you find yourself throwing together things that just really don't work because you can't decide what in the hell you're making, so you end up with a big gooey mess that is made of lots of delicious things but tastes kind of bland and vaguely unpleasant.

So it seems like here we started with a suicidal main character (which allows for random flashes of death scene fantasies) who also happens to be highly obsessive (cue shots of labeled sock drawers, neat stacks of things in apartment), threw in some Mob action (cue gory murder scenes), then decided to to pair him with a quirky chick whose sister is a callgirl (cue sex club scenes). Just for fun, let's have them not really speak the same language (cue adorable translation problems, also long scenes where they both speak charmingly accented english). And she'll be leaving town in a few days, to add that fleeting love affair feel. Let's also make her ex-boyfriend an abusive asshole, to add some tension. Oh, and we can make her a stoner, so that there's at least one scene where she's really high and things can randomly fly through the air in a charming magical realism sort of way (because that's what happens when you're high?). So we throw all those together, and see what happens, eh guys? Right?

So what happens? Not a goddamn thing. These various features play themselves out in a rather disinterested fashion, albeit with very lovely visuals, and then the movie just kinda ends. Oh wait - they play themselves out _very_ slowly. I watched the entire movie in 1.4 time (god bless my dvd player) and it was still too slow.

It's strange, because the characters are actually quite sympathetic, but there's just no momentum to the movie at all. It's beautiful, but lacks any kind of emotional pull. Really not worth watching, sad to say.

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