We managed to catch some movies over the holiday break.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding is what everybody says it is -- a feel-good movie, a fine date movie, not glossy Hollywood inanity but not particularly deep, either. It's perhaps a measure of its limitations that when I got up to get popcorn the heroine was old and depressed, and when I returned she was young, vivacious and meeting Prince Charming -- not a flashback but a makeover accomplished with contact lenses, the right shampoo and a night course or two. The ensuing courtship was just as quick and bump-free as the duckling-to-swan transformation. Who has time for psychological depth when there's a wedding to put on? The other notable nuptual movie of 2002, Monsoon Wedding, manages to cram in pathos, social commentary and cultural specificity alongside the predictable jokes and colorful festivities, but such a comparison doesn't make the Greek version less enjoyable than the Punjabi one. See 'em both.
Far From Heaven is perhaps the opposite of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a "feel-bad" movie likely to send you and your date out of the theater with separate frowns instead of a shared smile. (That's not a criticism: some movies, like some drinks, are meant to be bitter.) As has been widely pointed out, it is a tribute to the "women's films" of the fifties like Magnificent Obsession and All That Heaven Allows, but Todd Haynes intentionally uses themes such as homosexuality and race which the 50's films couldn't touch. More than that, it's a movie about the limitations of movies: where Greek Wedding tries to finesse its superficiality, Far From Heaven is all about surfaces. Its visual lushness is matched by performances from the cast which are just as stylized and as carefully over the top. (Someone should put on a saturated-color film festival of Far From Heaven, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Fassbinder's Lola.)
24-Hour Party People is a mockumentary about a musical period that I knew nothing about (the "post-punk" club scene of Manchester, England and bands like Joy Division and New Order). I assume from the few inside jokes I did get (mostly about film) that it must be chock-full of them with regard to the music, British pop culture and life in Manchester. Not a send-up in the vein of This is Spinal Tap, but not quite a historical drama like Velvet Goldmine (there's Todd Haynes again), it's a little of both. Mostly it's a wittily self-referential piece about history and what it means to set out to "make" it, inspired by a love of time and place. When I got lost in the specifics, I kept orienting myself by imagining that Richard Linklater could have made a similar movie about the Armadillo or Raul's or Liberty Lunch.