Everything I’ve experienced since last March could be
categorized as confusion, depression, relief or frustration. Now, I find myself
surrounded by a cloud of uncertainty and worn down by waves constantly banging at
my cliff face and eroding my already fractured foundation. I’m not battle
ready, but rather battle weary. To use a legal expression, I keep wanting to
make myself whole again. In this pursuit, I’m plugging holes but always
leaking. Trying to follow a path while being continually knocked off my tracks.
Right around the time of having watched Friends with
Benefits and Crazy, Stupid, Love I made an interesting life
decision. My angel and I are moving in together sometime this summer. She’s
moving back to Texas from Florida
and taking a job that pays $4k less per year. My “sacrifice” is far less
impressive. I’m moving back to Lewisville,
where I lived before getting sick, which is 10 miles closer to where I work.
And speaking of work, I recently made another interesting life decision that
has me chewing ice during the day and grinding my teeth at night while I sleep.
A full-time position opened up at work and for the past 3 weeks I’ve been
participating in a tryout process, along with two other candidates. I won’t say
that I deserve this job, but I’ve certainly earned it. What that translates to
remains to be seen.
Last week I started looking at apartments. Which apartment
we get depends largely on our collective income. Earlier today my angel called
me to tell me she got the job she interviewed for and was excited that they
were offering more money than expected. My understanding (which isn’t worth
much) is that I’ll be finding out about the result of the tryouts by the end of
next week. I’m not used to things working out, at least not with respect to any
plan I’ve ever made, but we’ll see. Getting this job will make a lot of things
easier, but I don’t remember the last time life made anything easy for me. If
you combine the apartment, heart, career, and relationship toppings you have my
diet of stress pizza with extra stress sauce. The oven baking it all is my
current residence that, even with all doors and windows open on a rainy day
like today, is determined to stay between 85 and 90 degrees.
Going back to the above mentioned movies for a moment, there
is an annoying trend in rom-coms of mocking the genre for its lack of realism,
fairy tale expectations and bow-tying endings, then hypocritically going with
the conventionally sappy ending (see the flash mob and graduation speech). Surprisingly,
I still enjoyed both films, even though I don’t think I would call either good
or recommend them as anything beyond background noise. Friends and Crazy
aren’t the reason I decided to give it another go with my angel, but I’d be
lying if I said they didn’t, at the very least, make me reevaluate the relationship.
I put more stock in making someone else happy and having
that be one of the pillars of life. Still, I think cinema needs more movies
like (500) Days of Summer and The Break-Up. Art is duty bound to
be a reflection of life. I don’t think most people go into relationships expecting
failure, as I do, but there’s no denying that some couples build Lego castles
while others make Jenga towers. Did I mention that this is our second attempt
at cohabitation? The last time, seven years ago, I made an ass of myself, which
she is more than happy to remind me of, and, based on that alone, I’m shocked
that we’ve been in contact all these years and have maintained a reasonably
positive relationship. She made an amusing comment yesterday, comparing herself
to Amy Farrah Fowler from The Big Bang Theory. My goal this go-around is
to not tear at her wings, and instead make her sacrifice worthwhile. I hesitate
to call that maturity. But I do recognize that I’m thinking more in terms of
“we” than “me.”
For those of you who are trying to connect the dots, In
Her Skin has absolutely nothing to do with what I’ve mentioned above.
Thematically, it’s very different from the love stories I’ve written about in recent
months. I did, however, watch Mystic River a few weeks ago, and before
that, Gone, which was a huge disappointment. I don’t run across many
disappearance movies, excluding, of course, the garbage you still find on
Lifetime and other similar B networks, which probably explains why this movie
came out of Australia.
Australians are well represented in American film and television, but I don’t
recall seeing any content originating form the continent.
Miranda Otto, who most know from The Lord of the Rings,
is a native Australian, but Guy Pearce (Memento) is English, and Sam
Neil (Jurassic Park) and Ruth Bradley and are from Ireland. As something
to fall asleep to, I recently watched Lockout. It wasn’t the worst thing
I’ve seen this year, but it is a tragic waste of Pearce’s acting talent. I’m
interested to see how he comes across in Prometheus and Iron Man 3.
Neil was one of the highlights of Daybreakers, but I cringe at the idea
of a Jurassic Park IV.
My interest in Bradley goes beyond filmography. I knew from
the moment I saw her in this movie that something didn’t add up, especially
after her topless scene. Bradley has some of the most beautiful breasts I’ve
ever seen, both in shape and size, but her arms and legs were unusually thick
and her face looked like someone who just underwent a dramatic weight loss
(thinned out face but fat body). I kept thinking to myself “she’d be more
attractive than the girl she’s jealous of if she lost a few pounds.” From
certain angles, Bradley reminded me a lot of Natalie Portman. After doing a
little research, I found out that Bradley gained weight for the role, going
from a size 10 to 16 within just a few weeks. Bradley’s weight gain and the overall
filling out of her body is almost a cautionary tale of what can happen if you
stop exercising and start eating like an American.
My main criticism of In Her Skin is that there was a
good chunk of the middle of the movie that I had absolutely no idea what was
going on. This is because the director wanted to convey the perspective of a
soon-to-be murderer and her increasing loss of touch with reality. I can
understand the desire to tell a story from a crazy person’s viewpoint, but it
doesn’t take much to completely confuse a narrative, especially when you have
time jumps and time periods played by different actors representing the same
characters. Gone is much more effective in blurring the line between
delusion and reality.
This movie is a great example of what happens when a
community continues to cover for and justify the actions of someone who shows
clear signs of mental disturbance instead of turning them over to the proper authorities
for psychiatric treatment. Still, the only difference between this and Lifetime
movies is better acting and accents.
http://www.ifcfilms.com/videos/in-her-skin-2
