Shopping yesterday, I saw Leaving Las Vegas on a shelf, cheap. I didn't buy it. I would have to be paid a lot to ever watch that thing again. And yet it is an utterly necessary part of the canon -- what one has to have seen to be morally literate. It is a picture of despair that conveys despair. It also carries the message that love in the most twisted circumstances is still love.
I own Smooth Talk. I haven't watched it in years. Laura Dern plays a confused and bored teenage girl, in a very bad relationship with her mother. Her character is raped, coerced into sex by the most violent verbal attack I have ever heard on the screen. Somehow the claustrophobia of the kid's life, the violence of the mother, the different but related violence of the sexual predator, get under the viewer's skin in this movie, in a way that doesn't happen with louder, more graphic, bloodier productions. The things a miracle. I don't intend to ever watch it again. I think everybody serious should go rent it and watch it once.
Posted by shea0017 at December 24, 2004 1:38 PM