Ribbons of Revenge · 22:06 Uhr · Film · #
The revenge dramas generally suggest one of two opposed conclusions: revenge is troubling but necessary or a life-altering mistake. The religious movies aren't religious in the sense that they advocate a particular religious point of view or dramatize a religious story. They're religious in the sense that they presuppose and invite a religious view of life. They assume there's a higher power and perhaps a hell. They assume that good and evil are not rhetorical abstractions, but words to describe real cosmic forces at war in the universe and inside each person.
Like dreams, these movies are coded, half-involuntary responses to a post-9/11 world, and the fears of war, religious unrest, mass death and spiritual reckoning the event hatched. The movies are not precise or even outwardly purposeful, and none deals specifically with politics. But they are still movie dreams that work through real anxieties.
"13 Going on 30" · 10:40 Uhr · Film · #
In Gary Winick's "13 Going on 30" the lovely, coltishly awkward 13-year-old Jenna Rink gazes from afar at the snotty, popular girls in her class and whines, "I don't wanna be original; I wanna be cool."
The line resonates, because at 13, the age when kids long, paradoxically, both to fit in and to set themselves apart, it's so hard to see that to be original is to be cool. And particularly because it shows up so early in a picture that's clearly a polished, mainstream product, that line is an exciting promise.