Kam and I had a brilliant idea: we decided to go see a movie. I haven't seen one in ages; been too busy. Was a little distressed to discover that I not only hadn't seen most of the Oscar-nominated films, I hadn't even heard of several of them. Of course, most aren't in theatres any more; this was really more an \"I've got to get back to seeing more movies as they come out\" kind of impulse than anything else.<\/p>\n
So we narrowed it down to two choices for this evening: Gosford Park<\/cite> (which I've heard mixed but mostly positive reviews for) and Kissing Jessica Stein<\/cite> (which I'd never heard of, but sounded like fun fluff). After dinner, we settled on the latter.<\/p>\n (Note:<\/strong> If you're the sort of person who wants to see a movie without knowing anything at all about it, stop reading here. I'll try to avoid big spoilers in the below, but I do talk in general terms about whether I liked the ending or not.)<\/p>\n Hard to give this movie a coherent review, unfortunately. It looks at first like it's going to be yet another entry in the young-dykes-in-love romantic comedy genre (come to think of it, the last movie I saw also looked like that's what it was going to be); in this case, a neurotic young (female) Jewish copyeditor in NYC, unlucky in love, decides on a whim to answer a women-seeking-women ad. It turns out that the woman who placed the ad, named Helen, is a freewheeling art-gallery manager who, bored with her three boyfriends, is looking for something new.<\/p>\n The movie is charming, and funnier than I expected, and it sets up some standard romantic-comedy humor-of-embarrassment moments which it then doesn't deliver on, much to my relief. Which is to say, it often does something other than what I expected, in a good way. The acting is generally good, and the assorted best-friend characters are totally charming, especially the gay male couple who work with Helen. Despite a paucity of sets and a perhaps over-reliance on shots of the NYC skyline, the movie doesn't have the shoestring-budget feel that so many dyke films have. Unfortunately, the ending is disappointing. Interesting, but disappointing. I can't say more than that without major spoilers—I've probably already said too much—but I felt that I needed to mention this, because the ending is the only reason I can't wholeheartedly recommend the film. (It has other flaws, but they're mostly fairly small ones—though if a viewer were to find the protagonist's neuroses and breathy voice slightly more annoying than I did, that might push the movie over the line into unwatchable.)<\/p>\n Still, I think it's worth seeing. And it's apparently distributed by 20th Century Fox, which I imagine is a good thing, though I don't really know. (It's being shown in art-houses anyway, of course.)<\/p>\n I should note that I think Kam liked the whole thing (even the ending), so it may just be me being over-critical.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kam and I had a brilliant idea: we decided to go see a movie. I haven’t seen one in ages;…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}