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Published on December 14, 2004

It was absolutely freezing in my room this morning. The heat was on and I had a thin blanket or two, but anytime my hand or foot would protrude from under the covers it was met with quasi-icy air. I guess there is a disadvantage to having huge windows and a 15-foot ceiling, namely lack of insulation, and well, convection.

Worked on the car a little more last night. Found some parts that I thought I’d have to dig around for, not an appealing prospect at 11 p.m. in the world’s messiest garage with only a shoplight. I hooked up the fuel supply line and sorted out some of the sensors and vacuum lines that snake around the intake manifold.

I watched All the Real Girls last night too, kind of an indie romance/drama thing. The director grew up in the mountains around here, and that’s where the movie is set, so the locations and vistas were very familiar indeed. The cinematography was really breathtaking, capturing details here and there instead of grabbing the scene all at once as a means of establishing place, and it worked to slow down the pace of the movie, reflecting the themes and the nature of the area in which the movie is set, small-town NC, where time crawls by out of sync with the rest of the world.

I think my familiarity worked against me as far as the analysis of the dialogue. For at least the first half-hour or so, I was so concerned with whether they were going to present regionally-correct characterizations that a lot of the lines and the nuance just walked right by me. But once I got over the fact that the film isn’t an exercise in cinerealism, I really enjoyed it. I doubt anybody in small-town NC would speak the way they did, or at least they’d take a lot longer to do it, but it doesn’t mean the things they express aren’t accurate, and maybe I’m just not giving local folks the benefit of the doubt. In any case, some of the lines and monologues are incredibly poetic.

Good film. Familiar enough to hit close to home in a lot of ways, but aloof enough to distill the vulnerability and motivations of its characters and crystallize those into compelling interactions.

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8 Comments

  1. _fivestars says:

    All the Real Girls… isn’t that another Zooey Deschanel film?

  2. deepr_still says:

    heh heh. She gotcha there, Matt. It’s Jennifer Connelly all over again…

    So you would recommend it? Always looking for a good, interesting, out of the main stream movie to watch…but it’s not always easy to find em. And i’d rather not waste my time looking. But if it gets the Matt approval rating of 7 or above, i might give it a shot.

  3. admin says:

    Jennifer Connelly? I watched Labyrinth a grand total of one time when you were around… Not like I went out of my way to rent movies featuring her.

    Yes, I’d recommend it. You and Kristi would probably enjoy it a good deal. Be prepared for a handful of automotive inaccuracies in the script, but it’s nothing insurmountable.

  4. admin says:

    Perhapsibly. But in all honesty, after the first few minutes, the quality of the rest of the movie overtook any initial draw she provided.

  5. _fivestars says:

    I was just asking. :(

  6. admin says:

    You’re misreading my tone of voice (tone of write?). I’m not in the least upset that you pointed out the “Zooey Deschanel connection.” It is a big part of why I rented the film in the first place. But it’s always nice to discover that it stands on its own quite well apart from the presence of the initial attraction :)

  7. Anonymous says:

    /es/\\e

    You’ve thought about this before right? or was that… one reason guys think girls are “weird” is that in most cases if there is a boy/girl friendship the girl is definitely going to think “down the road”, “where is this going” and if she is over 21 that will include marriage. And then when the guy, who is usually unaware of this thought process (because she hides it very well) continues to treat her as a friend, she ends up “hurt” and treats him accordingly… :-7 oh and often the girl is unaware of what she is doing…

    Yeah whether she will admit it or not she would like the knight in shinning armor to be her best friend… sex, strength, mixed with trust and conversation… lethal stuff…

    Do you still have the movie? Could I borrow it?? Being from the mountains (ok, ok my mother being from the mountains…) I would love to discuss the small town NC nuance and vocal stylings….