Chaos Theory

I watched two movies that fit together quite nicely, and both really spoke to me: The Butterfly Effect (strongly advocated by my brother or I never would have gone there) and Rabbit Hole directed by John Cameron Mitchell of my favourite film of all time: Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

There's a part in Rabbit Hole where Kidman is given a comic book created by the guy who killed her kid, and I was so afraid her husband would destroy it. I didn't care nearly as much about the kid as I did about that piece of artwork. Make a copy dammit!! He worked so hard on that. These people are not to be trusted - they're too angry and broken to be rational! Get it out of that house! Spoiler alert: the comic book was safe.

Okay, real spoiler alerts from here on in:

The Butterfly Effect is about a guy who blacks out from time to time, and realizes that he can go back to these blackout sections of time to alter the future. But what he discovers is that no matter what he does, it never makes the future perfect. He can get close, but there's always someone damaged or suffering. He decides it's best if it's him. An honourable gesture, and it all works out in the end, I guess, except he and his girl aren't together - and she was pretty happy with him.

But the take-home message is that it will never be perfect. There will always be some suffering. Deal with it. And we can never really be in control of it all. Even if you can go back to the past to save the world, you can't know how your actions there will affect everyone. Marty McFly's parents got sporty. Who knew?

Rabbit Hole is about a couple who lost their child to a car accident - hit by a teenage driver right in front of their house. The teen writes a comic book about parallel universes. After Kidman rails against the God-lovers who thinks children die because God needs more angels, her mom (Dianne Wiest - I wish she was my mom) tells her everyone needs a form of comfort. Something. For some people it's God. Give them a break already.

Kidman reads more about this parallel universe stuff, and it's clear she gets some comfort from the idea that it's possible there's a different version of her, and her family, somewhere else, and in that version they're all happy and safe. This is just the sad version here. That really helps her cope with it all.  (It reminds me a lot of the Chaos episode of Community.)

Neither of those work for me, but I feel really good when I walk about outside and look at the trees and the moon. It's the same moon that you see too. It hangs out there for the whole world to see. It's constant - more or less. Nature reminds me of how small and insignificant I really am - but I mean that in the best possible way. My problems are petty little blips in the grand scheme of things. Nothing compares with eternity. And I'm part of this eternity - this galaxy. I'm larger than it all. And smaller too.

And that's okay.

An Anti-Censorship Theme: Shortbus and Not Yet Rated

I'm a big fan of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, so my review of Shortbus is strongly biased, but I just loved it. That's about all I really have to say, but I'll drag it out to fill the space. It's starts with a woman, Sofia, having crazy wild sex with her husband. It turns out she's a sex therapist, so that seems to make sense. Actually it starts with a guy in a bathtub who needs couples' counselling, and he and his partner end up at Sofia's practice. But as she's helping this young couple, who are considering having an open relationship, it becomes clear that the therapist has never had an orgasm. This premise I find a bit questionable, but theorize that it's like all the people with emotional problems who end up getting psych degrees. The problem leads them to the interest in the subject, but the study of the subject doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Ya, I have psych degree. Shut-up.

The movie has us watching the evolution of Sofia and this couple and a variety of other assorted characters that pop up here and there. It made me all teary at the end. I loved the movie because I really loved some of the characters. Sofia was actually my least favourite, and I wished she was more of a minor player, except in her scenes with Severin who I want to hug forever. I want to go to the bar they all hang out in ... just to talk.

But what everyone's talking about is the fact that throughout the movie all the sex scenes are real. And the opening masturbating scene is quite an eye-full, so to speak. There are lots and lots of naked penises which we normally never see in a mainstream film.

The film's definitely not pornography, if that's what you're after. The sex scenes are about the characters getting off, not the audience. They were startlingly un-erotic, very real, and comical at times like real-life sex can be. I appreciated that by the end, the sex scenes were almost common place, just another important part of our lives.

But it made me think about Tom Cruise and JLo and other actors that tend to hook up with their co-stars from each film they make. I think our attitudes often follow our behaviours and not the other way around. I don't think we decide how we feel, then behave accordingly, but instead we typically behave a certain way, register it, and rationalize our attitudes after-the-fact (whether we want to believe it or not). We like to think we're rational and carefully deciding our course of actions, but we're really led by our guts or instincts or sentiment (as Hume would have it), and then convince ourselves we intended it all along.

Anyway, I've often thought about actors pretending to fall in love, kissing and simulating sex, saying incredibly written lines to one another time and again for weeks. Surely many actors are convinced of their feelings after playing the part with someone they have a bit of chemistry with. I mean, I sometimes develop a bond with someone at work after finishing a difficult project together. If kissing were involved, I'd likely be rotating partners with each project too.

But the people in Shortbus are actually having sex with each other. And, unlike many pornos, their lines are about developing close emotional bonds. Does that lead to more likelihood of hooking up or less? Does one keep more emotional distance the closer the pretend intimacy is, or is everything vested in the scene, guts and all? The film used several actors who were already in a relationship (James and Jamie), so that reduces the dilemma. But it makes me think.

As for This Film Is Not Yet Rated, it has great potential. It's a very informative doc about the film rating system that moves through the process of understanding the sneaky underhanded system for what it is. It builds up nicely with the filmmaker hiring a private investigator (who gives a beautiful speech during their stake-out), but the climax falls flat. Here's the big ending:

WARNING - SPOILER ALERT:

he finds out the names of the people on the rating board. It's a big secret, see, but he found those names. I needed something bigger after all the build-up. What a let down. But even though it just seemed to stop, there were still some very worthwhile memorable bits in the during part. Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry) and Atom Egoyan really stood out for me. I'd recommend it for a rainy day with nothing else to do - unless you're a film buff. Then it's a must-see for educational purposes.

I also watched Crank. Don't make the same mistake. Just because Jason Statham was in Lock, Stock... and Snatch doesn't mean this isn't shite.