Thanksgiving dinner and Rachel Getting Married

Sean and I had Thanksgiving dinner with Thomas (Sean's friend with whom we're staying) and his family. It was a warm, pleasant time. Every pissant bone in my body was melted.

After dinner, Sean and I went to Rachel Getting Married. I thought it was quite good, despite the severe case of motion sickness that struck me after five minutes of jittery camerawork. The director, Jonathan Demme, shot Married in the Dogma 95 tradition, a movement I've always liked in theory more than in practice (look, we use cinematic artifice to make the film look like a documentary. so natural! so real!)

The camerawork aimed for a psychological effect (intimacy) but instead got a physiological one (nausea). Assuming that you might be less prone to this side-effect than I am, I'd highly recommend Married. I loved how the film was political at heart, yet never once made any of its themes explicit. The marriage in Married, both the actual ceremony and the interracial union in particular, represents a liberal wet dream of multiculturalism and collectivism (notice how Demme incorporates video his actors shot into the final movie). So, in short, it's fun, devastating, and always engaging to watch Anne Hathaway self-destruct amidst the blue state Utopia.