Outstanding movie.
Also apparently a perfect storm of indie flickdom, since none of the major players seem to have done much either before or afterward. I hope Woody Allen likes this movie, given how much of it is an homage to his style. Julia and I also thought of Kevin Smith*, but in hindsight really not.
My two biggest nitpicks are that (at first) Jessica Stein comes off as a rather annoying person (the way she takes her job and her supposed intelligence so seriously, though I assume we're meant to take both her and Helen less than 100% seriously), and that plot points are resolved so quickly/breezily sometimes, as if "oh yeah... but it turned out like this." (They overuse the "Three Months Later" narration card.)
Even so, probably better to resolve things too breezily than to drama queen it all and club the audience over the head on various points.
It's a sweet movie, a flawed movie whose flaws are all the more endearing, about two human beings and their sweet relationship (with a lower-case "r"). The more I think about it better this works as a Woody Allen movie, where the Woody character happens to be female.
*- Julia mistakenly believed she'd already seen Kissing Jessica Stein. The movie to which she'd incorrectly associated that title is actually Chasing Amy, which we've both seen. I saw it in a Boston movie theater with a guy friend. Just about everyone in the theater arrived as same-sex twosomes. I might have been the only straight guy in the theater.
(Yes, my friend realized I was straight. We liked each other's company all the same. Now I wish I remembered better who attended the housewarming party at my Boston studio. This guy Scott was either 1/3 or 1/5 of my guest list. There was also Peter and Ashlie, and as I was typing this I became 90% sure of who my other two guests were: two Harvard guys who were dating at the time of the housewarming but broke up shortly after that. So a guy-guy couple, a guy-gal couple, a single gay guy, and a single straight guy, and the latter two saw Chasing Amy together a few weeks later.)
Posted by Matt Bruce at December 20, 2006 12:36 AM