Cinema Nova, 09/03/10
Status: Behinder and behinder!
A number of things have kept me from the movies lately:
- A camping holiday in the Otway Ranges
- Reading The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen
- Seeing Calexico in Thornbury (I’d often wondered if you could fit maracas, lap steel, trumpets, xylophone and piano accordion all into the same lo-fi mariachi track. Apparently, it is the only way to do it)
- Writing, writing, writing
- Reading other people’s comic blogs
- Watching the second season of Mad Men (I occasionally watch TV. You won’t tell cinema, will you?)
- A lack of anything that I actually want to see (yes, Valentine’s Day, I’m looking at you)
Precious dragged me off my derriere, however, and off to the cinema I went. For 106 minutes of the 110 minute running time, I wished I was doing anything else on my itemized list (even Valentine’s Day - things were desperate indeed).
It’s not that I didn’t like the film - far from it - it’s just so awful. So hopeless and bleak and, well, utterly, utterly hopeless. Precious (newcomer GABOUREY SIDIBE) is 16, illiterate, black, poor, has 2 kids as a result of a lifetime of rape by her father and has just been kicked out of school. There’s no happy here. What there is, instead, are staggering performances (from MO’NIQUE, MARIAH CAREY of all people and LENNY KRAVITZ), a moving story and a great script (including one of a very few successful uses of voice-over I can think of).
I found it really hard work, but the pacing, characters and neat little cinematic tricks to lift the tone meant it wasn’t undigestible. Ultimately, it was even a little bit rewarding. More so, I dare say, than Valentine’s Day would’ve been.
