Welcome, all, to the second installment of Netflix Nerdery--where the explosions are bigger, the women are hotter, and the particularly unfashionable bifocals resting on the bridge of your noses are actually taped together. Okay, so I didn’t have to bring up the bit about the glasses to accentuate the thrill of this second blog installment--everyone in Richmond wears those. Let’s get down to business.
The weather lately has been bipolar, and millions of people every year are affected by the aptly acronymed disorder called SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Symptoms of the disorder include a loss of appetite, decreased social activities, and even a decrease of your sex drive. And since this disorder is so common, I thought I could shed some light on how to lessen its effects. Light treatment is the best known treatment--and Netflix can help! If nothing else, the glow from your screen should be beneficial. And for this week's column, I have chosen five movies where the main characters are dysfunctional.
Lars and the Real Girl:
Lars is lonely and delusional. So he does what any lonely delusional person would do--buys a life-sized sex doll over the Internet, promptly falls in love with her, and starts telling people that she's his girlfriend. At this point, his family decides it's time to intervene, as hopefully any brother and sister-in-law would do. Lars is a nice little fable about the loving ministrations of family and community, a kind of throwback to the age-old question of whether humans are inherently good. This movie travels back to the Hobbesian days and spits right in his face, which somehow gives it buoyancy.
Melancholia:
Although the dramatic tricks of this film are overbearingly obvious--a planet named Melancholia is about to collide with the earth--I found this movie visually stunning and interesting as a piece of artwork. The film follows the role of Justine and her marriage, celebrating a sumptuous party in the home--manor, if you will--of her sister and brother-in-law. Melancholia is a psychological disaster movie, and also a beautiful meditation on depression that is at times exasperating. Written and directed by Lars Von Trier, the mind behind the disturbing Antichrist (which is also on Netflix!), and the much better Dogville (not on Netflix!), the movie will disappoint some but enthrall others.
Me and You and Everyone We Know:
Miranda July has been making her way into the public’s eye for a while with her series of great short stories and her bizarre, affecting attempts at writing and directing films. Me and You and Everyone We Know is a poetic and observant meditation on how people struggle to connect with one another in the alienating contemporary world in which we live in. It tells the story of two individuals; Richard, a recently divorced, lonely shoe salesman, and Christine, an eccentric performance artist, whose connection to one another turns them both panicky. Meanwhile, Richard’s sons are co-mingling with people on the internet in hopes of finding their future wives. One of these scenes, involving a conversation about pooping, will forever be implanted in my mind.
Adaptation:
Adaptation is a semi-autobiographical story about its author, Charlie Kaufman. He is a gifted but profoundly neurotic screenwriter who, after the success of his previous film, Being John Malkovich, has been hired to write a script adapted from the nonfiction book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. In reality, the script becomes a documentation of Charlie Kaufman’s struggles while trying to produce a pure unadulterated non-Hollywood screenplay about orchids. After months of failing to start the script, Kaufman neurotically writes himself into the story, along with his (fictional) twin brother, Donald--both played by Nicholas Cage. Charlie and Donald's experiences in the Hollywood film industry play out as Kaufman’s examination of the creative process through a string of insecurities, neuroses, and self-doubt. Adaptation is experimental, quirky, outrageously clever, and one of my favorite films of all time.
Little Miss Sunshine:
This film is about family dysfunction at its heart. It asks what happens when a family that includes a heroin addict grandfather, a suicidal scholar brother, a failed motivational speaker father and his wife, a teen son who has taken a vow of silence, and a chubby, bifocal-clad preteen daughter who wins a chance to be a part of a beauty pageant, are thrown together on a roadtrip that no one but the daughter wants to take. The drama/comedy is a satire that plays on dysfunctional family dynamics so well that at points, you forget that there is anything seriously wrong with them. It is touching, melancholic, and downright hilarious all at once, with a remarkable cast (Steve Carell, Alan Arkin, Toni Colette, etc) to boot.