Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

I'm beginning to get panicky about the conference paper I have yet to write for May 30 (the Slayage BtVS Conference), but know I'll have to make some serious progress on it tomorrow, or missmurchison will SO kick my butt! I'm trying not to let my resentment over the fact that my panel is scheduled opposite a vidding presentation by sisabet and sockkpuppett -- meaning that I won't get to attend their presentation, which kind of sucks -- distract me from my purpose, which is to get something halfway decent written, at least in rough draft form, by the end of this week.

Meanwhile, my procrastination yesterday afternoon (after a particularly draining church service, in which the only sounds during the hymns seemed to be my voice and the solo violin accompaniment -- which was fine for me, since the violin covers a multitude of vocal sins and lets me really 'belt out' on those high notes, but kind of defeats the purpose of congregational singing, if nobody else seems to be joining in, at least not at a volume my ears can detect) took the form of seeing two amusing movies back to back: "Monsieur Ibrahim" (Omar Sharif; in French with English subtitles -- a bit unusual, but I strongly recommend seeing it, if you get the chance) and "Laws of Attraction" (Pierce Brosnan -- which is usually reason enough to see any halfway tolerable film -- with a script that ALMOST starts to do him justice in the second half of the movie, and gives another nice plug to the Irish film industry). [Cuts for movie spoilers]


"Monsieur Ibrahim"

I didn't know what to expect with "Monsieur Ibrahim", but the review in the paper made it sound worth a look-see (and it just so happened that there was a matinee showing which would get out at exactly the right time for me to quietly segue into a showing of "Laws of Attraction" next door, since the Ebert & Roeper review of "Laws" had been scathing enough to make me think it might not be worth a trip to the theater and cost of a ticket all by its lonesome -- especially not for a poor, over-worked graduate student).

The film is set (for the most part) on a tiny street in Paris in what looks like the early 1960's, where young (maybe 14 years old?) Moses shares an old, book-filled apartment with his severely depressed and interpersonally-challenged father, his mom having apparently left them both many years earlier. The only "love" in Moses' life has to come from his friendly commercial transactions with the street-walkers stationed at six-foot intervals all along his street (in order to fund those transactions/experiments/adventures, he first breaks open his piggy-bank, and then -- when the first hooker who agrees to accept his 30 francs and his assurance that he's over 16 years old treats him very kindly and gently -- starts 'embezzling' the grocery money his father gives him) AND from M. Ibrahim, the "Arab" (actually a Turkish Sufi) who runs the open-8AM-to-midnight-seven-days-a-week grocery store across the street.

Moses ("Momo" for short) starts shop-lifting food items from Ibrahim (justifying it to himself on the grounds that Ibrahim IS, after all, an Arab and therefore his enemy) in order to be able to save his food money to feed a different kind of hunger, then learns that Ibrahim is aware of all this and ALLOWING him to steal ("If you must steal, I'd prefer you do it here") as an act of genuine kindness. Soon, in addition to accepting free food and housekeeping hints from Ibrahim (who tells him to offer his dad cat-food as "farmhouse pate" and to keep topping off the same bottle of beaujolais from a bottle of the cheapest wine), Momo is learning about life and love and religion from this charming old man (Omar Sharif LOOKS like an elderly Turkish shopkeeper with no wife to keep him shaved and tidy, but he's still got sparkle and charm to spare).

Though both Momo and Ibrahim conceal things from one another (Moses, for instance, hiding for some time the fact that his father has finally abandoned him altogether, as he happily sells off his father's books to pay his living expenses and buy records to enchant the cute girl downstairs who taught him to "Madison"), their affection for one another as adoptive father and son is always genuine and their deceits are never intended to hurt one other (unlike Moses' biological father, who lied to him about his "perfect" older brother Paulie who did everything right and was so much better than Moses in every way and now lives with his mother in parts unknown).

When Ibrahim and Moses at last make their father-son relationship legal and buy a bright red convertible to drive from Paris to Ibrahim's old home in Anatolia (Momo getting affectionate 'goodbye' kisses from each of the hookers on the street before they drive away), you can't help but smile and enjoy their happiness with one another and agree that they're both due for some good times.

I particularly enjoyed the scenes in Istanbul where Ibrahim teaches Momo about different faiths (all he knows about his own Jewish faith is from his father's example, concluding that it seems to be about being depressed all the time and never going to worship or reading the Torah or anything of that sort) by blind-folding him and taking him into different houses of worship (Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Muslim) so he can identify them by their distinctive aromas (incense, candles, and stinky feet, respectively). But more moving was their visit to a Sufi place of worship, to see some "whirling dervishes" praying by dancing (an experience which finally touches Momo and helps him to clear his head of anger and a lot of other baggage, as he asks Ibrahim in wonder, "Is this what it feels like to pray?").


"Laws of Attraction"

As for "Laws of Attraction", having heard some of the hype before its premiere touting it as a sort of updated version of "Adam's Rib" (one of my favorite Tracy-Hepburn films, and one which never seems to be shown on television any more) and having heard enough about the actual movie since then to know that any resemblance to "Adam's Rib" was purely accidental and severely distorted, I couldn't help thinking -- now and then -- during the first half of the movie that it would have been so much better if they HAD made THAT movie with Brosnan and Moore, instead of THIS one. But then, as Monty Python might say, "It got better . . . !"

First, let me admit that there were a lot of good bits and pieces in this movie (though they never quite all came together or got used to fullest advantage). When you get right down to it, the idea of two highly successful divorce attorneys -- one who doesn't believe in DIVORCE at all (Brosnan), and one who doesn't believe in MARRIAGE at all (Moore) -- somehow connecting with one another and managing to build a sustainable relationship at home and at work . . . well, there's a lot to admire there, and I really would have liked to have seen that worked out more thoughtfully from the start, instead of going for some idiot's misconception of what the old "screwball" romantic comedies of the 30's, 40's, and 50's used to do. (There was absolutely no reason that I could see why Julianne Moore should be recycling some of the LESS successful 1950's "silly-woman" schtick of Lucille Ball and Doris Day.)

The character of Daniel Rafferty (Brosnan) started by going out of his way to be smug and annoying, it seemed, and only the immense charm and likability of Brosnan made me able to see that there might be some actual DEPTHS behind all that ostentatious and too-calculated-not-to-be-a-defense-mechanism shallowness. My sympathies were with Julianne Moore from the start, because . . . well, I like her work in a lot of other films AND in this film she's a very, very smart woman loaded with insecurities about her personal appearance and relationships (and hey, I can identify). But then I got annoyed with some of her "screwball" antics (I gotta say, that whole Chinatown scene early on made no sense whatsoever and seemed to exist for no other purpose than to get her upset enough and mad enough to seek Brosnan's character out at home, thus leading to a night of drinking and ill-considered passion, which then set them up for even greater conflict -- and potential for 'make-up' passion -- in the future).

Rather than "Adam's Rib", I got the feeling -- for the first half of the film -- that I might be watching a re-tread of that old Rock Hudson/Doris Day movie where they play rival advertising executives and he first screws her in business and then screws her in other ways, culminating in their getting blind-drunk on alcoholic candy and winding up married (so it's all alright, then, 'cause marriage and fatherhood are all the penance any lying chauvenist manipulator should need in order to redeem him completely -- or so I inferred after a steady diet of these movies when I was growing up).

But when they finally got to Ireland to depose the staff at the castle that both their clients (the rock star and the fashion designer) claimed was all they wanted in the divorce settlement, where Brosnan and Moore started to see each other a bit more clearly as people with their own fair share of insecurities and irrational fears, etc., and THEN they drink a little too much in the course of actually having a genuinely GOOD TIME with each other at the village festival, developing some real affection and rapport with one another . . . well, THEN I was fine with their waking up married (especially since it was terribly obvious by then that Brosnan's character really WANTED to be married to Moore's character and was capable of being hurt by her horrified reaction and instinctive attempts to reject before she was rejected). With Moore's "Mom" doing a little behind-the-scenes work to help things along, we wind up with a rather satisfactory denouement, eventually.

At times, I felt that I was watching a movie-of-the-week on television, or one of those two-hour "Remington Steele" episodes (especially from near the end of the series' run, after Brosnan had been offered the role of James Bond for the first time, and been forced to turn it down, just so he could do another six hours of "Steele" before NBC decided to cancel it after all). In other words, not bad at all, but maybe not quite up to pay-to-see-it-in-the-theater-quality (and Stephanie Zimbalist's 'Laura Holt' didn't usually have to be made to look foolish to the same extent that Moore's character did upon occasion . . . though there were times in the second season of "Steele", when they first introduced Mildred and she would treat Laura like a junior secretary in Laura's own detective agency, that I got just as irate as I did at some of the antics in the first half of "Laws of Attraction").

Overall, if you like Pierce Brosnan, rural Ireland, and Julianne Moore, you CAN spend an entertaining hour-and-a-half at this movie -- especially if you don't pay more than matinee prices to see it. Just don't be surprised if your inner fanfic writer kicks in and starts mentally re-writing and fixing things, to turn it into the movie it should have been in the first place, while you're still watching it. Even as a non-fanfic-writer, I still felt a strong urge to re-write this story at several points as we went along.