If anyone doesn’t, we will ban them.

I haven’t seen any of the movies you refer to, I really want to see Rachel Getting Married though, even though it’s apparently a ripoff of the dogma films, of which very few I like. Surprisingly the ones directed by women, Italiensk for begyndere and Elsker dig for evigt.

Rachel Getting Married is all music of the reception, no score, Igby Goes Down, also all pop songs, Dazed and Confused.

There is definitely a Mendes schism at work, with people either siding with his earlier pre-Rev Road stuff or what follows, and I am very much about what follows. In fact I would argue he has gotten better with each film, American Beauty being perhaps his worst.

Don’t be condescending Kurt. It’s obviously politically correct to have this opinion you’re expressing, but you can’t deny human nature. It’s different when they are yourself.

The soundtrack was pretty over-the-top I thought. Nowhere near the brilliance of the (original) music in Sideways. You know it’s a bad sign when the Music Supervisor gets credited before the composer.

curiously how many people thought that was Nick Drake crooning through the film? Not so.

because I love this quote and because I am thinking you may not have seen it the first time I posted, I am posting it again.

this to me, is how to understand the tonal, structural indifference of Eggers’ storytelling:

“what am i giving you? i am giving you nothing. i am giving you things that god knows, everyone knows. they are famous in their deaths. this will be a memorial to them… i tell you and it evaporates. i don’t care – how could i care? i tell you how many people i have slept with (thirty-two), or how my parents left this world, and what have i really given you? nothing. i can tell you the names of my friends, their phone numbers, but what do you have? you have nothing… i give you virtually everything i have. i give you all of the best things i have, and while these things are things that i like, memories that i treasure, good or bad, like the pictures of my family on my walls, i can show them to you without diminishing them. i can afford to give you everything… we feel that to reveal embarassing or private things, like, say, masturbatory habits (for me, about once a day, usually in the shower), we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photograph will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. but it is just the opposite, more is more is more – more bleeding, more giving.”
— A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS – Dave Eggers

worries of style and decorum are the least of Eggers concern, he writes according to what makes sense to him and that becomes the style. And I say Amen to that. I may not like everything he has to say or write but I admire the spirit of what he does, you take him as he is, or not at all. Away We Go feels very much like his voice, its a voice that is not trying to conform to anything, its trying to pick away at truths whether they be comedic, dramatic, confrontational, slight, it goes wherever it needs to.

Goon, again opposite sides, I thought Girlfriend in a Coma was great, end of the world and all. And JPod is the worst, absolutely. Life After God is perfect though, I have read it like seven times. I need to read All Families are Psychotic still.

“Perhaps the film is bleaker than I thought. It’s better to spend their time and raise their children under Rudolph’s dead parents, then engage with any of their living friends and relatives – who all happen to be narcissistic nutjobbers.”

don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to say it was a decision born out of these encounters… that is the brilliance of the ending to me, it is indifferent of what came before it. The reason they go where they go is not based on what happened in their journeys, it happened because there is a fruit tree in Miami. thats what gets the ball rolling. This breaks with convention, but to me anyways is also a beautiful logical segueway to a conclusion that is also beautiful and logical.

also I don’t think they are all narcissistic nutjobbers, Miami and Montreal and Tucson are very normal people, and Madison and Pheonix and the parents are eccentric… thats a pretty good balance, another reason I don’t see this as straight satire, its not straight anything.

Loved the chapter titles though. the top picture in this article is an hommage to that.

(Also, I find the reliance on biology of the Montreal parents to be rather icky. We’ve got all these adopted kids but really we only want ‘real’ kids. Ewwwww.)

Favourite Coupland: ALL FAMILY’S ARE PSYCHOTIC
Worst Coupland: J-POD (ick.)

Don’t get me wrong, I quite liked AWAY WE GO. I just liked the ‘danger and confusion’ of A HEARTBREAKING WORK where Eggars has only a small amount of money to raise himself and his brother and find his place in the world.

The lakefront Savannah Mansion puts them in the lap of privileged occupied folks in the ‘ironic and quirky’ Wes Anderson or Whit Stillman, and it seems that the film was more aiming at ‘every-man’ than privileged. It is only a very minor bump though, nowhere near the dealbreaker. Who knows, in a few years, this may be the parenting version of THE BIG LEBOWSKI. Or as I stated above, BROKEN FLOWERS is probably the best road-trip vignette comparison.

Maybe Sean was seeing it as supposed to being that way, he does mention Wes Anderson and I don’t see the comparison. Take The Royal Tenanbaums for example, there is a suicide attempt in the film but how it is portrayed is still quirky, it has a Elliott Smith track over top of it, comedy is rendered by how everyone confronts the event, the veneer of quirk never leaves a Wes Anderson film… this, which is Eggers more than Mendes, has sincerity and irony co-exist in the same universe, side by side without needing to be one or the other. I think that is what is off-putting about the film…

but like I said elsewhere, not even the people who agree to loving the film can agree to why, so is the strange complexity of the film apparently.

and Kurt, I just don’t see the argument that the ending is undermining the message. The point is they come to the realization that they could go there, when Verona comes to terms with the past, and the whole thing about finding your place in the world, that place was always understood to be a place in SOCIETY, around caring people. Its not so much finding yourself as finding your place in the world, and its only by the end in Away We GO (Spoilers) that they realize the spirit of Verona’s childhood is family enough, is society enough, for them. Unlike the Andrew/Gamble argument that the ending is about admiring one’s acreage, its about finding home. This issue of finances you all bring up truly perplex me. Are you saying wealthy people don’t suffer? Are you saying having a big house is what secures their happiness? There is one line in the beginning about being poor, and that is the only line, the rest of it is about finding good people and being part of something loving. Money is not an issue in the film, nor should it be.

Funny, Kurt, you mention the babysitting issue of the Montreal couple, as you made the same kind of nitpicking of Mendes’ other film, Rev Road, where are the kids?! Who cares, they are off stage, focus on what is on stage. I never understood these realism nitpicks for films that show no vested interest in being purely real. There is a contrivance to the story, and we agree it is most like Broken Flowers, go from one house and worldview to the next, but what is wrong with that contrivance so long as what is being expressed is in itself of some worth?

One of my favorite books is Douglas Coupland’s Life After God, and one of the key stories has to do with these characters swimming in a pool and where they go as they grow up, and that too is contrived, each character perpetuating a worldview for the sake of Coupland getting across his own message, but is that in itself something to nitpick? For Jandy, maybe, while she likes Away We Go, her main gripe is that everything is prepackaged for the couple, go here, get advice, go here, get advice… and to me thats fine so long as Eggers has something to say, and I believe he does.

Structurally and tonally Away We Go is like Broken Flowers, but it has the kind of wry observations of life that Sideways or any of Payne’s films have, and so I see it as a merging of those two, but ultimately it is Eggers.

Would any of you guess that is what has happened in any reviewers’ cases?