Two from the Bin

This actually happened a couple of weeks ago, but while a manager in my office was interviewing applicants for a job, she mentioned that "if you want to network with your friends, you have to find your own time to do it." The concept of "networking" with my friends is pretty depressing. Chat, hang, share with, cling to for dear life... yes. Network... gross. Opposite.

I started netflix again. I KNOW that I'm poor... but actually I think I can spend $10 for a month of happiness. More importantly, my account was at the limit for being on hold, so I had to restart or risk losing all of my work on it. I've rated 881 movies (that is an over-estimate because certainly many of the pieces I've rated are TV shows) and I don't want to start again.

ANYWAY, yesterday I went straight home and watched two movies that I would never think to watch. I just thought, I'm in the mood to see something that I've never heard of-- support some indies and find some gems like the miracle of Cashback or Love Me If You Dare.

1. Show Me Love- Swedish young lesbian movie. I've never seen a Swedish movie before, actually. I thought it was fantastic. The main girl was so obnoxiously confident and rambunctious and got whatever she wanted, but... she was so cool anyway! And very pretty. She (Alexandra Dahlstrom) looked like a cross between Alyssa Milano and Eliza Dushku from Bring It On... except blonde. I think, POSSIBLY, what contributed to her being so pretty in the movie was that you rarely saw her completely head on. ANYWAY, pieces of the soundtrack were hilarious. It was pretty dark and then there were random 90s pop songs. "Show Me Love" by Robyn was actually the final song in the film, and it was so inappropriate! Not lyrically... but tonally.

2. Mary and Max-

This was the logline: Mary Dinkle, a chubby 8-year-old Australian girl, and Max Horovitz, an obese, middle-aged New Yorker with Asperger's syndrome, are a pair of unlikely pen pals in this quirky clay animation feature from writer-director Adam Elliot. Corresponding for two decades, the friends delve into a variety topics, including sex, kleptomania, psychiatry, taxidermy and more.

Awesome.

I actually only read the first two lines until just now, but I was so interested in an independent claymation because it seemed so expensive and unlikely. It was funny because they used a lot of screen time on stills of the environment with voice over of the correspondence or narrator. Also, there were very few colors. ANYWAY, it was quite dark but uplifting, although it didn't have the most extensive plot. More of a vignette... but a little plot. Plus, turns out Toni Colette and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Eric Bana did the voices.