Odi/Amo

and don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a great movie. The cinematography is beyond solid, the music is, if nothing else, creative, and I generally like the cast. Here’s the problem: I hate the movie. Okay, maybe not hate. That’s pretty strong. But I just really don’t like it. I described it to Will as a “tootsie-pop which, when one licks all the way to the center, he finds contains nothing but air.” I realize that this could be taken as rather offensive. Sorry ‘bout that. But here’s the deal. I appreciate that it’s absurdist. I understand that it’s totally cool to mix twelve genres and three time periods of music in an absurdist movie. I get that stuff doesn’t need to make sense. But the bottom line is that, while it is clearly an absurdist comedy at heart (which, in many ways, is comparable to the center of a tootsie-pop being empty space), it masquerades as a love story. And I really don’t think it is a love story. Or maybe it is, but not the sort I like. I don’t like love stories that consist of love-at-first-sight, based on the spontaneous writing of the lyrics of “Your Song” and a presumption that a man is a duke, unchanged by the fact that the woman is willing to continue to sell herself to a dirty old man after professing undying love. The second point irks me substantially less than the first. The part that really bugs me is the whole “we fell in love after ten seconds of awkwardness and immediately begin rearranging our lives to the point of near death in light of this discovery of love” plotline. Because I think it slights us as viewers. It oversimplifies the facts of the matter. It creates in us the illusion, however tenuous and subtle, that love is a sexual attraction that, when followed to its eventual end, becomes the ultimate end of human life. The ultimate incarnation of joy. And this is so misleading. I think this happens a lot with movies I watch. I see such shining examples of what it is to be broken and lost, and see their marks upon my own life, and jerk back in repulsion. Not that this is always the case, but having followed down the rabbit trails of the Moulin Rouge version of love and found the trail lacking any good final destination, I know how fundamentally flawed such representations of life are. So, I’m really not into the movie, though I’m sure it is much more a fault of mine than of the movie’s that I don’t like it.