I have the strongest desire to see Away From Her, Sarah Polley’s debut. Given that the subject matter—a husband and wife dealing with the latter’s gradual demise into Alzheimer’s—is not only kind of depressing, but it veers into that touchy feely, slow moving kind of film that is so quiet and deliberate that you need to struggle to hear even in the theater, this is not a typical choice for the home team. But since my first viewing of the trailer I’ve been awaiting this one with hope, because summer is rarely a great time for cinephiles. Away From Her is helped in my largely arbitrary opinion by Polley’s place at the feet of Atom Egoyan, a filmmaker whose films I for the most part can’t watch (for various reasons) and therefore respect (I didn’t say it was a perfect system).
But I suspect the presence of Julie Christie is causing my girl crush of yore to rear its strangely androgynous head once again. Ah, only Julie Christie and her perfect Lara could make me plod through Pasternak's mostly unreadable book (for a 13 year old, anyway) in an effort to have more Doctor Zhivago. Oh my God, just that music is enough to make me cry. Nah-nah-nah-naaaaaaaah! I totally have the soundtrack on vinyl. It’s one of my Do or Die movies: if it’s on TV, I have to watch it all the way through, or my soul will eat itself. Yeah, and it’s, like, 45 hours long: I suck. In other breaking news, 2 + 2=4. On the plus side, it is slightly shorter than Gone With the Wind, another on the list. The last one is Tootsie. Anyway. As Away From Her will surely breeze right by my local cineplex, release-wise, I already look forward to harassing the local Blockbuster to order it in already.
In other news, searching for “An American in Paris DVD movie” on LimeWire confesses some truly disturbing results. Eh. It’s what I deserve for trying to shortchange Gene Kelly.
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