Friday, July 23

Bones
The Client List
A Single Man

Getting very close to the end of Bones online streaming, becoming more anxious about my future. Even though this show is the same every time, with the state of the body and cause of death being different, I still find it entertaining and enjoy the chemistry between the characters. Still loving Emily Deschanel as Bones, her quirks and of course her accent. Love.

The Client List is just the latest in a long string of Lifetime movies I have watched knowing it will be awful but keeping with it anyway Jennifer Love Hewitt was once great -- I'm thinking of Heartbreakers, which I still drop everything and watch when it's on TBS. But now, in this movie, as a former Texas Beauty Queen with a shitty spray tan and an amount of make-up that makes drag queens look natural - not to mention the fucking awful accent - she's just looking for a paycheck, hahahaha. Desperately needing money, she applies for work at a health spa as a massage therapist -- because she just so happens to have her license! Wow, what an amazing coincidence. Now, I respect legit massage therapists. Sometimes after finals my mom would get me a massage with her main man, Kenneth, whose hands are more magic than Harry Potter, but this place was called Kind Touch, and to me that just screams happy ending. Of course, it's more than a tugger after a hot stone on the back at Kind Touch, it's all out prostitution, and well, she does it for her family. It's really embarrassing to watch her talk to these men, wear these outfits and throw up on the way home. And she's really irresponsible with the money she earns, buying a lot of useless shit instead of keeping it for a rainy day/saving it so she gets to quit being a prostitute. I would say I can't believe I watched this, but let's face it, I totally can.

A Single Man, Tom Ford's directorial debut, has a very simple story. Colin Firth, amazing as always, still has trouble making it through the day long after his long-time lover (the always beautiful Matthew Goode) died in a car accident. And of course all of this is placed in the 1960s and all of the politics that includes - bomb shelters! passive aggressive homophobia from the neighbors! As a film student I'm pretty desensitized to obvious moves like jump cuts and flashbacks, but even some of these jump cuts were super jumpy. But that's not what took me out of the magic of the movie. It was the color temperature. Oh my god, did anyone watch this to approve final cut? The graying of Firth's character occasionally I understand, it's a "statement" or something. But sometimes the reds were so blinding, Nicholaus Hoult's lips so freakishly pink, that I just couldn't handle it It made Firth look like he suffered from Rosacea. Other than that, I thought it was very enjoyable, especially Julianne Moore's aging London princess in a perpetual pity party with amazing eyeliner and hair. Still though, I feel like I never got a handle for Firth's character, though I think it was a problem with the material, not him. He was at once indulgent and standoffish, incredibly inconsistent, which was confusing as far as motive goes. I don't know - maybe it's me. But for a first go around the track, I thought A Single Man was a pretty good film.