scha.den.freu.de. Pronunciation Key: (shaedn-froid). Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others, malicious satisfaction.
These are excerpts from the reviews of Gray Matters, A.K.A that Heather Graham movie what had been making me feel so hopeless:
Gray Matters is as unhinged as its characters.
dull, contrived, obvious, and at 96 minutes, seemingly endless
Sitcommy, forced and forgettable.
Never have I ever wanted to climb into the screen and kill every single character as much as I did with this movie.
Gray Matters could be recommended to gay women whose erotic fantasies are located in the stuffed French poodle department of FAO Schwarz.
Drawing on their sitcom chops, Graham and Cavanagh cover for their cloth-eared dialogue with trumped-up camaraderie, pushing and pulling at each other like toddlers in playgroup.
This warms the cockles of my little black heart.
I'm so happy...
5 comments:
Having never heard of this movie, I looked it up on IMDB. Wow. I could never see any movie that is a) features Heather Graham and is PG-13, thus depriving us the chance to see her true talent, and b) has a cameo appearance by Gloria Gaynor as Herself.
Never heard of it? You must have missed my little mofo of self-pity a few weeks ago.
Given the right director and/or script, Graham can actually be fine even without sex scenes (see Scrubs, for example).
It's just that she so rarely gets them (see 99% of everything else she's ever done).
I myself missed seeing that there was a Gloria Gaynor cameo, but yeah, that would have stopped me from seeing it even if everything else hadn't.
I dance to disco and I don't like rock, but "I Will Survive" is the worst.
Yeah, it does seem like I missed that post. Looking back, apparently I was too busy mourning for Molly Ivins that day, or maybe I saw the opening paragraph, realized I never heard of The Illusionist, and stopped reading. That's a bad habit of mine with blogs.
But yeah, I still don't know what to make of Graham. My girlfriend and I were talking about how much we liked her on Scrubs and Boogie Nights and a few other things, but she's also made some turkeys. Did she just get lucky with the good ones or does she just take any offer that comes her way?
My problem with I Will Survive is not necessarily the song, because I do find it to be well-written, even if it's overplayed. But rather that her cameo tells me everything I need to know about the movie - that at some point they needed a moment of female empowerment, and chose the most obvious touchstone.
Compare that to Springsteen's sublime cameo in High Fidelity - the embodiment of the music geek thinking that the singer is singing directly to him.
Yes, some part of my distaste for "Survive" is due to its glaring overuse, but I also don't find that well-written of a song.
Maybe this is where my empathy for women and gay people stops.
I've never seen the movie adaptation of High Fidelity. Having liked and identified with the book so much, I've just always felt that the slightest deviation from the text was gonna piss me off.
Plus I don't think Cusack & Co are good writers...
The cameo takes place in the logical part of the book, where he thinks about the song "Bobby Jean" and gets the idea to contact his ex-girlfriends. He says he wishes life could be like a Bruce Springsteen song, lies down on his bed, and there's Bruce in his bedroom, playing blues licks on his Tele and telling Cusack what he needs to do.
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