welcome to my own personal blog-a-thon. i'll probably post a huge number of times this week, since there's almost literally no one else in my office. plus, it's my last week and i have only one major project left on my table. wheee.

last week, i meant to write a little review of lovely & amazing, which i saw on thursday night with the lovely and amazing claudia sell. somehow, though, i never got around to it on friday. for once, probably because everyone was heading off to vacations this week, the office was hopping. (well, and i was just plain busy trying to finish the second-to-last project in time for a meeting with my two-steps-up supervisor.) in any case...it was wonderful. wonderful in the sense that it was beautifully crafted and i'm not sure whether, at the end, the balance was tipped in favor of uplifting or upsetting.

i'd actually read a fair amount about this movie, largely thanks to weblogs, actually, but while many reviewers made much of the fact that body issues played a large role in the film, no one adequately grasped just how large that role was--in my opinion, at least. of course, it's also my own pet issue...so i suppose i would see it that way. what really disturbed me was the fact that no one grabbed hold of the interesting parallels between racism and lookism that were played out in the person of annie, the (fat) african american adopted daughter.

of the reviews i've read, only the onion approached saying that the body issues were really what the movie was all about--the review packaged them in "self-esteem" but did a fair job of pointing out the primacy they took in the construction of the film. i also read one review (can't actually remember which, just now), that accused raven goodwin (annie) of "an admirable lack of Cute." whoever wrote that one missed the boat. she's not un-cute because of her behavior, which is cheeky and demanding but lovable. the only explanation i can find for that particular sentiment is that this eight-year old didn't lose twenty pounds to play a role wherein she smiled a hundred percent of the time.

annie is my favorite character. until the bitter end, in fact, annie is really the only character who is even vaguely likable. her mother, jane, and her two grown sisters michelle and elizabeth are...distressing at best, and truly hateful at worst. watching michelle berate annie about her weight in public reminded me of a variety of half well-meaning, half mean-spirited, and always completely thoughtless adult characters from my own fat childhood. watching the average-sized jane, giving annie a bath, explain liposuction as "an improvement" was equally difficult. elizabeth, the middle daughter, seems a little more difficult to understand. she's at the mercy of anyone who dislikes her appearance (she's so thin it's scary), but she's invariably kind to annie. mostly, though, that doesn't help her--we see her willfully humiliating herself in front of an asshole movie star and fecklessly defending the appearance culture of moviestardom. ugh.

one thing i didn't read in the reviews was any sort of take on the morality-play aspect of this movie. the three older women, completely obsessed with the beauty, or lack thereof, of their bodies, all end up in rather dreadful situations by the end of the show. granted, things get (mostly) resolved in the end, one way or another, and it's a strength of the film that after the first eighty minutes you can spend the last ten approaching sympathy for these people. i wondered after seeing the film, though, if the director and writer (nicole holofcener) had a more explicit moral in mind than most reviewers came up with. in my mind, appearance obsession led straight to near-death, disfigurement and criminal behavior while personal honesty and unapologetic fatness led to an unaccountable escape from what could (should?) have been an extraordinarily dangerous situation. hmm...

in any case, it was an absolutely beautiful movie. there's much more to say--weirdly overbroad male characters, wonderful detail and great performances by all the women of the cast--but i'm not going to say it. i should say that it's *not* a "fun" movie in any sense. it's been billed as a "dramedy," and indeed, there are funny moments, but all my laughter came from discomfort and i found myself slinking lower and lower in my seat as the show went on. and then--i mentioned this above, but i'll do it again--miraculously, the characters begin to redeem themselves in the final minutes. irritatingly enough, you may even find yourself identifying with them. the very last scene is a gem: simple and perfect. made me want to go and call my mother. (then again, most things do.)

so, uh, yeah...see it.