Well That Was A Waste of Makeup...
Jan. 15th, 2006 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athersgeoI've done just this side of bugger all today. I think all my motivation leaked out while I wasn't looking. I hope it comes back overnight!
About all I DID accomplish today was knocking another DVD off the pile. So...
The film this time round was "Where The Heart Is". It stars Ashley Judd and Natalie Portman with Stockard Channing and Joan Cusack. I've never seen Ashley Judd in anything (to the best of my memory), but I've seen the other three actresses in plenty of other things and thought they were great, so I was quite looking forward to sitting down with this one...
...And for once, I really wasn't let down. It's a good little story with some interesting characters. Natalie Portman plays a character who could, I suspect, be described as trailertrash at the start of the film: She's quite literally, barefoot and naked, with no money and no idea of what to do when her louse of a boyfriend dumps her at a Wal-mart in the middle of Oklahoma. She gradually begins to pick her life up, starting from ending up giving birth IN the Wal-mart. She gets taken in, ultimately, by Stockard Channing's character, who's a little on the dippy side but has her heard very firmly in the right place and she gains a friend in Lexi (Ashley Judd) who works at the hospital she winds up in when the baby's born. The rest of the film charts Novalee (Portman's character) and her struggles to build a life, Lexi's struggles with her life, and the gently blooming love affair between Novalee and Forney (played by James Frain).
What I could have easily done without was the intercutting of the louse of a boyfriend's trials and tribulations - though that DID let Joan Cusack play a fantastic character in music manager Ruth Meyers, I'm not sure the scenes really added much to the story. The other thing I didn't go too much on was the time jumps. The whole film spans five years (ish) and the jumps in time were a little disorientating if you weren't paying complete attention.
All that said, though, I enjoyed the film emensely. There were nice touches of humour, nice touches of pathos and some very nice plotting - there were one or two plot twists that truly surprised me and one which had me quite literally on the edge of my seat, which is not bad going for what could have been a by-numbers heart warming story.
About all I DID accomplish today was knocking another DVD off the pile. So...
The film this time round was "Where The Heart Is". It stars Ashley Judd and Natalie Portman with Stockard Channing and Joan Cusack. I've never seen Ashley Judd in anything (to the best of my memory), but I've seen the other three actresses in plenty of other things and thought they were great, so I was quite looking forward to sitting down with this one...
...And for once, I really wasn't let down. It's a good little story with some interesting characters. Natalie Portman plays a character who could, I suspect, be described as trailertrash at the start of the film: She's quite literally, barefoot and naked, with no money and no idea of what to do when her louse of a boyfriend dumps her at a Wal-mart in the middle of Oklahoma. She gradually begins to pick her life up, starting from ending up giving birth IN the Wal-mart. She gets taken in, ultimately, by Stockard Channing's character, who's a little on the dippy side but has her heard very firmly in the right place and she gains a friend in Lexi (Ashley Judd) who works at the hospital she winds up in when the baby's born. The rest of the film charts Novalee (Portman's character) and her struggles to build a life, Lexi's struggles with her life, and the gently blooming love affair between Novalee and Forney (played by James Frain).
What I could have easily done without was the intercutting of the louse of a boyfriend's trials and tribulations - though that DID let Joan Cusack play a fantastic character in music manager Ruth Meyers, I'm not sure the scenes really added much to the story. The other thing I didn't go too much on was the time jumps. The whole film spans five years (ish) and the jumps in time were a little disorientating if you weren't paying complete attention.
All that said, though, I enjoyed the film emensely. There were nice touches of humour, nice touches of pathos and some very nice plotting - there were one or two plot twists that truly surprised me and one which had me quite literally on the edge of my seat, which is not bad going for what could have been a by-numbers heart warming story.