Some Girls

This past weekend, Patrick and I had a very interesting discussion with Amy and Jamie and Adrienne. We were talking about various movies and television shows that we all like and dislike and it quickly became clear that our opinions on such matters vary wildly. Patrick and I believe that The Wire is probably the best writing we've ever seen. Jamie found it pretentious and self-important. Amy loves a British series called North and South that put me and Patrick in such a funk, we haven't been able to work up the nerve to try it again. All of us loved Arrested Development, except for Adrienne who thought that it tried too hard and just wasn't very funny. It was fascinating to me to talk to a group of lovely, insightful people and to see just how much we all differed in our opinions.

So, I am continuing with this post knowing full well that my recommendations hence forth may be meaningless. For whatever reason, I've decided to pass on some of my favorite movies and explain why I enjoy them and why they've stuck with me for so many years. If you try one out and it's not your cup of tea, I apologize whole-heartedly, but all of these are movies that I could happily watch at any time on a moment's notice. I should warn you that they frequently make fun of me at work for being an 80-year old woman combined with a 12-year old boy since A ROOM WITH A VIEW and ALIENS are two of my favorite movies.

If you're still with me, I will be posting the movies one at a time and my first selection is the movie SOME GIRLS. Some Girls starts out feeling a bit like a crude 80's sex comedy shot in an exquisite location. But pretty soon, it become something much more. It follows the hopes, desires and frustrations of a young college student named Michael (Patrick Dempsey, way before his McDreamy days)on a Christmas visit to his enigmatic girlfriend's house in Canada. (Jennifer Connely plays his beautiful, but mercurial girlfriend, Gaby.) Michael arrives at the airport and sits beneath a giant mural of the three graces while he waits for a very long time for Gaby to pick him up. This is a perfectly fitting opening for a movie that is essentially about the enticing, but strangely unknowable quality of women. Gaby whisks Michael away up to her family's castle house and I was pretty much smitten with it from then on. I don't know if it's the snowy scenery, or the incredibly decorated art nouveau house or the eccentric family with three daughters, but I always feel completely caught up in their world whenever I revisit this movie. A Russian actress named Lila Kedrova plays Gaby's grandmother and her portrayal is one of the more memorable and luminous performances I've ever seen on film. The writing in this film, particularly towards the end, played a big part in my wanting to write movies. There are some incredibly moving scenes near the end between Michael and the grandmother. I don't want to give too much away, but if you give the film a try, watch for the summer shoes and the grandmother closing up her house for the winter.

I also think that Some Girls does not get enough credit for helping to usher in the 80's Sundance era of independent movies. Obviously, there were earlier independent movies, like Easy Rider, but this was the first movie of my generation that I remember being a small scale film that attracted a lot of attention. It also just so happens to have been produced by Robert Redford and I would not be at all surprised if this film's modest success encouraged him to grow the Sundance Film Festival. Nowadays, people talk a lot about Sex, Lies and Videotape and The Crying Game and other films that came after this one. Definitely they were a part of that movement, but I still say that Some Girls had a hand in building the momentum.