So, on Wednesday night we went along to see “I [heart] Huckabees”. There are some films where, even if you are quite enjoying it, you find yourself periodically looking at your watch from about 45 minutes in. This is not one of those films. The ascendence from the bottom of the screen of the closing credits marked the first time since the film began that I was aware of the passage of time. About three minutes into the movie, not long after giving Adrienne the customary dissertation on who did the soundtrack music and what else they have ever done in their lives, I said to her words to the effect that “this is the best film I have ever seen”. Well, maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but it grabbed me from the outset, and as far as I am concerned it could well have just kept going and going, and I would still be sitting there, absorbed.
This is the latest in a string of films from, primarily, young(ish) American writers and directors that I have found very appealing, in their (overused word, but perfect in this context) quirky, left-of-centre storytelling and visual techniques, injecting comedy into what are not, for the most part, comedies at all. That these films find a wide audience is surprising; there is nothing “pat” about them. That they are able to be made at all, in these days of ever-decreasing circles of creativity in mainstream Hollywood (Pixar honourably excepted), is remarkable. “Huckabees” has taken the dramatic and aesthetic lessons of films like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “The Royal Tenenbaums” to the next level. One wonders which of the gang will play the next trump card. (The next P T Anderson film is most likely still some way off, but there is a new film by the Other Anderson (Wes) which should be here soon.)
And how can you say no to a film that features Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman as a pair of “existential detectives”?
Later, there was a man sitting at a table outside Charmers in Manuka, wearing a Bush-Quayle ’92 t-shirt. Canberra in January is another planet.
