It's a Boy-Girl Thing

2006

D'Orsay Brooke film clip (collage below)

Samaire Armstrong film clip (collage below)  

Broken Flowers

2005

Alexis Dziena film clip (collage below)

Wondering "Where did she go?" Alexis has not had an especially good time of it after this film. For details, Check this out.

Scoop's comments on the film:

Bill Murray plays a profoundly depressed ex-lothario named Don Jonston. That name would be the English-language version of Don Juan. Get it? If you don't, the script will help you out with a scene in which the character actually watches an old Don Juan movie on TV. Ol' Don receives a anonymous pink letter informing him that he has a 19-year-old son who may be looking for him. Prodded by a neighbor who loves detective stories, Don decides to embark on a cross-country search for his girlfriends from that era, hoping to ... well, really hoping to learn something about himself, I guess. If he just wanted to know more about whether one of them could have written the letter, he could have accomplished the same thing telephonically, so I guess we can assume he wants to meet them face-to-face for other reasons unrelated to the son's identity.

It is an arthouse film which was nominated for arthousey awards, and won a special jury prize at Cannes. It's one of those films where the author derives some alleged humor by standing condescendingly above all the characters, giving them ridiculous ideas and outlandish professions. (Don's four ex-girlfriends are a pet communication facilitator, a professional closet organizer, a refined and demure seller of "high quality pre-fab homes," and a biker chick.) I believe the point is that your life is shallow and empty unless you are a judgmental middle-aged filmmaker. Bill Murray turns in yet another of those sad sack performances in which he plays a man with no enthusiasm for anything, no spring in his step, and no facial expressions beyond a single mask of despondent boredom. Within the spectrum of recent film performances, Murray is most comparable to Wilson the Volleyball.

It's the kind of movie that people either love or hate. Critics mostly loved it. Moviegoers mostly avoided it. If you have not seen it, you can read more about the movie at Rotten Tomatoes. To me the most incisive comment was the following:

We are reminded in every possible way that this man is a "Don Juan" and yet nothing in the story or character development suggests how someone so broken, so numb, so completely uninterested in life or people, could be that sort of man. We have no idea how or why he has become so broken, and so ultimately don't much care that he is. No light is shed on this at any point - the movie is just one long dip into a stagnant pool of listless nothingness.

I can only imagine that the transitions between scenes of simply fading to black again and again and again, and the endless travel footage (Don in plane, Don in car, Don reading map, Don sleeping in hotel) were one of three things: lack of imagination, self-indulgence or laziness. I can think of no other reasons as this just adds to the stultifying feel of the movie. The parallel between the film's pace and Don's life seems like an amateurish parlor trick to fool the audience into thinking that the mundane is meaningful - not in this movie! Here, the mundane is just plain old boring. All the symbolism is lurid in its obviousness (ex: Don watching the old/original "Don Juan" movie on TV as his life unravels) while the character/story development is so subtle as to be non-existent.

Some trivia: Based on the extra features, the film seems to have been named Dead Flowers until the very last minute.

I wrote much more in The Movie House review, but it won't mean anything to you unless you have seen the movie.