constructive, shmenstructive

i was too tired to do anything resembling something interesting last night. so what did i do instead? i played a semi-obscure, totally pointless SNES game called "final fantasy mystic quest"...which is basically a game that squaresoft (designers of the "final fantasy" series) created to entice stupid kids who weren't good enough at puzzles or thinking to play their RPGs.

yeah, i'm aware of how callous that sounded, but since i'm playing it now, i like to think that fact balances out my bristling.



then i watched "lars and the real girl", even though i had some serious reservations about ryan gosling. and just like every other time i seriously attempt to apply some gosling-hate, i was completely stymied by how awesome an actor he is. i have to really respect the fact that for a movie about a guy who falls in love with a plastic life-sized doll and then has an entire community rally around him and accept the doll as a "real" person, the filmmakers managed almost entirely - almost - to keep the film from being thorougly cheesy. there were only a few parts when i cringed. the woman who played margo was just the right mix of quirky and insistent that her attraction to lars totally made sense, despite the fact that it shouldn't have since nobody would be realistically interested in the lars we see for at least the first 30 minutes of the movie or so. the cinematography and the scenery in the film were great, and even the oft-cheesy "winter for the whole movie and then spring at the end during the conclusion/epiphany" trope wasn't overplayed. i really liked the fact that all throughout this was the type of movie that could have been played for cheap laughs or cheap melodrama, but the filmmakers simply treated it, well, simply...and let you make your own decisions. we need more movies like that.

the standout in the film for me (even more perhaps than ryan gosling) was emily mortimer, who as pretty much always did a great job and who portrayed this character who was just so beautiful (personality-wise) and caring and interesting that from the very first time she showed up on-screen at the beginning of the film, i wanted her to be in every single scene. very...um...how you say..."arresting" performance.