Ross and I ventured out in the quiet snow yesterday at 9pm to see Vicky Christina Barcelona at DocFilms—the cruel season and the fall of night conspiring to make the movie’s verdant setting, steeped in sunlight, seem even more startlingly unreal than Woody must have wanted it to. In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the deal: Two absurdly gorgeous twenty-something Americans spend a summer in Barcelona, where they meet a passionate Spanish painter who succeeds in seducing both of them (separately, though he’d rather it were together) and become embroiled in the messy tangle of his relationship with his crazy-beautiful ex-wife, who has a murderous streak when in the heat of romantic jealousy.

Anya wrote a review of Vicky Christina in which she calls it a “coy, shy longing for a fairy-tale vision of love,” and I’ll start by saying that I agree it’s supposed to evoke a fairy tale, which is one reason for the intrusive narrative voice that runs all along the film’s edges like a gilt frame. I don’t, however, think the movie is either coy or shy, and I definitely don’t think it longs for a fairy-tale vision of love.

Everyone in the film has an incomplete and somewhat warped idea of what love is; no one is capable of learning or growing. Where affairs of the heart are concerned, Christina—impulsive, blonde, artistic but not very good at it—says things like, “I’ll go to your room, but… you have to seduce me.” Vicky—pragmatic, brunette, scholarly but not very good at it—says things like, “If you would care to join us for some recognized form of social interaction, like a drink, then we’d be fine, but otherwise, I think you should try offering [your seductive Spanish charms] to some other table.” Juan Antonio—the painter—says things like, “Life is short. Life is dull. Life is full of pain. And [having a threesome with a complete stranger] is a chance for something special.” Maria Elena—the murderous ex-wife—says things like, “Our love is forever, but it just doesn’t work. That’s why it will always be romantic. Because it cannot be complete.”

And just in case you aren’t capable of realizing on your own how the simple act of pursuing their earnest beliefs to their logical ends makes a fool out of each of these characters, the narrator (invisible, but horribly smug) is continually engaged in a kind of gentle mockery of them: “She saw herself more a European soul, in tune with the thinkers and artists she felt expressed her tragic, romantic, freethinking view of life.”

No one is capable of learning, growing, or changing: everyone’s fate is inevitable from the first, and no one receives a happy ending, because no one deserves one. Where Anya thinks of the film as a failed fairy tale in which true love is idealized, but ultimately shown to be unattainable, I think of it as an anti-romance, in which the idea of true love has sticks poked into it—but very tenderly—from every possible angle.

Yet by the end of the movie you feel that very little harm has been done, and that’s largely because the characters are so utterly ridiculous that it’s hard to take them seriously. It is, however, very easy to enjoy watching them, since they are all very, very pretty. And for that reason, quite despite myself, I liked Vicky Christina Barcelona from beginning to end.

I don’t know, Wong Kar Wai. I don’t know if it was such a good idea to cast Norah Jones as the main character in your film. A beautiful singing voice and perfect lips that look sexy in a close-up when they’re covered in ice cream do not a lead actor make. She wasn’t grating (not for me, anyway—Ross, on the other hand, turned to me after the credits started rolling, shook his head, and said “I can’t stand Norah Jones. Everything she said sounded like it was coming out of the mouth of a Valley girl.”), but she wasn’t great. And I don’t know why you decided to confine Jude Law, who is an experienced and capable actor, to the tiny set of his café and give him no discernible personality whatsoever beyond his ability to bake, his incredible niceness, and his obsession with finding a girl who clearly doesn’t want to be found (yet).

I forgive you for Natalie Portman, because she was honestly much, much more convincing than I had imagined she would be as a peroxided gambler with a sad past, a sassy tongue, and a sweet streak—but did you really have to make her put on an accent on top of all that makeup? And I thank you for David Strathairn, whose alcoholic, stalker-ex-husband character was the only one I really believed in for a moment and really felt for, and whose end was as fitting as it was inevitable. The Otis Redding that you kept playing during those scenes at the bar was pretty wonderful, too.

I don’t know. You can’t help but make a gorgeous movie, and you have such a deft hand with interweaving periods of silence and sound; and the story of Jeremy and Elizabeth is engaging enough, as romances go—I just don’t understand why you wanted to make a romance, a straight romance, anyway. There was a dark heart missing from the sweet dessert of My Blueberry Nights that I wanted to taste and just wasn’t there.

I have an imaginary love-hate relationship with going to the movies by myself. I always drag my feet about going and think I’m going to feel all self-conscious and lonely, or else I get stuck in front of the computer for three hours because it’s no one’s job to say, “Hey, weren’t we going to go see that movie?” and I don’t end up going. But whenever I do, it’s wonderful (of course). I should remember that. I even feel self-conscious and lonely in an enjoyable, grown-up way that I kind of like, even though sitting by myself in an auditorium before the lights go down does remind me a bit uncomfortably of secondary school assemblies. So this brief note, before I brush my teeth and get in bed with Goethe, is to tell you that Kind Hearts and Coronets is my new favorite movie. And that if Louis Mazzini D’Ascoyne weren’t

a) fictional
b) liable to murder me in my sleep
c) probably about to be executed for real this time, anyway,

I would totally be waiting outside that jail house in my own black carriage with the door open, beckoning him to join me.

It’s tempting to believe that my aesthetic sensibilities were always highly developed and sophisticated, and that even as a kid I was able to appreciate very adult cultural experiences. Hey! I think. By the time I was a teenager I was reading Raymond Carver and Bukowski for fun! I adored ancient Greek theater and dissected the subtleties of Tom Waits lyrics! Go me!

And then something happens like my second viewing of Citizen Kane the other night, and I realize that in actual fact I have been for most of my life a complete pimpled philistine who couldn’t tell her toes from Artaud. Folks, I watched that movie, widely acclaimed as one of the finest American cinematic creations of all time, at the age of 17 and vividly remember finding it horrifically dull. Despite the fact that I had a fantastic, dynamic, excited teacher telling me just exactly why its cinematography and pacing were so brilliant and modern. Despite the fact that I was totally infatuated with his opinion about everything and sucked down every last artistic recommendation he gave me (see above re: Tom Waits lyrics). Despite the fact that it was frankly kind of embarrassing to admit that I had absolutely no idea why anyone would even be able to get past the first 5 minutes of this towering classic film.

My recollection of the wholly unrewarding nature of watching Citizen Kane was so powerful that I attempted to dissuade Ross from putting it on our Netflix list (he’d never seen it, and wanted to) and warned him repeatedly that he would most probably find it wretchedly boring when it did in fact arrive.

Well, it arrived. And we watched it, having nothing else to do. I was fully prepared to get up and potter around the house while it was going on, or start working on the article I had to write.

And then, of course, I was completely riveted from the opening shots, because it is, in fact, an utterly brilliant, astonishingly beautifully shot, funny, smart, fascinating, brave movie. And now I can finally admit to myself that my taste has not always been the shining beacon of absolute clarity and good sense that it now clearly is at last, and will ever, ever be.

Things in our house that have found new homes in the past two days: 2 tiki torches, 30 records I bought on a whim from the Garment District last year, a set of watercolor supplies, a box full of books, one tall wooden bookcase, one yellow mountain bike, and 40 wine glasses. Put ‘em all together and you’d have one heck of an art project.

Things I have somehow acquired since I promised myself there would be no unnecessary purchases until we moved, nosirreebob, especially but especially not camera equipment: 2 Polaroid cameras and 13 packs of film.

I worked all day today, with a break to have leftover tandoori chicken and goat saag with naan for lunch. Ross cleaned like a madman (the counter-top by our sink is actually white again!). We rewarded ourselves with a beer at the Swan, a bar that is 3 minutes away from our house by foot but that we have never before entered. It’s adorable, so we kicked ourselves a bit over that. Finally, a cheeky Mexican movie and apple pie with ice cream to finish, and the Friday is done. Ben, given the content of the film you probably called while someone or other was having sex. It really would have been inappropriate to answer the phone, don’t you think?

Later, lovelies.

Anya and I went to see Away From Her last night. The film is based on an Alice Munro short story, and it’s a lovely, exquisitely restrained piece of work. The (distractingly) beautiful Julie Christie plays Fiona, a firm, witty, passionately self-aware woman with Alzheimer’s who leaves her husband of 44 years to check into a nursing home so that she can, as she puts it, begin to disappear with “a little bit of grace.” Grant and Fiona have one of those lifetime loves that seems as weathered and as everlasting as an old tree, a sort of Calvin-and-Alice-Trilling affection grown out of decades of caustic and kind words, fury and fondness; the kind of marriage that makes you feel sort of in awe, not because it’s perfect (there’s a dark offense in Grant’s past that whispers itself into the pair’s parting moments) but because it’s so sturdy and scarred it begins to resemble an element of the landscape: a mountain, an ancient sea. (Watching it, you look at your slight, flimsy two years of marriage and quiver in fear and concern: what if you never get there? What if you do? What happens at the end?) Some time after Fiona moves into the home, and some time after she forgets enough of herself to do so, she falls in love with and begins tending faithfully to Aubrey, a frail fellow patient who depends on her with a silent, almost frightening need. Grant—watching—has to decide how to respond to this, and in doing so he becomes the focal point for the film’s treatment of love through the lens of loss, memory, and suffering. What he ends up doing is in some sense deeply romantic, and at the same time it’s an extraordinarily pragmatic gesture: a fractured compromise with the present in order to retain the right to preserve the past as it was.

Go see it. You’ll like it. I promise. Especially if we usually disagree.

I realize that for many of you the following will register as somewhere between sacrilege and actual assault upon a beloved and holy object, but I just watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the first time and while I’m rather fond of Audrey Hepburn… I sort of hate Holly Golightly. Not, you know, with a deep and burning passion to the depths of my soul, or anything, but she’s pretty much the antithesis of everything I think a human being ought to be. She isn’t even the kind of person I think is rotten but secretly find terribly entertaining and kind of wish I could be for an afternoon, either, like the Heathers or Marla in Fight Club. I can’t bring myself to admire, empathize with, or love Holly in any way. I just find her selfish, sad, irritating, and utterly maddening as an image of femininity.

I’m pretty sure that means I’m taking the film too seriously, but feel free to argue with me (Hi, mom. ;-)).