A comet passes through the film, sliding off the script like an oiled Conservative. It comes, lasts two weeks, goes. You know what it's there for but that doesn't make it any easier to understand because there's times when the comet's trail seems to rip the script to shreds...
Brighton looks exactly as a I remember it from my time living there: full of abandoned Ballardian tennis courts, vacant lots, creepers straining up buildings, flats pretending to be war-torn, the sun somehow sucked away from the sea so that it hangs in clumps over the land, giving just enough light to see. People start running in the morning and it's night-time when they finish; the Summer days last as long as a match between an overweight Kournikova and a red hot Mauresmo.
And now I can't work out if I like Kirsten Dunst. She's fabulous and almost believable in everything she plays; perky, moody, brattish, vulnerable but... she's hard to trust: she looks like she flash those small, sexily imperfect teeth at anyone. She's believably in love in every film and that starts to make that love unbelievable. She looks too emotionally available, too liable to twist her allegiances - from Spiderman, to Peter Colt, to the geeky indie guy in Bring It On. She lights up the screen but it's at the expense of her co-stars - they just don't seem to bathe in the same ectosplasmic glow; girls look vapid, boys look vaguely obscene. She's dispensed with the whore/angel axis and added something new, something I can't quite put my finger on...
Her arms move in curious ways; at times she's like a bag of elbows. She looks different from different angles, in different frames, her face seems to defy the objectification of the camera, even the still.
Oh, and Paul Bettany is in it too.
2 comments:
she's undiggable. she's not as cute as she's given credit for and she looks previously anorexic. i dunno...she annoys the hell out of me. i don't buy her portrayal of angst, heartbreak, or passion.
nothing on earth did drag me. my wife did.
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