Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Go, Margot, go ... please, just go


You ever missed a movie at theaters, even though you meant to see it, and then you finally caught up with it on video, and it was so wonderful you kicked yourself for waiting so long to check it out?

"Margot at the Wedding" isn't like that.

This black comedy (I think) stars Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh as estranged sisters who reunite for the latter's wedding, to an unemployed loser played by Jack Black. (Although, given the current situation, it's probably not best for me to imply a correlation between the lack of a job and loserdom.)

It was 88 minutes of unbelievable characters doing unbelievable things. I didn't for a minute buy that any of these people could exist in the real world. They were total literary constructions. Everything they said sounded written.

"Margot" is from writer/director Noah Baumbauch, the guy behind "The Squid and the Whale," another tale of disintegrating families, with the children serving as witnesses to the poor behavior of the ostensible grownups. That movie was actually pretty good, although it had one of those endings that thinks it's all European and arty and ambiguous, when in fact the story just stops arbitrarily. This one, too, although we had checked out long before.

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