Simple love and a Mirrormask review
Oct. 22nd, 2005 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inmyriadbitsI love this. Neil Gaiman linked to this journal on his blog.
"An excerpt from a letter. Friends and family were discussing an extraordinary woman who, for some mysterious reason, has had only medium luck in love. Someone who knows her very well said this:
"She wants what very few people know how to give. She wants all the simple things. Not many people know how to do simple anymore. She wants grilled cheese sandwiches at home dipped in ketchup served on a paper plate, not dinner at an expensive restaurant. She wants to sit on the beach at sunset, not some far away exotic vacation. She wants a handwritten note that says I care about you, not some piece of jewelry that was financed over three years. She wants you to brush her hair, not send her to some spa for a day.
"And she wants things even simpler than that. Simple things that it seems like we have all forgotten. She wants you to ask her before you kiss her for the first time and the second. She wants you to hold her hand while you're watching re-runs together on the couch. She wants you to look at her when you talk to her. You guys, not just you, but so many guys have it all wrong. You think it is about where you take her and what you buy her for her birthday and for Christmas and you think it is about figuring out how her mind works. You think it is about being the best lover she ever had and you think it is about what she thinks of your career and your friends and your families and you think it is about all kinds of things that would never matter to her.
"As far as she's concerned, you can go out with the guys as often as you like. She *wants* you to have fun and enjoy yourself. You can have a job that keeps you and calls you away from home. She wants you to be happy with your work and she wants you to succeed. You can be so-so in bed. She wants to learn your body and have you learn hers. You can be greedy and selfish and demanding from time to time. She wants to work things through with you. You can see her once a week or once a month. She just wants to make the most of the time you get together.
"What does she want? That's what someone asked. All she wants is to be loved, simply. Just like she loves everything in her life. There is no complex formula to the way she lives. Everything for her is simple and easy because everything comes from her heart. She wants to be loved from your heart. And no one in her life has done that yet because people spend way too much time over-thinking things and over-analyzing things and doing stupid things and finding reasons not to just love from the heart. "
And then he got up and left. And no one said another word. "
Also, I don't think I ever actually reviewed Mirrormask, which is bad, so here goes.
It was beautiful. It was a dream, and it felt like a dream; the way that reality is completely surreal, the way logic works and doesn't at the same time. The creatures and situations were classic Gaiman, which was lovely. I left the theater feeling the way I did when I finished reading Neverwhere, which is to say, completely transported and then dumped back into reality. That feeling has made me cry more than once, most notably when I finished reading The Blue Sword, closed the book, and burst into tears because I had to acknowledge the fact that it wasn't real, was never real, and that I would never meet the characters I had fallen in love with. I was depressed for a whole day once, after the second or third time seeing Pirates of the Caribbean, because it just felt so tragically unfair that Captain Jack Sparrow never existed. That said, this was the better side of that feeling; I was caught up and let down easily.
I really liked the Helena-Valentine relationship, and I really hope someone good gets around to writing fic that explores that dynamic a little more closely. The movie was for a young audience in many ways; many reviewers I've read compared Mirrormask to Labyrinth or Dark Crystal, but I was more reminded of The Neverending Story and its sequel than anything. (As a side note, I LOVED Atreyu in the first movie. Noah Hathaway was so cute, and now it's like he disappeared off the face of the Earth. Huh. I just checked his IMDB profile, and he was Boxey on the 1978 "Battlestar Galactica." I'm all for a cameo...I am such a perv, because he was only 13 at the time and I'm 18, only I guess now he's...oh my god, he's 33. Does that make it more or less pervy, I wonder?)
Aaaanyway...those of you who know me know that I'm very bad about tangents. The movie was well-acted, and the characters avoided being stereotypes, which I always appreciate. Helena was an appealing lead, emotionally and aesthetically, as was Valentine (played by the very cute Jason Barry, who was apparently Jack's Irish friend in Titanic, who I always felt was short-changed in terms of development). I love morally ambiguous characters like Valentine, and he was witty and pretty to boot. Plus, he so had the best line in the movie ("I don't want to be a waiter!", hee). I was also interested by the movie's focus on the mother-daughter relationship. Most movies that do so examine it in a very Gilmore Girls, Stepmom kind of way, but this felt very true to me.
The movie was visually stunning. It was so evocative of a dreamscape, flat and deep at the same time, populated by odd characters (dude, the MONKEYBIRDS) and weird vistas. I can't say enough about it, so I'm just going to see it half a dozen more times instead. And I suggest you do, too.
"An excerpt from a letter. Friends and family were discussing an extraordinary woman who, for some mysterious reason, has had only medium luck in love. Someone who knows her very well said this:
"She wants what very few people know how to give. She wants all the simple things. Not many people know how to do simple anymore. She wants grilled cheese sandwiches at home dipped in ketchup served on a paper plate, not dinner at an expensive restaurant. She wants to sit on the beach at sunset, not some far away exotic vacation. She wants a handwritten note that says I care about you, not some piece of jewelry that was financed over three years. She wants you to brush her hair, not send her to some spa for a day.
"And she wants things even simpler than that. Simple things that it seems like we have all forgotten. She wants you to ask her before you kiss her for the first time and the second. She wants you to hold her hand while you're watching re-runs together on the couch. She wants you to look at her when you talk to her. You guys, not just you, but so many guys have it all wrong. You think it is about where you take her and what you buy her for her birthday and for Christmas and you think it is about figuring out how her mind works. You think it is about being the best lover she ever had and you think it is about what she thinks of your career and your friends and your families and you think it is about all kinds of things that would never matter to her.
"As far as she's concerned, you can go out with the guys as often as you like. She *wants* you to have fun and enjoy yourself. You can have a job that keeps you and calls you away from home. She wants you to be happy with your work and she wants you to succeed. You can be so-so in bed. She wants to learn your body and have you learn hers. You can be greedy and selfish and demanding from time to time. She wants to work things through with you. You can see her once a week or once a month. She just wants to make the most of the time you get together.
"What does she want? That's what someone asked. All she wants is to be loved, simply. Just like she loves everything in her life. There is no complex formula to the way she lives. Everything for her is simple and easy because everything comes from her heart. She wants to be loved from your heart. And no one in her life has done that yet because people spend way too much time over-thinking things and over-analyzing things and doing stupid things and finding reasons not to just love from the heart. "
And then he got up and left. And no one said another word. "
Also, I don't think I ever actually reviewed Mirrormask, which is bad, so here goes.
It was beautiful. It was a dream, and it felt like a dream; the way that reality is completely surreal, the way logic works and doesn't at the same time. The creatures and situations were classic Gaiman, which was lovely. I left the theater feeling the way I did when I finished reading Neverwhere, which is to say, completely transported and then dumped back into reality. That feeling has made me cry more than once, most notably when I finished reading The Blue Sword, closed the book, and burst into tears because I had to acknowledge the fact that it wasn't real, was never real, and that I would never meet the characters I had fallen in love with. I was depressed for a whole day once, after the second or third time seeing Pirates of the Caribbean, because it just felt so tragically unfair that Captain Jack Sparrow never existed. That said, this was the better side of that feeling; I was caught up and let down easily.
I really liked the Helena-Valentine relationship, and I really hope someone good gets around to writing fic that explores that dynamic a little more closely. The movie was for a young audience in many ways; many reviewers I've read compared Mirrormask to Labyrinth or Dark Crystal, but I was more reminded of The Neverending Story and its sequel than anything. (As a side note, I LOVED Atreyu in the first movie. Noah Hathaway was so cute, and now it's like he disappeared off the face of the Earth. Huh. I just checked his IMDB profile, and he was Boxey on the 1978 "Battlestar Galactica." I'm all for a cameo...I am such a perv, because he was only 13 at the time and I'm 18, only I guess now he's...oh my god, he's 33. Does that make it more or less pervy, I wonder?)
Aaaanyway...those of you who know me know that I'm very bad about tangents. The movie was well-acted, and the characters avoided being stereotypes, which I always appreciate. Helena was an appealing lead, emotionally and aesthetically, as was Valentine (played by the very cute Jason Barry, who was apparently Jack's Irish friend in Titanic, who I always felt was short-changed in terms of development). I love morally ambiguous characters like Valentine, and he was witty and pretty to boot. Plus, he so had the best line in the movie ("I don't want to be a waiter!", hee). I was also interested by the movie's focus on the mother-daughter relationship. Most movies that do so examine it in a very Gilmore Girls, Stepmom kind of way, but this felt very true to me.
The movie was visually stunning. It was so evocative of a dreamscape, flat and deep at the same time, populated by odd characters (dude, the MONKEYBIRDS) and weird vistas. I can't say enough about it, so I'm just going to see it half a dozen more times instead. And I suggest you do, too.
