Flutterby™! : Movies

Between helping Jeanne do the food (lots of melted chocolate!) for a fundraiser to keep Public Glass open, going to Valley Visions to help out the San Geronimo valley schools (Good food, which is somewhat amazing for a huge dinner and dance held in a riding arena, and a killer band, although both of us felt like we were dancing in molasses because of the general poison ivy malaise so we ended up going home fairly early), and Sunday's hike, we were both worn out enough this weekend that we watched two movies. Oddly, we had the same reaction to both of them.

The first was Goodbye, Lenin. The premise was that in east Berlin, just before the wall falls, a mother has a heart attack, is in a coma for a number of months, and when she comes to, to avoid shocking her, her family builds a small world around her in which she still lives in the east, as western culture sweeps across that part of the world. Neat characters, some good scenes, but I kept feeling like I was missing a lot because of a lack of cultural context, and I felt this way largely because some of what I did get was derived from many of the slides and stories of the GDR that my parents have from my childhood.

The second was Triplettes of Belleville. We laughed in the beginning of it, but after a while I had the feeling of watching a demo reel that's gone on too long. Great animation, wonderful storytelling ability, but telling an underlying story that just didn't have that much depth to it, and with a surrealism that tended towards the bizarre for its own sake.

So, in both cases there seems to be a cultural context in which these are really good movies, but neither Charlene nor I are part of whatever that culture is.