I enjoyed the film and found it thougt provoking but I do have a
short list of things that stood out and bugged me.
- The Harford's daughter is in the second grade and she can barely
read?
- Cruise orders a beer in a nightclub thereby educating me that
there is only one kind of beer in NYC since he doesn't specify
what kind.
- Those were the best looking streetwalkers ANYbody EVER saw.
- What GP walks around with over $800 in cash on an evening when
he wasn't planning on going out anywhere?
-
The insistant piano music (as previously mentioned by others)
- I laughed during the "trial". Sorry, it was really
funny to me.
Everything except for the piano and the horrid reading skills of
the daughter can be written off to "dream-state", but
they bugged me a bit anyway since they stood out for me and
jolted my sense of what was going on.Things I really liked: That you didn't get some huge fictional
history of the characters to explain why they were the way they
were. Edelstein thinks this makes them unreal I think it keeps
you focused on the current happenings of the characters rather
than wasting your time trying to psychoanalyze them as if they
were real people. It's a movie for pete's sake----the characters
do what they are written to do whether or not their actions are
supported by some Freudian premise. The more history you give
them the more bogged down in mundane things you become and the
less attention you pay to the ideas that they are faced with.
I loved the private moments of the two characters: he drinks
cheap beer and she is entranced by the sight of her own naked
reflection in the mirror.
I laughed hysterically everytime someone thought Cruise was gay.
I looked for an acknowledgement to Cllr in the credits for
harping on this little joke, but I didn't see it.
I think you should sue!
Okay, here's something that's really been eating at me. How in
the world does Cruise the actor handle the sex scene that his
wife had to shoot with the actor playing the naval officer?
Because Cruise and Kidman are married I found that I couldn't NOT
think about those things. Cruise doesn't have to do anything that
would get him in major trouble with his wife, but Kidman gets
naked, makes out and gets felt up by another man. There's only so
much that can be done with smoke and mirrors.
Anybody know of any interviews he's given regarding that aspect
of the film? Or any by Kidman regarding it?
As for the real v. fantasy the point for me in the end is that it
doesn't matter. Kidman was unfaithful in her mind. Cruise made
the attempt to be unfaithful in reality. Both were equally
faithful and equally unfaithful and the nature of fidelity itself
is shown to be amorphous and ill defined: it is ultimately
defined by the person who feels betrayed NOT by any set rule of
what may or may not be indulged in.
