Learning Strategies

What a strange movie!

I definitely enjoyed the unconventional film I Heart Huckabees, but it’s more than merely unconventional. I can’t do better than to quote a few sentences from Roger Ebert’s review:

...the moment a movie is over, everybody asks you what you thought about it. I said, “I didn’t know what I thought.” Then how did it make you feel? “It made me feel like seeing it again.” You mean you liked it so much you want to see it twice? “No, I’m still working on seeing it the first time.”

Now I have seen it twice. The movie is like an infernal machine that consumes all of the energy it generates, saving the last watt of power to turn itself off. It functions perfectly within its constraints, but it leaves the viewer out of the loop. This may be the first movie that can exist without an audience between the projector and the screen. It falls in its own forest, and hears itself...

Yeah. What he said.

Oh — you want to know what it’s about? Nah, that wouldn’t help. I could tell you that it’s about an environmentalist organization, a large department store that pretends to support it, an environmentally conscious firefighter, and an existential detective agency; but that wouldn’t help you much. I could tell you that it stars Jason Schwartzman, Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, and Dorchester’s own Mark Wahlberg, but that wouldn’t help you much either. Just rent the DVD and see it. Maybe twice.

Labels: movies