There's no shame in admitting that holidays tend to take me out of my rhythms--haven't worked out in way too long, been eating more than I probably should, and have been leaving the old weblog to fester. Ah well. I always bring work to Iowa with me, only to discover that I can't really do much--it's partly an issue of whether or not I own the space where I'm working. Or not working, as it were.
Anyhow, of all the movies I could have gone and seen last night, my moms and I chose Mona Lisa Smile, which was a two-hour festival of mediocrity. Another one of those H'wood piles of clichés, where every actor was typecast, every plotline pre-fabricated, and even the emotional climaxes were as flat as a drive through Kansas.
But here's the thing that stuck with me. There's a scene where Julia Roberts is walking down a short flight of snow-covered steps, and she slips and falls on her ass. No one really sees her do so, and while I suppose it's meant to communicate a sort of "nothing's going right" kind of mood, I spent the rest of the movie wondering what the hell that scene was doing there. Now, I don't exactly rush to the theaters to catch the latest JR flick, but I've seen a bunch of them, and as I started thinking back, it seems to me that H'wood spends a lot of time having Roberts fall on her ass. The earliest I can think of is My Best Friends Wedding, but in that movie, if I remember correctly, her character is very intentionally a klutz (to offer a heavy-handed contrast with the faux-poised Cameron Diaz). Since then, and correct me if I'm wrong, I can't remember a movie with Roberts where she doesn't fall on her ass at least once. Maybe Ocean's Eleven?
I could be all wrong about this, I suppose, but it struck me as weird that I could remember a number of her movies where the director effectively dumps Roberts on her butt. And outside of intentionally slapstick actors, I couldn't think of another person for whom that's the case. And yes, it is a sign of the quality of MLS that this is all that I took away from it. Well, that and the fact that I would have paid $50 to the young woman who sat behind me (yapping and laughing inappropriately) to wait for it to come out on video.
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