panspermia

Were this an American movie, the producers would doubtless hope to cast Reese Witherspoon in the lead. It's the story of a bimbo girlfriend who has to fend for herself after her slimeball car-dealership-owning boyfriend is arrested. Ragnhildur Steinunn Jónsdóttir starts out as a plastic-y trophy and grows into someone cute, warm, and surprisingly capable. It's a trajectory not unlike Legally Blonde, and Ragnhildur Steinunn Jónsdóttir handles her role as Hildur as convincingly and engagingly as Witherspoon did in her corresponding role.

I don't play role-playing games, or even video games, and my taste in movies tends to the heavier stuff, but I like to praise the rare lightweight upbeat movies that work for me. It's not saccharine, and while Astrotopia (what Netflix calls this movie) is clichéd in the overall arc of the plot, it is relatively fresh in the moment-to-moment of the movie. I'm not big on visual gimmicks, but the scene-fades into comic-book panels are precisely appropriate and an added little delight.

The scenes and characters in the nerdy fantasy store where Hildur finds work were reminiscent of the record store scenes in High Fidelity. Not exactly new territory, but enjoyable in the same way.

Overall the movie had a nice quirky quality without being too darn cute or shoving its upbeat-ness down the viewer's throat. I enjoyed it a lot more than I had expected I would.

Satantango is my all-time favorite movie. It's about a small town and the dissolution of its collectivized farm after the end of communism. All My Good Countrymen (the title on my DVD, though listed on IMDb as All My Compatriots) is about a similar small town, but it's about the period of collectivization instead of de-collectivization. In All My Compatriots, there is a steady demoralization of the townspeople as the collectivization and politicization moves along from 1945 to 1958. If you follow that trajectory until the collapse of the Soviet Union, you get to the lethargic, soul-destroyed nadir from which Satantango begins. Even though All My Compatriots is about a Czech town, and Satantango takes place in Hungary, it's remarkable how similar the towns feel and how much the one movie feels like the continuation of the other.

While Satantango is an unusually long movie (over 7 hours!), it felt like it moved along a lot faster than Compatriots. (Satantango isn't fast-paced by any means; but time goes by faster than in Compatriots because it manages to mesmerize in a way Compatriots does not.) Besides its slowness, Compatriots was also rather hard to follow. Nonetheless, Compatriots had a quirky quality I liked, and it's especially interesting as a movie made during the Prague Spring. Also, the town and landscape had a delightful Brueghel-like quality, and many of the faces made me feel like Fellini had managed to slip into Eastern Europe to shoot the close-ups.

A good test of whether you would like this movie is whether you liked There's Something About Mary. If you liked it, you'll certainly like The Heartbreak Kid. If you liked 'Mary' but it was a bit too gross or stupid, but made you laugh nonetheless, you'll like The Heartbreak Kid even more than 'Mary'. It's sweet and it's funny -- same thing I would say of 'Mary' and 'Shallow Hal'. The Farrelly brothers can provide rather adolescent humor, but they're not mean-spirited. Even if the characters themselves aren't sweet, there's still something kind about the Farrellys' take on their severely flawed, caricatured characters.

I tend to like really obscure, serious films (e.g., Satantango, Ararat), so I hesitated before giving this movie 10 stars. But for what it is, I think it's pretty much perfect. I was continually surprised, and often in ways that made me laugh really hard. It was neither trite nor predictable. The casting was spot-on. The acting may not have been the most challenging, but it was flawless. The pacing was great -- there was never a moment where the energy flagged or I wished it would end soon. And while I say it was sweet, it certainly wasn't sentimental.

Ben Stiller is a great comedic actor. He can be a total weasel of a character, but he exhibits a vulnerability that makes him likable nonetheless. He can laugh at himself (witness Zoolander or Dodgeball), which makes laughing at his comedy all the more easy. Jerry Stiller always seems to play practically the same character, but I haven't tired of him. And the female leads, especially Malin Akerman (who is new to me), were perfect foils for Ben Stiller.

I left the theater happy and smiling and having had many good laughs. That's a pretty good aftertaste for a comedy.