Your cheatin' heart

I forgot to reorder my Netflix queue and get a happy film. So I ended up with Ulysses (which I got because it's Banned Books Week and James Joyce's novel always gets a mention, but I didn't want to read a thousand pages to see what the fuss was about) and Closer. Closer is shorter, so I watched that.

This film was kind of depressing. Basically, there are two couples, and two of them have an affair. Fallout ensues.

It was incredibly realistic, in that the characters do little petty things and make under-their-breath snarky remarks that people do in real life. But none of them seemed to be happy together to begin with, so when they kept saying "I love you," I didn't really believe them. Most of the film is dialogue between the various couples, and they're mainly arguing about their sex lives. Since they weren't really portrayed in happy, loving relationships, their reactions seemed to stem more from possessiveness than betrayal or heartbreak. I didn't think the characters were particularly well-developed. They spoke snippets of reality, but to me it was an incomplete picture. I realize that's one of the main points of the film (hammered into the viewer by the fact that Julia Roberts' character is a photographer, and Natalie Portman's character goes on a diatribe about art and photography and sadness and beauty.) I found it believable, but not compelling.

And the theme song was "The Blower's Daughter," a terribly slow, depressing song with a slow, gray, depressing video. It matched the gray tone of the movie.

It was all just depressing.