Strangers with Candy
directed by Paul Dinello
written by Dinello, Amy Sedaris, Steven Colbert
2005 (seen 2006)
Amy Sedaris plays an all-around bad person who’s kind of innocent, and when she gets out of jail and tries to finish high school as an adult, there are problems. Three things make this a pretty good movie: Sedaris’s bizarre performance, and Steven Colbert as a closeted gay fundamentalist science teacher, and the general level of shameless incredible bad taste. There are a lot of little good things too. Sedaris’s character is one of those great naive sociopath clowns—like Anya Jenkins, or Tony Soprano—who don’t know any better than to say all their selfish childish reactions out loud, which you kick yourself for identifying with. The science contest that drives the main plot is a decent parody of every inspirational school movie ever made, and a horribly true picture of administrative smarm. I’m told the TV show was better but I haven’t seen it so that’s OK.
Notes on a Scandal
directed by Richard Eyre
written by Patrick Marber, from a novel by Zoe Heller
2006
Oh boy, I wanted to like this. I would go see Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench even if they were in Home Alone 6, and they’re well cast here: Dench is a bitter veteran teacher who needs a friend, Blanchett is a new one who doesn’t know what she needs. Blanchett starts sleeping with a teenage student; Dench tries to rescue her, then figures she’s owed big-time and things get mean. You could either play this as pure melodrama, or you could dig into their needs and rationalizations, but the movie tries to have it both ways and it doesn’t work.
A friend said something like “Why does an older lesbian always have to be a miserable evil predator?”, and I started to argue that that’s not a cliché because neither of us could actually think of any other movies/plays/novels with that premise. But the way Dench’s character is handled here, it feels like a cliché whether you’ve seen it before or not. She starts out as a voiceover narrator, and the tension between what she says and thinks is effective. But once she gets scarier, and you find out about ugly things in her past, the movie more or less drops her point of view so all you see is scary behavior; and the ending implies that she’s never really felt or learned anything, that she can do it all over a million times and bounce right back. You can tell a good story about someone who’s just empty (like The Stepfather, which is how I got a big crush on Terry O’Quinn way before Lost), but here we already know she isn’t, so there’s no reason for this distancing except that the filmmakers got coy or distracted.
Blanchett’s character doesn’t have this problem, because we never really get what she’s about anyway except in one long speech near the middle; otherwise she just doesn’t seem very smart, but you sympathize with her because there’s a scary monster chasing her. The men get pretty short shrift too: I like Bill Nighy as the husband, but he just goes from oblivious to furious; the teenage lover is a one-note idiot and also implausibly confident.
The VERY! LOUD! dramatic music that you hear all the time is by Philip Glass, or an alien pretending to be Philip Glass.