Atonement, & another Celeb F'ed up Bodypart

Seen: Atonement

We ran out of things to do on Monday night, so we popped into the video store down the street and rented Atonement. It’s set in WWII-era England, involving a love story gone awry. Two lovers, torn apart by the vindictive accusations of a little girl, separated by time in jail and a horrific war, but most of all by the jealousy of a young girl.

It’s a good movie almost all the way around. We were actually warned by The Girl’s grandmother just before we sat to plop it in, that it a) wasn’t all that good, and b) there was some ‘raunchy’ sex scene in a kitchen. Now, we usually take movie recommendations from her with a grain of salt, if not a shaker-full. Good thing, too because she wasn’t quite right on either front. Firstly, the movie’s not that bad. It’s overall a fairly well-done flick, if a little rough at the end.

Secondly, the raunchy sex scene? In the Library, not the kitchen. And furthermore, it wasn’t even raunchy! Odd perhaps, but far from raunchy. I’ve seen raunchier on TV. This was not raunchy. It was actually kind of understated & intriguing.

For me, the worst part of the movie was the ending. You go along with the story, you hope they find each other, then it seems they did. But then you quickly learn that they never did, they died, and the part you just saw was the imagination of the vindictive little girl – now 143 years old – in her new novel, Atonement, an “autobiography” of her horrible act. She explains in an interview that those moments were in fact how she wrote it out of her imagination, to give them the time together they never had (because the died, victims of the war, a continent apart).

That sucks enough, but then she keeps talking, and it keeps sucking more. Oh now she tells us that she doesn’t think of it as a cheap ploy, a copout, she thinks its what they would have wanted. You know, for her to be a famous writer at the expense of their love & lives. Yeah, they wanted to die apart. So you could ‘imagine’ them together. Yeah.

Newsflash: It IS a cheap ploy. It WAS a copout. You ARE a raving bitch. And this catastrophic ending, in which you teased us with happiness – no, gave it to us and then ripped it from our grasp – was a complete disaster. We’d have rather have just received the bitter ending without the soft buildup.

But aside from the ending, it’s quite alright, cheerio! I’d give it a straight B.



F’ed up Celebrities we’re allowed to mention, part 2
So one star in this film is well-known for her good looks. Not so much known for her f*cked up eye, though. Yeah, Keira Knightley has a f*cked up eye I noticed, and again, it seems no one is allowed to mention it. It struck me – like, popped out of the screen and almost hit me – in a café scene where she meets her lover after a 3-year hiatus that he spent in prison. She’s standing there in her blue ‘thing’ that she’s wearing, and her face just fills up the screen with a “deer in the headlights” sort of look. And that’s when it almost hit me: her left eye is noticeably bigger and higher than her right. I mean, the camera was slightly off-center to her right, making that eye closer to the screen to begin with, yet still her left eye just dominated the screen. It was eerie. Or, well, eye-ie or something.

Not saying she’s not a beauty, no one’s perfect, but still, why can’t these things be mentioned?

I mean honestly, her eye doesn’t really bother me. But MAN, Joaquin’s f*cked up shoulders bug the living hell out of me.

Peace.